The Trump administration has created an anti-immigrant crusade that has emboldened and equipped ICE and for-profit detention centers with funding and immunity to detain, isolate, neglect, harm, and deport immigrants at alarming rates.
In 2025, Congress tripled the ICE budget making it the largest U.S. law enforcement agency. Despite this bloated budget, Republicans are requesting billions more to bring detention centers “up to standards” and add more capacity. Their request will likely be used for more raids, not to improve care for detainees.
To focus on the numbers, $45 billion was allocated to open new detention centers. CoreCivic and the GEO group, the largest for-profit developers in the detention business, plan to open 23 warehouses this year alone. An additional $30 billion was added for arrest and deportation services. As a result, these corporations are getting $500 million every quarter.
This windfall is coming from taxpayers and investments by pension and 401K funds. The cruel detention and deportation of human beings is a growing profit boom. All this funding doesn’t provide healthy food and medical care to detainees. What it does pay for is snatching people off the streets and building more cages to hold them.
Instead of Trump’s “worst of the worst,” the majority of those detained are activists, families, workers, elderly, students, and children. Since the start of Trump’s term, ICE statistics show over 2,000% increase in detainees with no criminal records, many of them U.S. citizens.
Inhumane conditions
Palestinian activist and Columbia University student, Leqaa Kodia, shared her experience after a year jailed in the Prairieland Detention Center. She described ICE’s treatment as similar to the Israeli Defense Force’s strategies to break the will of Palestinians living under occupation.
Detainees are cramped in small areas the size of a parking space with a thin mattress or sleeping on the floor. Families are separated. The spaces are unsanitary with sewage smell seeping in and water faucets connected next to open toilets. Food is similar to dog food and people must eat it or be placed in confinement as staff would see it as suicidal ideation.
The Texas Dilley detention center tricked children and mothers into thinking that they would celebrate Christmas with Santa Claus and see a movie. Instead, the children were yelled at to sit while staff took pictures for publicity uses. After watching a three-minute trailer, the mothers and children were ordered back to their cells.
In a tragic incident in Buffalo, New York, Nuru Alam, an elderly blind man, was left by ICE outside of a closed coffee shop in the wintry weather. Alam froze to death and his body was found three days later. Another detainee, Viera Reyes, was denied treatment for prostate cancer despite confirmed blood results. Reyes’ neglected condition worsened and he has since filed a lawsuit. Twenty-five people died at detention centers in 2025 with seventeen deaths so far this year. Hundreds more cases of cruel treatment have been documented.
Profiting from pain
Private detention companies are rushing to add more space by reopening abandoned prisons and warehouses. ICE lures support of local communities by promising jobs and tax incentives. These new regional facilities could process up to 1,500 people each and feed into larger facilities that hold up to 15,000 people. They are using a corporate logistics model to traffic and deport thousands daily.
ICE hides its plans from locals, but many communities are successfully challenging these new jails, in spite of laws favoring the federal government’s authority. Diverse communities in cities and towns across Arizona, Texas, Kansas, and other states have succeeded in stopping land and warehouse sales, denying permits, and passing moratoriums.
We must stop these expansions and demand immediate inspections and oversight — with the goal of dismantling ICE altogether.
Send feedback on this article to FSnews@socialism.com.
