Caitlin Dickerson

Congress has been quiet other than to fund this massive expansion.

So I really think that we're looking at a reality with this $170-plus billion for immigration enforcement that involves violence.

Armed law enforcement in the streets as a regular fixture of our lives, of chaotic conflicts in the streets is something that we're going to become accustomed to and massive detention centers that are going to come up and that are going to be built for the purposes of holding people and then getting them out of the country.

So the number of immigration detention facilities in use has dramatically increased since Trump took office.

And they're really just getting started with spending the $45 billion that were specifically dedicated to detention in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

This means that private prison companies and counties that want to rent bed space to ICE are going to be able to profit really significantly on increasing the detained populations.

When Biden left office, the detained population of immigrants was around 39,000 people.

Now it's 70,000 people.

You know, you need to be able to detain people to effectuate deportations.

And at times, a lack of detention space has held them back.

There was a time last year when I was reporting in Atlanta and people who are going to the downtown ice field office for their ice check-ins were being arrested and put into immigration custody.

Many of them were folks who had temporary legal status under the Biden administration and then had that eliminated when Trump took office.

And then a few weeks after I started reporting on this issue, I started to hear that people were going into their ICE check-ins once again and having this normal interaction where they would tell the officer what they'd been up to, where they were living, and be told to come back in six months or a year.

And I asked what the difference was, and it was just that the detention facilities in Georgia had filled up in the intervening time.

So really, who was being arrested and who wasn't had nothing to do with the circumstances of their case, with whether they were a legitimate threat to the public or not.

It was

Is there a bed to put them in?

And so I think the Trump administration really wants to eliminate the possibility that limited bed space could hold them back.

So, you know, immigration detention is legally not actually meant to be punitive, which is a little bit ironic given what we know about the health and safety conditions in detention centers.

Lots of people are dying in detention more than in years past, which is a huge concern for people.