While violent, military-style operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the streets of American cities continue to draw attention and condemnation, they reflect only part of the experience of those swept up in the raids. Once those people are disappeared from their neighborhoods and communities, they become detainees in a sprawling system of facilities across the country—many of which are not meant to house human beings at all and effectively cut detainees off from the world outside.
Emerging reports of what goes on inside are alarming. Detainees are subject to physical and sexual abuse; deprived of medical care, food, water, and sleep; and denied access to legal representation. Mothers have been separated from nursing infants, parents told to sign deportation papers if they don’t want their children taken away. At the Florida state-run facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” people were shackled and left in a two-foot-high cage outdoors without water for up to a day. In January, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) released a report detailing over one thousand credible reports of abuse in the immigration detention system since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. The majority of reports come from facilities located in Texas, Florida, California, and Georgia; almost all abuses occurred at facilities overseen by ICE.
Rather than do something to address these violations, the Trump administration is seeking to replicate them on a wider scale. Internal ICE documents reviewed by The Washington Post in December outline a plan to create a “feeder system” to speed up deportations, with up to sixteen industrial warehouses serving as regional processing sites for detainees, who would then be funneled to seven large-scale warehouses at major transit hubs. The document proposed locations for twenty-three facilities. The Post describes the plan as “the next step in President Donald Trump’s campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants,” expanding the detention system that is already the “largest in the world.” It is not hyperbole to characterize this as the establishment of a network of concentration camps on American soil.
Problems with ICE and CBP predate the return of Trump. Neglecting medical care has long been a practice of CBP in particular, according to the Government Accountability Office, going back to the Biden presidency.
But the American Immigration Council notes that immigration detention has gotten “larger, more abusive, and more opaque than ever” since Trump’s return, because of the speed with which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has tried to meet his deportation goals. When Trump took office, the daily average number of people in detention was 40,000. A year later, it has increased by 75 percent, to 73,000, while the number of facilities has increased by 91 percent. The administration plans to have 135,000 beds ready by 2029. Changes in policy—like the expanded use of “mandatory detention”—also mean that people are held in custody longer. “With more arrests than detention beds to hold people,” the report says, “ICE facilities saw significant overcrowding in 2025, worsening and substandard medical care, growing complaints of abusive conditions, and documented extensive violations of detention standards.” One factor that could explain the increase in reports of medical abuse: ICE stopped paying for detainees’ medical treatment in October, which it is required to provide by law; much of this care is provided by private prison companies who delay or deny care outright.
About a year ago, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said his goal for the department was to create “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” DHS seems poised to make this happen. The Washington Post reports that in January, the department purchased warehouses in Surprise, Arizona, and Williamsport, Maryland, close to two locations proposed in the ICE memo. In Tremont, Pennsylvania, DHS purchased a former Big Lots distribution warehouse, and a township supervisor confirmed that it will become an ICE processing center. The Post notes that “ICE officials have also begun notifying warehouse owners and local officials in several other cities of their interest in specific properties.”
DHS thinks it can detain eighty thousand more people thanks to these new facilities alone. In support of that aim, it’s casting a wide net. We know the administration isn’t being honest about targeting the “worst of the worst” for deportation. As of January, nearly half of those detained by the Trump administration have neither a criminal record nor pending charges. Only a small fraction have been convicted of the violent felonies the administration cites to vilify anyone without papers as a brutal criminal. According to the Cato Institute, most of the other convictions were for vice, immigration, and traffic crimes.
We know that people allowed to be in the United States—people “who are doing it the right way”—are also being detained. Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father, detained by ICE in Minneapolis and sent to a “family detention center” in Texas, have active asylum cases and are thus authorized to be living in the United States. We also know that U.S. citizens have been held in ICE detention, where some have been physically abused and denied access to lawyers or family members. Cases in which citizens or legal residents are mistaken for “illegal aliens” (usually on the basis of race) and in which bystanders have been detained for filming or “impeding” ICE agents have tended to fall apart, but that is not always the case. The government is quick to label protestors “domestic terrorists” or to escalate other crimes into terrorism charges.
Trump has suggested he’d also like to deport and imprison abroad the “homegrowns”—U.S. citizens who are “criminals,” however Trump or random ICE agents may choose to define that term. After the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September, the Department of Justice issued NSPM-7, a memo directing federal and state law enforcement to pursue domestic-terrorism charges against antifa members. Antifa members will be identifiable by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American values on family, religion, and morality.” This is sufficiently wide grounds to categorize anyone—a protester observing ICE from her car or an ICU nurse aiding a pepper-spray victim—as a domestic terrorist.
Trump and those in his administration have long mused on ways they could revoke the status of immigrants they don’t like—turning them into “illegals” subject to detention and deportation. They have revoked the green cards and visas of people whose speech they don’t approve of (such as Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student arrested after writing an op-ed in support of her university’s divestment from Israel, and Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine activist and spokesperson for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University—both held in ICE detention) and stated their intention to do it more systematically. Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship; if the Supreme Court agrees with the government’s arguments when it takes up the case in April, it’s not clear whether immigrants’ children born in the United States will still be considered citizens. In a few cases, DHS has already deported citizen children of immigrants.
The administration has also long made known its hostility toward the policy of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), having revoked it for people from Venezuela, Honduras, and several other countries, including Haiti. In early February, it was set to launch a major ICE raid on the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio—famously demonized by Trump and J. D. Vance during the 2024 campaign. At the last minute, a federal judge postponed the termination of TPS for people from Haiti, accusing DHS secretary Kristi Noem of “preordaining” the termination because of “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” But the Trump administration plans an appeal to the Supreme Court. Historian Timothy Snyder has characterized the effort to purge Springfield of its Haitian population as a “pogrom” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Anybody deemed a target of immigration enforcement—whether they entered the country illegally, are awaiting asylum claims, have had their status revoked, or have been labeled “domestic terrorists” or “homegrowns”—could be swallowed up into the rapidly expanding system of detention facilities. Rachel Maddow framed this prospect in mordant terms: “If they build them, they will fill them.”
Have the American people seen enough? Greg Sargent at The New Republic reports that even in areas that voted solidly for Trump in 2024, people are opposed to using empty warehouses for immigration detention. In Hanover County, Virginia, residents protested the proposed sale of a building to DHS, and the board of supervisors came out in opposition to it. As a result, the warehouse owner canceled the deal. After immense public pressure from residents, Oklahoma City’s Republican mayor opposed a proposal for an ICE warehouse, and that deal fell apart, too. The same thing happened in Morris County, New Jersey; Kansas City, Missouri; and Salt Lake City, Utah. “The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence,” Sargent writes. “It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.”
Whether that’s enough to derail the Trump administration’s mass-deportation program is another question. But widespread revulsion at protestors executed in the street, children used to entrap parents, and people dragged out of cars and shipped to detention centers around the country seems to be morphing into organized, disciplined opposition. The realization is dawning: if the administration can strip the rights of so many, then no one’s rights are safe.
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