This story is a part of “Trump Two: Six Months In,” our collection taking inventory of the administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and prison justice.
During the last six months, Rodney Taylor has watched the Trump administration’s explosion in immigration enforcement from a detention cell in rural Georgia.
Taylor, a 47-year-old who had each of his legs amputated as a baby, got here to the USA from Liberia when he was 2 years previous for medical care. In January, he was arrested and detained at Stewart Detention Middle, the place he has witnessed the power grow to be extra crowded, and circumstances worsen. With out sufficient beds, he stated, males slept in frequent areas. With out entry to sufficient bathrooms, he stated they defecated within the showers. He says he has misplaced weight, as a result of he can’t get sufficient nutritious meals.
In a press release, Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the personal firm that runs Stewart, denied that detainees needed to defecate in showers and stated they’re supplied with three nutritious meals a day.
Throughout the nation, civil rights attorneys and detained immigrants report equally dire circumstances, because the variety of folks in immigrant detention has skyrocketed since President Donald Trump took workplace, reaching a historic excessive level. Statistics launched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late July confirmed the company holding almost 57,000 folks, a forty five% improve since Trump’s inauguration.
This fast progress means the Trump administration should shortly discover locations to place folks. The U.S. has a gargantuan community of prisons and jails, and within the final six months, that infrastructure, constructed for the prison system, has been redeployed to perform Trump’s immigration targets.
In some circumstances, that has meant repurposing empty beds or reopening services that had been shuttered throughout latest prison justice reforms. And now the administration plans to make the detention infrastructure even larger. In July, Trump signed into legislation his tax minimize and coverage invoice, or what he dubbed his “massive stunning invoice,” which allotted a further $45 billion for immigration detention facilities. If spent evenly till the funds expire in about 4 years, this is able to add greater than twice what ICE spends on detention every year, all however guaranteeing detention capability will proceed to develop.
The Marshall Undertaking analyzed ICE detention knowledge supplied by the Deportation Knowledge Undertaking and processed by the Vera Institute of Justice and located that from late Might to late June, ICE had used 432 services to carry immigrants, up from 315 over the month main as much as Trump’s second inauguration. Since Jan. 20, ICE has put folks in at the very least 45 services that had not detained immigrants in additional than a decade of accessible knowledge.
ICE didn’t reply to questions for this story.
Listed here are a number of the methods that the Trump administration has used to blur the dividing line between the prison system and the immigration system throughout its first six months to detain increasingly immigrants.
Utilizing federal jails and prisons
Two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, ICE brokers pulled as much as the federal jail in Los Angeles, which holds folks awaiting trial on prison prices, with busloads of migrants. An worker on the facility was alarmed and wrote a press release that was shared with U.S. senators. “Staff have been informed that they will’t flip them away and should make room to accommodate them,” the assertion stated. “We’ve got not been educated or employed for this function, and we don’t know what these people are being detained for.”
Since then, the variety of folks being held in federal Bureau of Prisons services for ICE has swelled from a number of dozen, to greater than 1,300, in line with Benjamin O’Cone, a spokesman for the bureau. As of July, they had been being held at federal prisons and jails in Miami, Atlanta, Kansas, Philadelphia, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, although not on the jail in Los Angeles.
As soon as in federal jail services, detainees discover themselves in a system ill-equipped to trace them, creating havoc for attorneys and members of the family looking for to succeed in them. One lawyer representing folks in a distant New Hampshire jail stated that for months it was just about unattainable to arrange telephone calls with shoppers there, and that lack of entry to attorneys delayed and interfered with immigration proceedings. This lawyer requested to not be named as a result of they worry additional jeopardizing their entry to shoppers.
Kenny Castillo, president of the union native representing bureau staff on the jail in Miami, stated immigration detainees spend 21 hours every day of their cells, as a result of the jail is just too understaffed. Regardless of holding a whole bunch of latest immigrant detainees, Castillo stated the jail obtained no further coaching and no new employees, forcing officers to be unfold even thinner. Cooks and lecturers are actually being known as upon to protect items, he stated.
For years, the Bureau of Prisons labored carefully with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE, and federal prisons usually held immigration detainees. However the follow waned throughout the Obama administration. When the primary Trump administration despatched 1,600 ICE detainees to the federal jail in Victorville in 2018, the employees was caught unprepared, and the trouble was broadly condemned as a catastrophe.
