“US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees,” The Guardian reported.
Let’s put this into perspective.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the national civilian corrections system, has an annual budget of just $8 billion and has seen cuts to its workforce and infrastructure. Yet, the spending for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now exceeds or matches the military budgets of European Union member states.
Unsurprisingly, federal corrections “officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement”, reports ProPublica. Earlier this year, CBS News reported that the number of people in ICE “custody has reached a new record high, surpassing 70,000 for the first time in the deportation agency’s 23-year history”.
Federal prisons hold more than twice that population, to be sure, but such a ballooning population, along with the sudden expansion of facilities, is frightening. Worse, immigration detention, as well as enforcement, has become a zone of exception, a place where normal constitutional rights evaporate.
“The constitution doesn’t apply if you entered the country illegally” is a line that regime supporters parrot. “If you didn’t go through due process on the way in, you don’t get it on the way out” is another.
As absurd as these ideas are, this creates a wholly separate police and corrections system that exists outside the constitution, which can be applied to anyone: immigrants, whether they are undocumented or not, and even US citizens. That clearly isn’t an accident.
Just review a few horrifying realities:
From Reuters: “Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found…Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal.”
From the Irish Times: “An Irishman living in the United States for more than 20 years has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials since being arrested last September. Originally from Glenmore, Co Kilkenny, Seamus Culleton is married to a US citizen and owns a plastering business in the Boston area. He was arrested on September 9th, 2025, and has been in an ICE detention facility in Texas for nearly five months, despite having no criminal record, ‘not even a parking ticket’. In a phone interview from the facility, he said conditions there are ‘like a concentration camp, absolute hell.’”
From the Marshall Project: “The number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on a given day has skyrocketed, jumping more than sixfold since the start of the second Trump administration.” ProPublica went into detail about just how horrifying these conditions are for children.
ProPublica also found nearly 200 US citizens who have been held in ICE detention and documented the brutal and violent conditions. PBS also went into detail about the violence endured by US citizens at the hands of so-called “immigration” police.
From NBC: Over their four months at the Dilley Immigration Processing Centre — a remote, prisonlike facility that has drawn mounting scrutiny over what human rights advocates describe as inhumane conditions — Nikita and Oksana say their children have endured indignities they never imagined possible in the United States. Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. ‘We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,’ Nikita said in Russian. ‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.’”
Arizona Daily Star: “Among detainees at Eloy Detention Centre, 79-year-old Julia Benitez is known as ‘la abuela,’ the grandmother in Spanish. The Cuban asylum seeker was only having occasional memory lapses when she first surrendered to U.S. border agents last year, after crossing the southern border near Lukeville, Arizona, her family says. Julia was sent to Eloy, about 50 miles northwest of Tucson, in May 2025. But after nine months detained in an unfamiliar setting, without individualized attention or care, Julia’s early-stage dementia has progressed to the point that she doesn’t know where she is, said her daughter, Dayana Cosme Benitez, a lawful permanent resident who lives in Miami with her two sons.”
NBC: “[Immigration and border agents] have used harsh tactics to scare or repel those they see as getting in their way. The officers, masked and kitted out with military-grade armour and rifles, have faced down peaceful protesters and people who have threatened, obstructed or attacked them, with methods that are less deadly than guns but still inflict grievous injuries. Hundreds have been hurt, and courts in at least four states have found that officers used force inappropriately and indiscriminately.”
The Guardian: “Thirty-two people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2025 – making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades, as the Trump administration moved to detain a record number of people. Some of those who died in detention had arrived in the US recently, seeking asylum. Others had arrived years ago, some as young children. Some had been apprehended on criminal charges or had served time for convictions; others had been picked up in the administration’s indiscriminate ICE raids.”
CBS News: “Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offences.”
It is important to note that while the Trump Administration continues to justify the operations by ICE and Border Patrol as a widespread immigration crackdown, from Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis to West Coast megalopolis Los Angeles, these forces are being used against entire populations.
Across social media, far-right commentators celebrated the executions of white citizen protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti as much as they justified the forced removal of immigrants.
Before Trump’s second presidency, general policing had always been a local matter, and federal law enforcement agencies were siloed into specific missions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tackled organised crime and domestic terrorism. Marshals served the courts. The Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, well, those names explain it all.
ICE and Border Patrol, therefore, are no longer a specific task force with a defined mission, but rather divisions of the new militarised police force at the service of the US government’s cultish, undemocratic leader. They are Iran’s SAVAK, Haiti’s Tonton Macoute, and Romania’s Securitate, in American clothing.
Alongside this expansion of “warehouses” for people, no one can operate under any illusion that this is normal democratic behaviour. The US has had slave plantations, internment camps for Japanese-Americans and Native American reservations. This is all part of the national DNA, as much as anyone might want to deny it.
Can this army now constitutionally create a new regime of detention that exists outside the normal order? Who is going to stop them?
So far, Americans are organising against this, and some of those efforts have been successful. Realising the gravity of the situation will sustain this kind of pressure.
Photograph courtesy of Thomas Hawk. Published under a Creative Commons license.
