In his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump pledged to crack down on illegal immigration: “All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” The administration set a minimum goal of 3,000 deportations per day.
There was a problem. At the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated or contracted with more than 200 disparate facilities across the country, from federal detention centers to county jails, and it had the resources to detain only about 41,000 people at a time. To reach its daily deportation goal, the government would have to scale up its capacity. So this year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone on a real estate shopping spree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on warehouses across the country. The plan: to transform them into detention centers for undocumented migrants.
It is inhumane to store human beings—people who in many cases have not been convicted or even accused of anything more serious than civil immigration violations—in warehouses like so much freight. It is also far too costly, both in tax dollars spent and in harms imposed on the communities where these holding centers are being built.
Hellbound and Down 