This story is a part of “Trump Two: Six Months In,” our sequence taking inventory of the administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and legal justice.
Over the past 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 toddler, got here to the US 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 turn into extra crowded, and situations worsen. With out sufficient beds, he stated, males slept in frequent areas. With out entry to sufficient bogs, 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 situations, because the variety of individuals 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 individuals, a forty five% improve since Trump’s inauguration.
This fast progress means the Trump administration should shortly discover locations to place individuals. The U.S. has a gargantuan community of prisons and jails, and within the final six months, that infrastructure, constructed for the legal system, has been redeployed to perform Trump’s immigration objectives.
In some instances, that has meant repurposing empty beds or reopening amenities that have been shuttered throughout current legal justice reforms. And now the administration plans to make the detention infrastructure even greater. In July, Trump signed into legislation his tax reduce and coverage invoice, or what he dubbed his “large lovely 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 information offered by the Deportation Knowledge Undertaking and processed by the Vera Institute of Justice and located that from late Could to late June, ICE had used 432 amenities to carry immigrants, up from 315 over the month main as much as Trump’s second inauguration. Since Jan. 20, ICE has put individuals in no less than 45 amenities that had not detained immigrants in additional than a decade of obtainable information.
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 legal 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 individuals awaiting trial on legal expenses, with busloads of migrants. An worker on the facility was alarmed and wrote a press release that was shared with U.S. senators. “Workers have been advised 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 objective, and we don’t know what these people are being detained for.”
Since then, the variety of individuals being held in federal Bureau of Prisons amenities for ICE has swelled from a number of dozen, to greater than 1,300, in keeping with Benjamin O’Cone, a spokesman for the bureau. As of July, they have been being held at federal prisons and jails in Miami, Atlanta, Kansas, Philadelphia, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, although now not on the jail in Los Angeles.
As soon as in federal jail amenities, detainees discover themselves in a system ill-equipped to trace them, creating havoc for attorneys and relations in search of to succeed in them. One legal professional representing individuals in a distant New Hampshire jail stated that for months it was nearly unimaginable to arrange cellphone calls with shoppers there, and that lack of entry to attorneys delayed and interfered with immigration proceedings. This legal professional requested to not be named as a result of they concern additional jeopardizing their entry to shoppers.
Kenny Castillo, president of the union native representing bureau workers on the jail in Miami, stated immigration detainees spend 21 hours every day of their cells, as a result of the jail is simply too understaffed. Regardless of holding lots of of recent immigrant detainees, Castillo stated the jail obtained no extra coaching and no new workers, forcing officers to be unfold even thinner. Cooks and academics at the moment are being known as upon to protect models, he stated.
For years, the Bureau of Prisons labored intently with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE, and federal prisons typically 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 workers was caught unprepared, and the trouble was extensively condemned as a catastrophe.
“When you’ve an inflow of all these detainees, they arrive from everywhere in the world, they’ve all these medical situations and wishes,” stated John Kostelnik, who was on the time president of the union representing Bureau of Prisons workers 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 workers to handle it.”
Reopening shuttered amenities
A federal choose 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 power, operated by CoreCivic underneath 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 amenities have gone by means of an analogous cycle.
The state jail in California Metropolis, California, was closed in 2024 and is now set to turn into the largest immigration detention heart 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 heart. It’s going to merge with a close-by immigration processing heart 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 workers sexual assault in opposition to the ladies housed there. The power additionally had main issues with its infrastructure, together with mould and asbestos, and ultimately closed.
Legal justice consultants like Eunice Cho, senior workers legal professional on the ACLU Nationwide Jail Undertaking, stated that when shuttered amenities are resurrected, it underscores why developing new buildings or increasing previous ones will be treacherous. As soon as a jail is constructed, there are enterprise motives to search out methods to place extra individuals in it, for one objective or one other.
Increasing contracts with personal firms for extra space
Although Biden ended personal jail contracts for the federal jail system, he left them in place for ICE, and plenty of detained immigrants are in amenities run by personal firms.
