How many people are being held?
As of mid-January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had some 73,000 people in detention, its highest number ever and an 81% increase from the same point in 2025. The numbers are spiking not only because of the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz, but also because of a radical shift away from decades-old policies. People charged with civil immigration violations—such as entering the U.S. unlawfully or overstaying a visa—now face mandatory detention while their cases wind through overtaxed courts. Previously, migrants in this situation would typically be released on bond, especially asylum seekers and those who’ve lived in the U.S. for years and don’t have criminal records. The result of that change is a crush of detainees being kept in more than 200 locations, including county jails, ICE field offices, military sites, and tent facilities such as Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz.” The U.S. already had “the largest detention and removal infrastructure of any country in the world,” said Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute. “And now it’s being put on steroids.”
What are conditions like?
Detainees describe a litany of horrors, from extreme overcrowding to physical abuse. “It’s like a concentration camp,” said Seamus Culleton, an Irish national who’s spent five months at Camp East Montana, an ICE facility in El Paso, Texas. A Boston plastering contractor who is married to a U.S. citizen and has applied for a green card, Culleton said he is being held in a cold, damp room with some 70 other men; is constantly hungry because the meals are child-size; and has been allowed outside fewer than a dozen times. It’s not just detainees blowing the whistle. A former worker at a Baltimore ICE facility said officers there treated migrants like “animals,” with people left “lying in feces” and detainees in overstuffed cells “lying on the floor head to toe.” That scene reminded the worker of images “of how they brought the slaves from Africa.” Nonprofit groups that focus on human-rights abuses have also produced damning reports on U.S. facilities.
What do they say?
An Amnesty International report on Alligator Alcatraz detailed food contaminated with maggots, sewage seeping into sleeping areas, and insect infestations. At other facilities in Florida, Human Rights Watch documented people sleeping on cold concrete floors, inmates in psychological distress subjected to solitary confinement, and men being forced to eat with their hands shackled behind their backs. “The guards treat you like garbage,” said a Colombian detainee. “You feel like your life is over.” Numerous reports and lawsuits include allegations of medical neglect, among them the dismissal of serious complaints such as chest pains; at least 32 people died in ICE custody last year, up from 11 in 2024. Six more died in January, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant at Camp East Montana who stopped breathing after a struggle with detention guards. The Trump administration said the guards tried to save Lunas Campos from a suicide attempt; an autopsy report gave the cause of death as homicide by asphyxiation. Despite such reports, the administration is planning to significantly expand its detention capacity.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
How many facilities are in the works?
Flush with $45 billion allocated for new detention centers in last year’s spending bill, ICE has in recent weeks bought seven massive warehouses in five states. They include a $70 million warehouse the size of seven football fields outside Phoenix and a $119 million, 1.3-million-square-foot former Big Lots distribution center near Harrisburg, Pa., that’s expected to house up to 7,500 people. That’s nearly double the number of inmates currently held at the largest federal prison. In all, ICE is proposing 23 new sites that together would hold 80,000 people. But fierce local opposition is hampering those plans.
Have any new facilities been blocked?
Protests and political pressure have led some site sellers to back out of deals. “We understand that the conversation around immigration policy is particularly heated,” the owners of an Ashland, Va., warehouse said after canceling a federal sale. A firm in Oklahoma City reversed course following a meeting with Republican Mayor David Holt, while the owners of a Salt Lake City warehouse rumored to be in ICE’s sights said they had no plans to sell after protests outside their offices. Many opponents of the facilities are motivated by humanitarian concerns; others cite strain on local resources and loss of tax revenue. A mega-detention center planned for Byhalia, Miss., would “foreclose on economic opportunities better suited for this site,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. An ICE official said such facilities make “communities safer for business owners and customers”; the agency also denies allegations of neglect and abuse at its centers. But critics and detainees say the brutality is real, and a deliberate policy choice.
What do they say is the goal?
To deter anyone else who might come to the U.S. unlawfully, and to make those already here self-deport—even if their immigration cases are still working through the system. “They do it so you give up,” said Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was held at an ICE facility in California City, Calif. Detainees there have complained of being denied insulin and other medications; in a lawsuit, immigrants called the center a “torture chamber.” It was too much for Avalos, 47, who suffers from chronic pain due to a foot deformity. Denied pain meds and forced to sleep on a top bunk, he left his two children in California and self-deported to El Salvador, which he last saw at age 7. Some of his former fellow detainees are wrestling with similar choices. “This place,” said Cambodian national Sokhean Keo, “is built to break us.”
