||| FROM BLOOMBERG NEWS |||
Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.
The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds.
The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.
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The historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson (Letters From and American), in a recent Politics Chat, discussed the ICE Detention Centers, and stated that we must not be fooled: A detention center is a concentration camp. (She made the important distinction between a concentration camp and a death camp, which she says people should not conflate.) She also noted that of course, people will die (and have died) in these camps regardless. Here’s a story about that: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/deaths-ice-detention-facilities-trump-20260122.html.
Pablo Manríquez of the immigration news site “Migrant Insider” detailed the Department of Homeland Security’s quiet execution of its plan to expand its capacity for mass detention by using a Navy contract to create “a nationwide ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps.” Here’s a story about that: https://therealnews.com/us-military-helping-trump-to-build-massive-network-of-concentration-camps-navy-contract-reveals
Today we are detaining/warehousing primarily black and brown people in the camps often without due process, bad enough news, but at this scale, who could be next? Independent journalists? Trans people? Activists and protesters deemed ‘domestic terrorists’? Here ‘s a story about someone from Ireland with a work visa: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/seamus-culleton-ice-ireland-trump-kilkenny-b2917222.html.
Amidst the onslaught of bad news and bad decisions coming out of the White House, may we stay awake to what is happening here, and speak out.
Update from today’s Letters From An American by Heather Cox Richardson:
“Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country’s largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of “national security concerns.”
Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each.
The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw “60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets.” Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms.”
Write your Senators and Representatives. Please.
Sick Detainees Describe Poor Care at Facilities Run by ICE Contractor: Problems at detention centers operated by CoreCivic extend far beyond recent measles outbreaks.
“The centers are almost 1,000 miles apart, yet they have one thing in common: They are operated by CoreCivic. The publicly traded detention company has secured contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars since President Trump took office last year, but it has a checkered track record of providing medical care to the people in its facilities….In recent years, it has been accused of falsifying records to disguise unsafe conditions, failing to provide lifesaving medications, and being slow to take critically ill people to the hospital, according to court records, government audits, sworn declarations and interviews with lawyers and people who were detained.”
Read about it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/business/ice-health-care-corecivic-immigrants-detention.html
“Today, detention is at the highest level in history. In July 2025, Congress authorized $45 billion for ICE detention, to be spent through Fiscal Year 2029. This funding comes on top of the already record high $4 billion appropriated for ICE detention in the Fiscal Year 2025 budget; an annual sum which is expected to increase in subsequent years. In the final section of this report, we calculate that with this funding, ICE could potentially acquire enough detention beds to house 135,000 people at any given time, more than three times the entire capacity of the system at the time President Trump took office. Private prison companies, as well as state and local governments, are set to cash in on these huge sources of funding.
With the Trump administration effectively eliminating three immigration oversight subagencies and prohibiting members of Congress from conducting lawful inspections, the detention system and the abuses endemic to it are more opaque than ever before. The problems with conditions in ICE detention are likely to grow only worse over the next four years. Families and adults disappear into detention in one state and reappear thousands of miles away—or in another country following a rapid deportation. While a flood of habeas corpus lawsuits has prevented some injustices, the majority of people do not have the resources or the ability to fight ICE’s choice to detain.”
Source (full report): https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/immigration-detention-report.pdf