As Trump’s mass deportation efforts continue to terrorize immigrant communities across the US, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE)’s vast network of primarily for-profit detention centers have exceeded their capacity. Earlier in February, ICE was forced to release some migrants from their facilities after reaching 109% capacity.
Due to limited detention capacity, Trump’s administration has utilized a strategy dubbed “catch and release”, which Trump himself had criticized Biden for employing. Through “catch and release”, migrants that are considered “nonviolent” by immigration authorities are released after agreeing to return for their hearings in immigration court. According to Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, these migrants “do not have final deportation orders and are likely contesting their immigration status.” Upon release from ICE detention facilities, some of these migrants are further surveilled through ankle monitors which track their movements.
McLaughlin said that ICE is seeking more funding to expand local law enforcement partnerships, and is looking for ways to review immigration cases more quickly in order to deport migrants with “executable final orders of removal.” Generally, people must go through immigration court and receive an order of removal before deportation. The length of time that ICE can deport someone with a final order of removal varies based on what country that person originated from.
Trump has vowed to undertake the largest mass deportation effort in US history, of up to 20 million immigrants. Daily ICE arrests did indeed surge in the last six days of January to 1,126, but dropped down to 724 ICE arrests per day during the first 8 days of February—lower than the average daily number of 759 arrests during fiscal year 2024, all under the Biden administration. Data also shows that deportations have declined by 6% under Trump’s administration.
Although Trump has promised to prioritize “violent criminals” when rounding up immigrants for deportation, claiming to target the “worst first” for arrests, data shows that many non-criminals are also being swept up in the detentions. According to data obtained by NBC News, in the first two weeks of February, 41% of total new migrants detained during that period had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.
ICE has sought expansion well before Trump
For this new influx of detained migrants, immigration authorities are scrambling for ways to increase their capacity for detention—even before Trump’s mass deportation operation began. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shortly before Trump came into office revealed that ICE has been exploring ways to expand its detention capacity in eight states across the US: California, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and Washington.
“These records only further confirm ICE’s work to expand immigration detention across the country, including in facilities with clear records of abuse, and in areas where immigration detention has not previously existed,” said senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project Eunice Cho. “Expansion of detention will only enable ICE to enact President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation.”
Trump has directed the Defense and Homeland Security Departments to expand the capacity at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, on illegally occupied Cuban land, in order to receive 30,000 migrant detainees. Trump’s administration is also developing plans to detain migrants at other US military bases, including Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas.
For-profit detention allows abuse to run rampant
ICE detention centers, 86% of which are run by for-profit corporations, have been the site of some of the worst scandals within the vast system of mass incarceration in the US. Immigration authorities have increasingly turned to private corporations in order to manage the ballooning population of detained migrants, which reached new heights under the Obama administration. The companies which run the detention centers are private prison companies such as the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation, which turn profits of billions from contracts with ICE. Rights groups allege that the privatized detention system leads to rampant abuses and has lowered accountability to any official government body. The for-profit nature of ICE facilities incentives cost-cutting through lowering the quality of medical care, for example, according to the ACLU.
Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia received national attention in 2020 after a whistleblower allegation that women detained by ICE were being forcibly sterilized. In 2022, a congressional investigation into these medical abuse allegations revealed that “female detainees appear to have undergone excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures.” Such procedures included questionable hysterectomies.
Abuse runs rampant at ICE detention centers, including a pervasive problem of sexual abuse. Records and testimonies obtained by Futuro Investigates revealed 308 sexual assault and sexual abuse complaints filed by detained immigrants at ICE facilities between 2015 and 2021. According to documents obtained by the ACLU, ICE detainees filed nearly 200 allegations of sexual abuse since 2007—revealing abuses that extend far beyond Trump’s administration. In fact, it was under Barack Obama’s administration that the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued regulations that excluded ICE detainees from the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which is designed to protect incarcerated people from sexual abuse. This decision was later reversed.
ICE detention centers are also notorious for their use of solitary confinement, an internationally recognized form of torture. In its use of solitary confinement, referred to by ICE officials as “segregation,” detainees are held in small cells with little contact with others for as long as over one year. The New York Times reported last year that during Trump’s first term and Biden’s administration, the average duration of solitary confinement within ICE facilities is almost twice the length of time constituted by the United Nations as torture.
