Randa Abdel-Fattah
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Brianna grew up in South Florida, near a federal immigration detention center.
It was an old missile base turned into a migrant detention facility in the 1980s.
As an adult, Brianna got interested in what it was used for, who ran it, who lived there.
And what she found was that for as long as the federal government has restricted immigration, it's struggled to find enough space, which is why it's often relied on local county jails in rural communities like the one in Franklin County, New York, to help them out.
has an expansive immigration detention system spread out over federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons, and county jails.
And it's exploded under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
The Trump administration wants to find or build the space to detain at least 100,000 immigrants on any given night.
It has $45 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill to do it.
And the administration is well on its way to meeting its goal.
In little over a year, the number of detention facilities used by ICE has nearly doubled.
And I'm Randabnit Fattah.
On this episode of ThruLine, the business of migrant detention.
Federal officials were upset at what was happening in Malone.
They mostly blamed the commissioners making these decisions.
But they also thought there might be some other kind of corruption happening.
And they wanted other places to detain the growing number of Chinese migrants coming across the border.