100 organizations support the renewed call for Communities, Not Cages amid Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda

For Immediate Release: 
Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Washington, DC — Today, Detention Watch Network (DWN) is relaunching the Communities Not Cages campaign and renewing its call to shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers and stop the expansion and construction of new facilities. With over a 100 DWN members, the support of 100 organizational campaign cosponsors across the country, and members of Congress, Communities Not Cages is amplifying local community organizing to end ICE detention while illuminating the dangers of the Trump administration’s multi-layered detention expansion plan. Campaign organizers underscore that the gravity of this moment cannot be understated, particularly after the passage of the MAGA megabill that will supercharge Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Shockingly, ICE’s budget now exceeds many militaries around the world. 

With the Communities Not Cages relaunch, the campaign is spotlighting 11 facilities over the coming weeks that are representative of Trump’s detention expansion and the communities uniting together to protect people and call for facilities to be shut down, including:

  1. Delaney Hall Detention Center, New Jersey
  2. FCI Dublin Prison, California
  3. CA City Correctional Center, California
  4. Leavenworth Detention Center, Kansas
  5. Guantanamo Detention Center, Cuba
  6. Central Louisiana ICE Detention Center, Louisiana
  7. South Louisiana ICE Detention Center, Louisiana
  8. Torrance Detention Center, New Mexico
  9. Krome Detention Center, Florida
  10. North Lake Detention Center, Michigan 
  11. Everglades Concentration Camp, Florida

Local representatives fighting to halt expansion and shut down detention centers that are part of the Communities Not Cages campaign, said:

Susan Beaty, Senior Attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, said: “As a community in the San Francisco Bay Area, we don’t want ICE in our backyard. When ICE doesn’t have a place to cage people, there are fewer raids and fewer arrests. We are saying no, we don’t want ICE detention in our community, and we want ICE out of the Bay Area and out of California.”

JR Martin, a member of No Detention Centers in Michigan, said: “As the federal government continues its assault on immigrants across Michigan and around the country, we hear from more people every day who are shocked to learn that Baldwin is now home to the largest detention center in the Midwest. We know that as this awareness spreads, opposition to ICE and the GEO Group will only continue to grow. When North Lake was last open five years ago, and conditions inside led to multiple hunger strikes, one person held there told us: ‘They don’t want nobody to know what’s going on over here—they want to keep it under the rug.’ The GEO Group keeps these things under the rug as much as they can, but the truth is that this facility has been shut down before, and it will be shut down again. We stand with campaigns around the country and beyond in looking toward a future where everyone’s needs are met, freedom of movement is respected, and the immigration detention system that allows the GEO Group to profit from fear and racist sadism no longer exists.”

Farah Al Jallad, Migrant Justice Organizer with Florida Student Power, said: “Florida communities could be thriving at this moment, but instead our legislators have decided they want to see their own communities suffer. Over $400 million of our state dollars will go to the Everglades Concentration Camp every year. Instead of investing in education or the rising cost of living, which our communities are desperately asking for, they are focused on building a center that will terrorize our community members and destroy our ecosystems.”

M.A., Steering Committee member and Digital Organizer for the Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition, said: “In Louisiana we have seen the expansion of immigrant detention centers since the first Trump Presidency when we went from two to 15 centers. Two of these detention centers in Jena and Basile have been home to many egregious abuses, medical neglect and even death. At the South Louisiana Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, women are held for prolonged periods in detention despite many desperately needing medical and mental health care. They also continue to detain and hold pregnant women against ICE detention guidelines. In this detention center, one of our own organizers has been detained since February, Arely Westley, due to her activism in the immigrant and transgender communities. Our community members deserve dignity, medical care and compassion – not to be thrown and forgotten in these for profit detention centers! We will never agree with companies making a profit off human suffering in a state with the largest number of incarcerated people in the country.” 

Cosecha New Jersey, the New Jersey chapter of Movimiento Cosecha, said: “Since the moment the community learned that Delaney Hall in Newark was reopening, we’ve been in the streets, raising our voices, and resisting. For nearly three months, our people locked inside have reported brutal, inhumane conditions, freezing cells, denied medical care, and food so scarce and foul it borders on starvation. This facility is not a place of ‘detention’”; it is a site of torture, isolation, and violence. Its reopening has fueled ICE operations, torn families apart, and signaled a clear warning: they plan to escalate. But so do we. GEO Group and ICE are nothing but parasites, feeding off our pain and fear. They profit from caging immigrants, silencing dissent, and criminalizing survival. They make us pay to speak to our families, fight our cases, and hold on to our dignity. And when we resist, they retaliate with cruelty. While the Trump Administration may have cheered Delaney Hall as its first immigration detention center to reopen in this new era of attacks, we promise this: when it closes, it will be because we forced it shut, a victory for the people. We fight not just here in New Jersey, but with our Compas in Michigan and beyond, wherever GEO Group spreads its poison, we will meet them with resistance. We won’t stop until every cage is empty and dismantled. Delaney Hall will be shut down. GEO will be shut down. Abolish ICE!”

The Communities Not Cages campaign originally launched in 2018 under the first Trump administration. In 2021 the campaign escalated to “First Ten to Communities Not Cages” which resulted in the closure of six detention facilities at the time. Today’s relaunch kicks off revamped campaign materials, including a new logo, detention expansion map, artwork, and campaign spotlight on the 10 facilities that will be shared on DWN’s social media channels in the coming weeks.

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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.