Passage of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will fuel a dramatic increase in the capacity of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain migrants awaiting deportation. Without adequate judicial supervision and political pressure, the facilities that will be added to the ICE arsenal are likely to join the existing detention centers as locations of human suffering and cruelty.
On July 4, the Washington Post reported that “The tax and spending bill passed by Congress on Thursday will triple federal funding for immigrant detention centers, setting the stage for a rapid expansion of these facilities and adding to concerns about the treatment of the growing numbers of immigrant detainees…. More than the government spent on detention during the Obama, Biden, and first Trump administrations combined.”
The Post notes that this country’s immigrant detention system is already “the largest in the world.” Rapidly adding detention centers does not bode well, given ICE’s already dismal record in providing adequate conditions for detainees.
America got a preview of what the government wants to do on July 2 when President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others in their entourage toured “Alligator Alcatraz,” “the newest illegal immigrant detention facility in the nation that’s located in the Florida Everglades and surrounded by swamplands teeming with alligators and pythons.”
That preview included photos of the president standing beside rows of bunk beds inside chain-linked fence cages. Nothing was made of the fact that “the hastily constructed detention camp… has already flooded once, may not meet hurricane codes, and is not officially approved or funded by the federal government.” Or that detainees and staff will face…more common hazards…[like] [m]osquitoes and hurricanes….”
While claiming that “Alligator Alcatraz will be air-conditioned and comfortable for detainees and calling it an “amazing thing,” Trump blamed the need for new ICE detention facilities on President Joe Biden’s open borders policies. “Look,” he said, “at what they made us do.”
The visitors crowed about how no one has to come to the detention facility if they are willing to self-deport. Then the president said they can come back legally.
Not surprisingly, a Fox News commentator said that the only people who would end up there would be “the worst of the worst.”
From the way the Trump administration has been conducting itself, we know that such a claim is not likely to be true. Instead of focusing on people who entered the country illegally and then committed serious violent offenses while they were here, the deportation dragnet is sweeping up people indiscriminately.
That is why so much money is being sent ICE’s way. Quoting Lauren-Brook Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the Post says, “This is the most ‘funding we’ve seen for a border immigration agenda in the history of the country…. We are seeing a wholesale expansion of ICE detention centers.’”
The network of those centers is already quite extensive. ICE operates around two hundred detention centers, jails, and prisons in many different places.
It contracts with local governments and private corporations to use their facilities or to run the detention centers. In June 2023, the largest number of ICE detainees were housed in Texas, Louisiana, California, Georgia, and Arizona. As the Post notes, “The average daily population of ICE detainees rose to 56,000 last month—the highest number since ICE began releasing those figures during the first Trump administration….”
Over the course of the year, the total number of individuals housed in an ICE facility has been generally around a quarter of a million. The Trump administration intends to drastically increase that number. For comparison, around 155,000 inmates are serving time in federal prisons.
In the past, those who found themselves in an ICE detention center were largely people who had been apprehended crossing the border or charged with a crime. Today, “about one-third of ICE detainees have never been charged with a criminal offense.” That number is sure to grow.
ICE has already shown little interest in ensuring that conditions in its facilities are humane. We got a taste of that when Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts student who was picked up on the street by masked agents and detained by ICE in Louisiana, returned to Boston.
She described the Louisiana facility as overcrowded and unsanitary. When she first arrived, Öztürk was kept in her cell and had limited access to food and other supplies. And while she was held, she received inadequate medical care and attention.
Öztürk’s experience in ICE custody is hardly unique.
As the Detention Watch Network observes, “ICE has an appalling record of abuse.” An August 2023 NPR story gives several examples of that abuse.
“In Michigan,” NPR says, “a man in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was sent into a jail’s general population unit with an open wound from surgery, no bandages and no follow-up medical appointment scheduled, even though he still had surgical drains in place.”
“In Georgia, a nurse ignored an ICE detainee who urgently asked for an inhaler to treat his asthma. Even though he was never examined by the medical staff, the nurse put a note in the medical record that ‘he was seen in sick call.’”
“And in Pennsylvania, a group of correctional officers strapped a mentally ill male ICE detainee into a restraint chair and gave the lone female officer a pair of scissors to cut off his clothes for a strip search.’
NPR documents a pervasive pattern of “‘negligent’ medical care (including mental health care), ‘unsafe and filthy’ conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees, and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.”
Yet the legal protections available to ICE detainees are different from those that apply to conditions of confinement in prisons. Since courts do not treat their detention as criminal punishment, the full panoply of Eighth Amendment rights is not available to them.
In 2019, the Congressional Research Service explained, “While the Supreme Court has generally addressed challenges to the duration of immigration detention, [it] has not addressed challenges to the conditions of immigration confinement.” Moreover, Congress has not enacted a statute that lays out the ways ICE should operate its detention facilities.
And given ICE’s track record, providing it more money to run more detention facilities may satisfy the president, but it means more misery for those who find themselves in them and more cruelty by the people in charge of them.
No photo op, like the one done at the newest detention facility in the Florida Everglades, should distract us from that fact.
As a 2021 Harvard Law Review note put it, “the government, by virtue of its own actions, assumes a positive constitutional duty to protect and care for those individuals that it detains—irrespective of their citizenship status.”
It is too bad that the Republican majority in Congress doesn’t care whether or how the Trump administration discharges that duty. But the rest of us should.
We should make our voices heard in defense of human dignity and human rights for the people who end up in the new ICE facilities Congress has just funded.
