Since taking office in January, Trump and his regime have increasingly weaponized the immigrant detention system for his white supremacist agenda. Suppression of dissent and intimidation have been cornerstones of the MAGA regime, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcefully abducting and incarcerating students and scholars for what is essentially a thought crime — expressing solidarity with Palestinians. The Trump administration’s total disdain for basic human rights has been laid bare through its extrajudicial offshoring of detention to CECOT, an abusive mega-prison in El Salvador, where people are being detained indefinitely with no due process. And even as Trump has given Elon Musk free rein to dismantle the federal government, decimating vital programs and services that support the needs of all people in the U.S., the Republican Party is pouring billions into expanding the cruel and harmful immigrant detention system.
The changing infrastructure and scope of immigrant incarceration has become a clear testing ground for this administration’s authoritarianism.
But these policies did not emerge overnight. For decades, government leaders from across the political spectrum set the stage for these draconian moves by diminishing immigrants’ due process rights under the pretense of “protecting public safety.” Transferring immigrants to remote immigrant jails is also a familiar tactic intended to impair access to legal counsel while putting cases before more hostile courts. Trump’s deportation machinery is building on what prior administrations, including those of Obama and Biden, had already put in place. An honest stock-taking of the Trump administration’s first 100 days reveals how bipartisan support for detention expansion and criminalization of immigration created the ideal conditions for today’s war on immigrants.
ICE detention is an archipelago of over 150 private prisons, county jails and federal facilities across the country through which hundreds of thousands of immigrants pass each year. Seeking to fulfill his campaign promises, Trump is moving full steam ahead with a multilayered detention expansion plan, which, if realized, will triple ICE’s incarceration capacity, enabling it to detain an additional 84,000 people at any given time. In February at the National Sheriff’s Association annual meeting, Tom Homan, the career ICE official turned “border czar,” said ICE will be lowering detention standards in order to make it easier for sheriff-run jails that don’t meet current standards to be used for immigrant detention. Detention center conditions have always been abysmal, but as the numbers increase, so have reports of people sleeping on floors and unhygienic conditions, including a lack of clean clothing, a lack of adequate food, and food quality issues leading to rampant weight loss and gastrointestinal illnesses.
In just 100 days, ICE has made plans to reopen family detention centers in Texas and previously shuttered prisons in California, Kansas, Michigan and New Jersey. It has signed several new county jail contracts and is using numerous Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities for immigrant detention. Current plans include using military bases for detention, including Guantánamo Bay. The use of Guantánamo in particular is designed to hype paranoia around immigration as a national security concern. ICE has also issued multiple proposals for new immigrant jails across the country. But it is worth noting that many of these detention center expansions were already underway prior to Trump taking office. In Biden’s last year in office, ICE requested proposals for several 950-bed detention centers throughout the country and was working to extend contracts at 14 facilities that have come under scrutiny for their deplorable conditions.
To carry out Trump’s mass detention and deportations, the administration is requesting billions in additional funding, which will largely be earmarked for private prison and military contractors. ICE recently circumvented contracting guidelines to fast-track proposals for a $45 billion expansion of detention. The cozy relationship between ICE and private prison companies is nothing new. After all, it was under Obama that private prisons began to run the majority of the detention system’s capacity, accounting for 70 percent by the end of his tenure.
Earlier this month, ICE signed a contract with Universal Strategic Advisors (a private contracting company) to essentially allow the firm’s members to operate as ICE employees, suggesting a Blackwater-like model. And, ICE is now utilizing surveillance technologies — which Biden had previously expanded to apply to hundreds of thousands of immigrants as so-called “alternatives to detention,” a widely endorsed liberal reform — to round up people who were previously not subject to detention. Trump is now leveraging the Democrats’ pro-corporate, prison industrial complex-friendly neoliberal approach to immigration enforcement to promote his crony-capitalist agenda.
As the infrastructure for detention has expanded, so has the scope of who is being targeted. The first bill that Trump signed upon taking office, the Laken Riley Act, cynically exploited a tragedy to stoke a moral panic over crime and immigration, resulting in the significant erosion of immigrants’ due process rights. The law compels ICE to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants for being accused of certain crimes, eliminating their fair day in court. It also threatens to saddle state governments with millions of dollars of cost to hold people in pretrial detention. It was the most significant expansion of mandatory detention law in nearly 30 years, and 58 Democrats voted for it. Democrats have long done the right’s bidding by scapegoating immigrants for economic scarcity and abandoning those with criminal records. They have repeatedly cosigned the denial of rights to immigrants, which as we are seeing now through Trump’s lawlessness, creates a silent danger for everyone, citizens and noncitizens alike.
In March, things took an even more alarming turn. ICE arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and other student activists under the guise of immigration enforcement, using detention and deportation to punish those who oppose or speak out against U.S. foreign policy. Around the same time, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act — a 227-year-old dormant wartime law — to justify the state-sponsored trafficking of immigrants to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador.
These two policy departures have become trial balloons for this administration’s autocratic agenda, but they are also extensions of longstanding immigration policy and practice. Since 1996, Congress has stripped due process rights from an increasing number of immigrants in order to detain and quickly deport them. This is especially true for immigrants who have had contact with the criminal legal system and undocumented immigrants who have recently arrived in the U.S.
Under Trump, the curtailment of due process has been extended to anyone who has come in the last two years without authorization. Trump’s justification for the student detentions portends creeping fascism, which should alarm and galvanize all of us. But mandating detention without bond for an ever-growing number of immigrants has been baked into the system for decades.
Trump has succeeded in one core objective in the past 100 days: His callous actions are instilling fear in immigrant communities and have even intimidated citizens who fear retribution for their beliefs or speech. But the Republican plan for mass deportations is dependent on scaling up the detention system, so by blocking detention expansion, we can limit ICE’s reach. Across the country, local communities are calling attention to the myriad ways this administration is destroying the public good, including its attempts to build new immigrant jails. Many are understandably leaning into innocence frameworks in response to the changing scope of who is being detained, but what the history of the system teaches us is that when we accept that some people are deserving of detention, then more people will eventually be at risk. Immigration is often seen as a wedge issue, but what these last months have laid bare is how our fight for immigrant justice is a fight for all of us.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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