Firms 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 amenities have troubling histories. CoreCivic’s South Texas Household Residential Middle in Dilley, Texas, got here underneath fireplace throughout the first Trump administration as a result of it housed youngsters separated from their mother and father; 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 kids, 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, typically with the promise of rewards, or the specter of punishments.
Hundreds of counties function their very own jails. Sheriffs and different native officers typically hire out beds to different counties, or to federal companies 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 might be collectively holding greater than 6,600 detainees for ICE.
“It’s simpler to get sheriffs and counties to signal on to holding individuals for ICE than it’s to construct model new amenities,” stated Austin Kocher, a professor who research immigration at Syracuse College.
In Ohio, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones advised a neighborhood 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, advised The Washington Submit that earnings from ICE underwrite different packages: “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 try 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 the town of Los Angeles and the state of New York to attempt to pressure their cooperation, and has, in different cases, threatened to withhold federal funding from locations that gained’t cooperate with ICE.
However in keeping with immigrants and attorneys, county jails are sometimes woefully unequipped to take care of immigrant detainees, a lot of whom arrive traumatized from the remedy of their house international locations that led them to flee.
“The overwhelming majority of sheriffs — they don’t have sufficient beds for the individuals they’ve,” stated Patrick Royal, a spokesman for the Nationwide Sheriffs Affiliation. Even amongst sheriffs who assist Trump’s deportation efforts, Royal stated he typically hears sheriffs say, “I barely have sufficient individuals to run my jail each day.”
Many jails that ICE ended contracts with throughout the Biden administration as a consequence of poor situations, such because the Glades County Detention Middle, in Florida, at the moment are holding detainees once more. In 2022, ICE introduced it could cease sending individuals to the Etowah County Jail, in Alabama, citing “a protracted historical past of great deficiencies recognized throughout facility inspections.” The jail grew to become notorious in 2021 after a pregnant girl detained there was pressured to provide delivery to her child alone in a bathe. Since March, ICE has resumed sending detainees there; by June, there have been typically over 100 immigrants detained there.
Supercharging current amenities
The Trump administration has been capable of shortly detain a rising variety of migrants due to the muse constructed and maintained by previous administrations, each Democratic and Republican. Among the amenities with the most important progress within the variety of detainees since his inauguration have been in operation for years.
Stewart Detention Middle opened in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 2006. For the reason that 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 individuals.
Taylor, the person who got here right here as a toddler and is now detained at Stewart, stated that as the power grew to become extra crowded, it’s been arduous to get medical care. He stated he needed to wait a very long time to get his prosthetics mounted and has been ready months to get a tooth pulled.
A spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Stewart detention heart, stated Taylor has an upcoming dental go to and that medical companies on the facility meet a excessive normal of care. Nevertheless, 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 company 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 usually 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 gives the newest numbers, we used detention statistics usually launched by ICE for the rely of the entire variety of individuals the company has detained. Nevertheless, this information solely goes again a restricted variety of years. Its reporting of facility-level statistics solely exhibits amenities holding individuals on the date of the snapshot, which omits some amenities, obscures adjustments over time, and has irregularities in current numbers.
To plot the day by day detained inhabitants over time and look at facility utilization and inhabitants, The Marshall Undertaking used information exhibiting particular person individuals’s stays in detention amenities 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 info processed by the Vera Institute of Justice for his or her ICE Detention Traits dashboard. Our evaluation additionally used details about amenities compiled by Vera from a wide range of sources.
We counted a facility as “in-use” if it detained no less than one individual for any portion of a selected day. Nevertheless, the amenities ICE makes use of for detention are fluid. For instance, a jail detaining 5 individuals may maintain nobody per week later. Meaning evaluating the variety of amenities used on any two days doesn’t present the complete image of the jails, prisons and different detention amenities in current use by ICE. Additionally, when visualizing the variety of amenities used day by day, the day-to-day fluctuations make the chart troublesome to learn. For these causes, we determined that when evaluating and visualizing the variety of amenities used, we might, for every date, calculate the variety of distinctive amenities 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 information that aggregates the person stints in detention to day by 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.
