Washington, DC — This week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued an urgent sole source justification and approval notice for contracts for multiple new detention facilities, including for the Midwest Regional Prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, North Lake Prison in Baldwin, Michigan, and California City Correctional in California City, California for ICE custody. All three facilities are owned by private prison companies and are currently shuttered, and now these horrific prisons will be repurposed for immigration detention. With a capacity to detain 1,800 people at North Lake and 2,000 people at California City – these prisons will be among the largest facilities within ICE’s network. This notice comes just days after ICE’s solicitation for “Emergency Detention and Related Services,” which could spend up to $45 billion over two years for new ICE jails and related operations. The solicitation for emergency funds comes less than a week after the Chair and Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee sent a bipartisan letter to the Trump administration challenging its treatment of emergency-designated funding included in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025.
This is the latest move in the Trump administration’s cruel, multi-layered immigration detention expansion plan, which if fully enacted will triple the amount of people in ICE custody. To achieve this, Trump has invoked an antiquated wartime act and partnered with authoritarian leader, Nayib Bukele, to outsource incarceration to El Salvador. Trump has also 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, and increased neighborhood and workplace raids that destabilize communities and disappear people into ICE’s network, often sowing fear and confusion with facility transfers.
ICE’s sole source justification combined with the solicitation of $45 billion would be a huge boost to the private prison industry. At a time where Trump is dismantling structured oversight of existing and new ICE facilities, this request includes new contracts that would be held to less stringent detention standards, typically meant only for small local facilities. As a result, private prison companies will have few binding requirements regarding conditions of confinement in custody, and will be able to defer to their own procedures for key areas such as environmental health and safety. At least three people have died in ICE detention since Trump took office. Expanding detention means that more people will be trapped in inhumane and at times life-threatening conditions, and private contractors will inflict abuses with impunity.
In response to the solicitation, Setareh Ghandehari, offered the following statement:
“Immigration detention as a whole is unnecessary, rife with systemic abuses and completely arbitrary – full stop. What we’re seeing now in detention centers, which are inherently inhumane, is a heightened degree of cruelty as Trump will stop at nothing to dehumanize and vilify immigrants. No one should suffer in these conditions. Immigrants are our family members, neighbors, friends, and coworkers – worthy of dignity and respect regardless of where they came from or how they arrived in the U.S. Trump’s detention expansion must be halted and vehemently denounced. Communities across the country do not want to depend on a carceral economy that profits off of people, and they are making their voices known across the country from Leavenworth, Kansas to Newark, New Jersey. Instead of investing billions of dollars to carry out ICE operations that cause immense harm and sow fear, communities want investment in education, housing for all income levels, climate resilient infrastructure and health care that will benefit everyone. Members of Congress must deny ICE funding to thwart Trump’s mass detention expansion. We need real leaders who aren’t afraid to unite against Trump and advocate for the rights of immigrants – valued and vital members of our communities.”
###
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.