Organizational Letters to Congress

Dear Members of Congress,

We, the undersigned 134 organizations, write to reaffirm our commitment to the Communities Not Cages campaign and its call to shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers and halt the expansion and construction of new facilities across the country. The Trump administration is aggressively pursuing an unjustifiable and inhumane plan to expand immigration detention to detain 100,000 people at any given time. Over the summer, Congress passed an unconscionable and obscene funding package, handing the Trump administration and ICE over $150 billion for mass detention and deportation, including a staggering $45 billion dedicated to expanding immigration detention, while slashing essential services and benefits that millions of Americans depend on. With this unprecedented new funding, ICE is the largest federal law enforcement agency, and the ICE detention system will be bigger than the federal prison system.

This expansion is already in motion: ICE has increased its partnerships with local sheriffs, county jails, state prisons, deepened collaboration with the Bureau of Prisons, and sprawled into the Department of Defense by using military bases like Fort Bliss for detention and deportation hubs. The administration has expanded surveillance, reintroduced family detention, and initiated offshore detention arrangements through unprecedented carceral partnerships with foreign governments. The most shocking of these actions has been the expansion of ICE detention at Guantánamo Bay, the agreement with the government of El Salvador to incarcerate people indefinitely at the notorious CECOT prison, and most recently partnerships with state governors to construct and open new immigration detention prisons and camps, such as the Florida Everglades camp and the Miami Correctional Facility in Indiana, but more insidious expansion has also been underway.

In August 2025, ICE was detaining more than 61,000 people—a 55 percent surge since January. This marks the highest ICE detention population in U.S. history. These numbers are not just statistics; they represent lives caught in a web of violence, isolation, and fear. The spike in detentions has been driven by workplace raids, chaotic street enforcement, and neighborhood sweeps that encourage racial profiling and disrupt entire communities. The result has been a widespread fear, the disappearance of loved ones, and the erosion of trust in public institutions.

This mass incarceration agenda has overwhelmed an already abusive detention system. Since January 2025, the ten largest immigration detention facilities have reported nearly 400 emergency medical calls for cardiac episodes, seizures, and head injuries. As of the beginning of September, there have been 15 reported deaths in ICE custody. These numbers reflect a dangerous environment that continues to be documented by detained people and their loved ones, legal service providers, Congressional delegations, and immigrant rights advocates, who have for decades reported horrific conditions including lack of food and necessities, extreme medical neglect, psychological trauma, and a complete lack of oversight.

Detention Watch Network launched the Communities Not Cages campaign in 2018 to amplify the work of local organizers exposing the harms of ICE detention and demanding shutdowns. We relaunched in 2021 as the First Ten campaign—a strategic push to close ten notorious ICE detention centers during a period when the detained population was at a 20-year low. Today, we are relaunching Communities Not Cages in a dramatically different landscape. Trump’s new wave of detention sites represents a renewed and brutal expansion of ICE’s reach, often in collaboration with private prison corporations, federal, state and local law enforcement, the military, and foreign governments. These facilities are not only symbols of cruelty—they are actively harming immigrant communities at an unprecedented scale and are a moral injury to our identity as a nation.

This moment demands bold and principled action. The Trump administration is using fear and disinformation to justify mass incarceration. We cannot let history repeat itself on a larger, deadlier scale.

Join us in demanding the halt of all ICE detention expansion, the closure of facilities spotlighted in the Communities Not Cages campaign, and no more funding for ICE detention in the ongoing appropriations process.

The time to act is now. Join the Communities Not Cages campaign in building a future rooted in dignity, safety, and justice for all.