Washington, DC — 50,000 people are now in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) custody, according to the agency’s most recent reporting. This alarming spike - a 25 percent increase in just four months - comes amid Trump’s increasingly authoritarian escalation to carry out his multi-layered, mass detention and deportation agenda. Just this past week, targeted raids in Los Angeles received widespread condemnation and sparked nation-wide protests, while Trump and Stephen Miller initiated “Operation At Large” to aggressively target people with a 3,000 person per day lock up quota. Trump’s expansion of immigration detention has proliferated ICE operations into other government agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Defense, using military bases as deportation hubs and growing ICE partnerships with local sheriffs and county jails to expand and reopen detention facilities. The administration has increased surveillance, brought back family detention, and skyrocketed neighborhood and workplace raids. Trump also entered into a first of its kind agreement with the president of El Salvador to outsource and offshore immigration detention to a brutal Salvadoran prison.
“The number of people in ICE detention is a grim indicator of Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda at work, targeting people based on where they work and what they look like, destabilizing communities, separating families, and putting people’s lives at risk,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. “At least 10 people have died in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated. This is tragic and infuriating. In addition to loss of life, ICE is subjecting people to medical neglect, overcrowding, horrendous conditions of confinement, and rampant transfers that disappear people into the detention system, sowing confusion and cutting people off from their loved ones and support networks. What we’re seeing now is a heightened degree of cruelty as Trump will stop at nothing to dehumanize and vilify immigrants. People in immigration detention are describing it as ‘hell on earth’ because it is.”
When Trump was inaugurated there were 39,703 people in detention, already more than double the amount of people than when Biden took office in 2021. Now at 50,000, the amount of people in detention has increased by 25 percent in just five months. During the first Trump administration ICE detention reached an all-time high at 55,000 people. Now, Trump is planning to use the MAGA-backed reconciliation bill, currently being negotiated in the Senate, to finance an ever broader expansion of immigration detention to detain more than 100,000 people.
“This bill skyrockets ICE’s budget to never before seen funding levels. If passed, ICE will have 13 times its current fiscal budget for detention, which is already operating at a historic high, on top of the funding in ICE’s annual budget that Congress sets each year,” added Ghanedhari. “Our elected officials need to act now and they need to act fast — the stakes are too high. Members of Congress must stop at nothing to block the MAGA-backed reconciliation bill. The nationwide protests have once again illuminated that people do not want ICE agents and detention centers in their communities. Immigrants are vital contributors to local communities – neighbors, friends, coworkers, caretakers and more. People don’t want investment in immigration enforcement, the unilateral deployment of the national guard, or massive military parades that direct billions of taxpayer dollars towards Trump's cruel and brazen agenda at the expense of critical programs that support millions of Americans like healthcare, food assistance, and education. The chilling impact of immigration enforcement is profound and widespread as people of every background will feel the absence of valued community members.”
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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.