Washington, DC — Breaking reporting from the Washington Post reveals what advocates have been sounding the alarm on for months: with the shocking infusion of funding from the MAGA-backed megabill, ICE plans to double its detention capacity by the end of this year to detain more than 100,00 people.
This follows reporting this week that ICE will open a new immigration detention center in Hudson, Colorado at a shuttered state prison, while in Mason, Tennessee, town officials voted to reopen a former prison into an immigration detention facility, despite objections from local residents. In Florida, Governor DeSantis announced plans to use a shuttered state prison for immigration detention at Baker Correctional Facility.
According to the New York Times, there are currently more than 60,000 people in ICE detention, the highest number in history. This alarming spike - 51 percent since January - comes amidst Trump’s increasingly authoritarian escalation to carry out his multi-layered, mass detention and deportation agenda, including most recently his deployment of the National Guard to assist in processing people for immigration detention in 20 states and Washington DC.
Trump 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. The administration has expanded surveillance, brought back family detention, incarcerated people in an abusive mega-prison in El Salvador, and increased neighborhood and workplace raids that destabilize communities and disappear people, including activists who oppose Trump’s agenda. People are then funneled into ICE’s network of private prisons, county jails, state and federal prisons, and makeshift detention camps, often sowing fear and confusion with facility transfers.
Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director at Detention Watch Network issued the following statement:
“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. We have long known that Trump’s cruel deportation agenda would be bottomlined in an aggressive multi-layered detention expansion plan at all costs – including at the expense of Americans receiving lifesaving healthcare and millions of kids having school lunches – however, the scope and scale, and more importantly, human toll, continues to be shocking.
“At least 13 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 60,000, the number of people in detention is at an all-time high, increasing by 51 percent in just seven months and surpassing the record-breaking 55,000 people in ICE detention during the first Trump administration. Now with a shocking $150 billion in funding for the targeting, detention and deportation of people from the MAGA-backed reconciliation bill - including 13 times ICE’s current fiscal budget for detention - Trump is planning to finance an ever broader expansion of immigration detention to detain more than 100,000 people.
“Nationwide protests have once again illuminated that people do not want ICE agents and detention centers in their communities or anywhere. Immigrants are vital contributors to local communities – neighbors, friends, coworkers, caretakers and more. People don’t want investment in immigration enforcement or the unilateral deployment of the national guard 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.