Washington, DC — The Trump administration is dangerously moving full steam ahead with unprecedented plans to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration detention system. There are already nearly 40,000 people locked up in ICE detention — if Trump’s multi-pronged detention expansion plan is realized, it will triple the immigration detention system’s capacity. The Trump administration is proposing to detain an additional 84,000 people at any given time, which would bring the number of people detained for immigration to over 120,000, roughly the number of Japanese Americans incarcerated in detention camps in the US during World War II.
Trump’s detention expansion plan will require billions of taxpayer dollars on top of the already alarming multibillion dollar budgets of ICE and Customs and Border Protection at the expense of broad budget cuts and federal funding freezes by the administration that have seen widespread backlash.
Major developments on Trump’s detention expansion plan in just two weeks since inauguration, include:
- Potential collaboration with El Salvador to create an unprecedented penal colony. On Monday, Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, offered to jail U.S. citizens and migrants on U.S. soil in El Salvador’s prisons. El Salvador has the highest prison rate in the world and its system is marred with abuse, a complete lack of due process, and indefinite detentions. Bukele’s offer is the first of its kind, setting a dangerous precedent to further demonize and destabilize migrants and people who have gone through the criminal legal process in the United States disproportionately impacting Black and brown people. It also deepens collaboration with authoritarian governments, further jeopardizing democratic values in the U.S. and around the world.
- New detention facilities. The Washington Post reported that the administration plans to open four new 10,000 bed detention facilities, as well as 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people. ICE contracts with both local governments and private prison corporations, such as the GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, to operate the majority of its vast network of facilities. This includes dedicated immigration detention centers as well as local and state jails.
- The use of military assets and bases including Guantánamo Bay, deepening the metastasizing of the deportation system and ICE detention into the Department of Defense. Trump’s use of large-scale detention facilities on military bases would exacerbate the well-documented abuse inherent to the detention system. It would also extend ICE detention, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, into other government agencies, and further obscure transparency and the minimal oversight currently in place. Reported military bases in use so far include the Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado, Fort Bliss in Texas and Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo Bay has an extensive history of abuse and torture that will undoubtedly put people’s physical and mental health in jeopardy. The use of Guantánamo Bay for a reported 30,000 people for ICE detention will require a mass influx of resources to erect large-scale detention facilities, as it was previously reported that the existing facility on Guantánamo Bay has the capacity to hold 120 people.
- Executive orders that will extend detention, maximize its use, and broaden the scope of targeting people for detention. In the onslaught of executive orders and directives that have been issued, detention has been a key component tying together the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. The orders explicitly directed immigration agencies to expand detention capacity in order to detain people throughout their deportation proceedings and expand the use of rapid deportation proceedings and prosecutions that land people in “mandatory detention,” and call for the detention of any immigrant arrested on suspicion of violating state or federal laws.
Detention plays a crucial role in enabling Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Detention puts people’s lives in jeopardy, isolates people from their loved ones and support networks, coerces people to sign their deportation order, and facilitates the logistics of deportations.
Immigrant justice advocates across the country offered the following statements on detention expansion:
Silky Shah, Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, said:
“If realized, Trump’s immigration detention expansion will tear apart families, put people’s lives in danger, and cost taxpayers greatly. It will also increase the targeting and racial profiling of people within their communities based on what they look like, the language they speak, and where they work while further expanding the detention system that is rife with abuse. It is not an exaggeration to say that Trump’s immigration detention expansion plan will cost billions of dollars and cause immediate harm and long-lasting damage to our democracy. It’s already clear that Trump is intent on paying for this cruelty by cutting funding for critical programs and services that help all Americans in order to pump that money into the detention and deportation system. This moment demands a national outcry — our elected officials cannot remain silent on Trump’s excessive cruelty. Rather, they must vocally oppose this mass detention and deportation agenda by denying Trump the resources he needs to carry out his plans, including by cutting funds to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
Bruna Sollod, Senior Political Director of United We Dream Action, said
“The alarm bells should be blaring for Americans across the country right now. Trump —and his cult of billionaires who have bought their way into running our country— have made it clear that under their administration, everyone is a target. With vile threats to ship immigrants and U.S. citizens alike off to private prison camps, including to El Salvador, we need no further evidence to see that the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for all people are being dismantled. Elected officials at every level must block Trump’s dangerous private detention expansion not only because it brings us closer to tyranny, but because it will rake in billions of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of Trump and his friends at the expense of everyday people.”
Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice said:
“Let's be clear: this is an unprecedented move and another dangerous escalation of Trump's costly, chaotic, and cruel attacks on immigrants. Once again, it’s a policy not designed to advance public safety or good policy, but a plank in an extreme and unpopular agenda meant to avoid as much scrutiny as possible.”
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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.