“When you’ve an inflow of all these detainees, they arrive from all around the world, they’ve all these medical circumstances and desires,” stated John Kostelnik, who was on the time president of the union representing Bureau of Prisons staff at Victorville. “We had scabies outbreaks, shingles outbreaks, we had issues I had by no means even heard of, however we didn’t have the employees to handle it.”
Reopening shuttered services
A federal decide as soon as known as Leavenworth Detention Middle “an absolute hell gap.” In a 2021 letter to federal officers, the ACLU of Kansas pointed to stabbings, suicides and homicides that occurred with “alarming frequency.”
The ability, operated by CoreCivic below a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, was shuttered in 2021, after the Biden administration issued an govt order banning the usage of personal prisons by the Justice Division. However the constructing remained standing, and CoreCivic needs to reopen it to carry ICE detainees.
Different services have gone by means of the same cycle.
The state jail in California Metropolis, California, was closed in 2024 and is now set to grow to be the largest immigration detention middle within the state.
The privately run D. Ray James Correctional Facility in southern Georgia, which closed in 2020, can also be slated to reopen as an immigrant detention middle. It’s going to merge with a close-by immigration processing middle to create a 3,000-bed facility, one of many largest within the nation.
Federal officers are additionally contemplating repurposing the jail in Dublin, California, nicknamed the “rape membership,” after widespread and pervasive employees sexual assault in opposition to the ladies housed there. The ability additionally had main issues with its infrastructure, together with mould and asbestos, and ultimately closed.
Legal justice consultants like Eunice Cho, senior employees lawyer on the ACLU Nationwide Jail Undertaking, stated that when shuttered services are resurrected, it underscores why developing new buildings or increasing previous ones could be treacherous. As soon as a jail is constructed, there are enterprise motives to seek out methods to place extra folks in it, for one function or one other.
Increasing contracts with personal firms for more room
Despite the fact that Biden ended personal jail contracts for the federal jail system, he left them in place for ICE, and plenty of detained immigrants are in services run by personal firms.
Corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic have secured new or expanded agreements for immigrant detention throughout the nation, together with in California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan and New Jersey. Throughout an earnings name this spring after hovering inventory costs, CoreCivic President Damon Hininger celebrated what the Trump administration has meant for enterprise, saying that “by no means in our 42-year firm have we had a lot exercise and demand for our companies.”
Most of the services have troubling histories. CoreCivic’s South Texas Household Residential Middle in Dilley, Texas, got here below hearth throughout the first Trump administration as a result of it housed youngsters separated from their dad and mom; a toddler died in 2018 shortly after being launched. The middle was closed final 12 months, however CoreCivic has now reopened it to carry households and youngsters, and in courtroom filings, civil rights attorneys say their shoppers have had poor entry to medical care, meals and training for kids.
Paying for native jails’ house
Native jails throughout the nation are detaining immigrants, generally with the promise of rewards, or the specter of punishments.
1000’s of counties function their very own jails. Sheriffs and different native officers generally lease out beds to different counties, or to federal businesses just like the U.S. Marshals Service and ICE. And to many sheriffs, federal detention contracts are a monetary boon. The Marshall Undertaking recognized greater than 150 native jails which can be collectively holding greater than 6,600 detainees for ICE.
“It’s simpler to get sheriffs and counties to signal on to holding folks for ICE than it’s to construct model new services,” stated Austin Kocher, a professor who research immigration at Syracuse College.
In Ohio, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones informed an area information station that he’s doing his half to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants — and that holding them in his jail helps his backside line. Equally, Sheriff Josh McAllister of Winn Parish, Louisiana, informed The Washington Publish that earnings from ICE underwrite different applications: “Our workplace goes out and checks on the aged. I don’t cost our faculties to offer useful resource officers. Due to that facility, I can do this.”
In some locations, sheriffs are required by legislation or pressured by means of different means to carry immigrants for ICE. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a legislation in 2022 requiring counties with detention facilities to cooperate with ICE. The Trump administration has sued town of Los Angeles and the state of New York to attempt to drive their cooperation, and has, in different cases, threatened to withhold federal funding from locations that received’t cooperate with ICE.
