ICE to spend $38bn turning warehouses into detention centers
From Coffee and Covid, Jeff Childers
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On Friday, the UK Guardian ran an unintentionally encouraging story headlined, “ICE to spend $38bn turning warehouses into detention centers, documents show.” That’s not all the documents show; best of all, they show a long-term plan. Here’s one of the warehouses ICE just bought, this one in Georgia. Just look at this thing:
On Friday, Republican New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte posted an internal ICE memo after supposedly catching ICE ‘falsely’ claiming it had worked with her office on a planned facility in Merrimack. The memo —marked ‘For Official Use Only’— revealed ICE’s “$38.3 Billion Detention Reengineering Initiative,” a plan to expand detention capacity to 92,600 beds by this November. It describes eight “mega-centers” holding 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, with sixteen regional processing centers. According to the memo, ICE has already quietly purchased at least seven warehouses —some exceeding one million square feet— in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
You would think progressives would be pleased. The planned mega-centers will include medical care, dental, recreation areas, law libraries, courtroom space, cafeterias, and scheduled phone calls. Which, to be honest, is more amenities than a freshman college dorm.
To give you a sense of the scale: ICE is currently holding about 75,000 people, up from 40,000 when President Trump took office a year ago. The new target is 92,600. Last week, ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that 1.6 million illegal aliens have final deportation orders— of whom half, roughly 800,000, have criminal convictions. That’s 800,000 convicted criminals, outward bound.
Meanwhile, twelve thousand new ICE officers are coming online to help process them all.
But the buried story that corporate media seems to miss is that this obviously isn’t a plan to handle a temporary surge. You don’t spend $38.3 billion building eight mega-centers that each hold 10,000 people, sixteen regional processing sites, and a standardized, “scalable” nationwide detention network just to round up a few busloads of criminal aliens and call it a day.
The memo itself calls this ICE’s “long-term detention solution.” Long-term. The infrastructure is designed to be operational by November 2026 — and that’s when it will start operating. They’re hiring 12,000 new agents to fill it out. They’re buying million-square-foot warehouses across seven states— and still shopping for more.
In other words, this memo reads less like an emergency response and more like the blueprints for a permanent deportation pipeline— an industrial-scale system designed to process 1.6 million people with final deportation orders (half of whom have criminal convictions) and then keep running for whoever and whatever comes next.
The Trump administration isn’t just catching up on a backlog. They’re clearly building a massive, multi-armed deportation machine that can actually handle 20 to 40 million illegal immigrants— by making mass deportation a routine government function rather than a political slogan. Critics who sneered that it was too late, that it would be impossible to deport 40 million illegals, are looking at how President Trump could actually deliver on his promises.
Once again, President Trump thought bigger —less modestly— and saw possibilities nobody else did. More promises kept.
Source:
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