However in line with immigrants and attorneys, county jails are sometimes woefully unequipped to take care of immigrant detainees, lots of whom arrive traumatized from the therapy of their dwelling international locations that led them to flee.
“The overwhelming majority of sheriffs — they don’t have sufficient beds for the folks they’ve,” stated Patrick Royal, a spokesman for the Nationwide Sheriffs Affiliation. Even amongst sheriffs who help Trump’s deportation efforts, Royal stated he usually hears sheriffs say, “I barely have sufficient folks to run my jail each day.”
Many jails that ICE ended contracts with throughout the Biden administration resulting from poor circumstances, such because the Glades County Detention Middle, in Florida, are actually holding detainees once more. In 2022, ICE introduced it might cease sending folks to the Etowah County Jail, in Alabama, citing “a protracted historical past of great deficiencies recognized throughout facility inspections.” The jail turned notorious in 2021 after a pregnant lady detained there was compelled to offer delivery to her child alone in a bathe. Since March, ICE has resumed sending detainees there; by June, there have been usually over 100 immigrants detained there.
Supercharging present services
The Trump administration has been in a position to shortly detain a rising variety of migrants due to the muse constructed and maintained by previous administrations, each Democratic and Republican. A few of the services with the biggest progress within the variety of detainees since his inauguration have been in operation for years.
Stewart Detention Middle opened in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 2006. Because the starting of the brand new Trump administration, the variety of immigrants ICE has detained at Stewart has risen sharply. From inauguration day to late June, the inhabitants of Stewart elevated by greater than 600 folks.
Taylor, the person who got here right here as a baby and is now detained at Stewart, stated that as the power turned extra crowded, it’s been arduous to get medical care. He stated he needed to wait a very long time to get his prosthetics fastened and has been ready months to get a tooth pulled.
A spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Stewart detention middle, stated Taylor has an upcoming dental go to and that medical companies on the facility meet a excessive commonplace of care. Nonetheless, Wired reported that because the inhabitants swelled at Stewart, 911 requires medical emergencies on the facility have additionally spiked.
Amilcar Valencia is govt director at El Refugio, a corporation that gives assist to people who find themselves visiting family members at Stewart. He stated they’ve gone from serving to about 20 households in a weekend, to often serving 40 to 60.
“The system was already constructed, and what [Trump] is doing is simply to make use of it to its max capability, utilizing the instruments of the system to inflict ache,” Valencia stated.
Methodology
The Marshall Undertaking analyzed a number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement datasets to get an understanding of immigration detention.
As a result of it offers the latest numbers, we used detention statistics often launched by ICE for the depend of the full variety of folks the company has detained. Nonetheless, this knowledge solely goes again a restricted variety of years. Its reporting of facility-level statistics solely reveals services holding folks on the date of the snapshot, which omits some services, obscures modifications over time, and has irregularities in latest numbers.
To plot the every day detained inhabitants over time and study facility utilization and inhabitants, The Marshall Undertaking used knowledge exhibiting particular person folks’s stays in detention services obtained by means of a number of Freedom of Info Act requests and launched by the Deportation Knowledge Undertaking, together with a model of the information processed by the Vera Institute of Justice for his or her ICE Detention Traits dashboard. Our evaluation additionally used details about services compiled by Vera from quite a lot of sources.
We counted a facility as “in-use” if it detained at the very least one individual for any portion of a selected day. Nonetheless, the services ICE makes use of for detention are fluid. For instance, a jail detaining 5 folks may maintain nobody every week later. Meaning evaluating the variety of services used on any two days doesn’t present the total image of the jails, prisons and different detention services in latest use by ICE. Additionally, when visualizing the variety of services used every day, the day-to-day fluctuations make the chart tough to learn. For these causes, we determined that when evaluating and visualizing the variety of services used, we’d, for every date, calculate the variety of distinctive services in use that day, or any of the 29 days earlier than it.
For Oct. 1, 2008, by means of June 10, 2025 we used Vera’s knowledge that aggregates the person stints in detention to every day inhabitants counts for every facility. For June 11, 2025, by means of June 26, 2025, reporters used a more moderen launch from the Deportation Knowledge Undertaking and processed it following Vera’s methodology, checking that it was constant for the overlapping durations of 2025.
