America is already the prison capital of the world, having both the largest and highest incarceration rate compared to other countries. However, there are also growing concerns among observers and activists about America’s escalating use of immigrant detention centers and whether, ultimately, its own citizens could soon also be filling those facilities.
“We’re human beings, we shouldn’t be housed in cages,” said Mildred P. Danis Taylor, civic engagement associate at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), and wife of an ICE detention survivor.
“ICE is deliberately different from jails and prisons. They have their own rules, they have their own laws, and they do whatever they want. They are the jury, the executioner, and they make whatever laws they want,” she said.
Recently, multiple media outlets reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plan to sell or offload seven of the 11 warehouses (in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey and Utah) it originally purchased for over $700 million to house migrants, and proceed with four others in Texas, Arizona, and Maryland.
“The stated purpose was to convert them into detention centers to house migrants targeted for deportation, with the ultimate goal of expanding total detention capacity to 100,000,” reported Joe Lancaster, assistant editor of Reason Magazine, which covers politics and culture.
“Reportedly, and in a welcome development, the DHS is largely scrapping the plan, and most of the warehouses it has already purchased will be sold or used for another purpose,” the article noted.
Attorney Nana Gyamfi, executive director of BAJI, said there is still cause for concern, because that was a testing. “There are already warehouses that are being used as detention prisons. They are not going to take those away,” she stated.
While the U.S. doesn’t have the capacity to deport millions of people, nor the infrastructure, she argued, advocates knew they would deport people in as cruel a way as possible. “You see who they’re targeting and the ways they are doing it, snatching folks.
But we understood that what we saw happening in front of us, and what has always been the case, is the immigration enforcement system working right alongside the criminal punishment system as one machine,” said Atty. Gyamfi.
In fact, she said, BAJI asks people to view the issue through the framework of STOP—Stop Taking Our People (wemakethemstop.org). The framework asks people to look at the intersection of anti-Blackness, criminalization, and immigration enforcement.
Everything requires infrastructure, so even though billions of dollars have been taken and another $70 billion added to the ICE budget, this is basically building up a private enforcement, in the form of DHS cops and federal agents, argued Atty. Gyamfi. The U.S. government still needs the mechanisms to keep it going, not just a building, she said.
“I also want people to remember that the devil is a liar, so let us not get comfortable and think that they will not proceed with these warehouses,” she said, adding, “People have pushed back against these warehouses. … and so they’ve realized that it’s not going to be as easy to do as they thought, but they don’t give up, right? The empire strikes back.”
According to the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit that advocates for fair and rational immigration policies in the U.S., United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Facilities reached staggering numbers.
Operating 91% more immigration detention facilities than it had at the start of 2025. Advocates and analysts are sounding the alarm as 104 additional sites were added in less than 12 months.
“They’ve been planning to put us, because after you’ve deported everybody, then who’s next, right? Us! The people that were born here, the people that are Black. That’s who they’re trying to put in there,” Ms. Taylor alleges.
The Trump-era total of deportations tallied around 290,603 through late 2025, which is lower than the DHS’s public claims of 527,000-605,000, according to the TRAC, a nonpartisan data research center at Syracuse University.
“They’re deporting people, they’re purchasing facilities—and if you want everybody out the country, why are you housing them? That’s the problem. So, it’s really scary what the real hidden agenda is,” Ms. Taylor said.
The detained population soared by more than 75%, reaching a record 73,000 people held on a single day in mid-January 2026—the highest number in the agency’s 23-year history, according to ICE data analyzed by the American Immigration Council.
But as the Trump administration touts mass deportations as a signature achievement, a pressing question is being raised by community leaders, frontline advocates, and those who have lived it firsthand: if so many people are supposedly being deported, who are all these detention centers actually being built for?
“They’re building them for any and everybody that poses a legitimate threat to this fascist regime’s effort at taking and maintaining power. And that includes U.S. citizens,” said Greg Akili, a community advocate and political analyst, based in Los Angeles.
He pointed to the federal government’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called it “the largest DHS operation in history,” deploying more than 3,000 federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities beginning in November 2025 and ultimately making more than 4,000 arrests.
Lawsuits filed by the Minnesota Attorney General and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul alleged racial profiling, unlawful arrests of U.S. citizens, and excessive force.
“They’re going after people and organizations that question them, that challenge them, that raise in the consciousness of other people that what’s happening here is not right,” he said.
For Mr. Akili, the expansion is not simply about immigration enforcement. “These concentration camps are built to suppress and oppress any opposition to their racist and fascist policies.
Secondly, they’re built to send a message—be quiet, don’t say anything, don’t do anything, because you could wind up here. And then finally, they are built to make sure that you don’t get together with other people who might say something,” he stated.
He added, “In order for the powers that be to maintain themselves, they need a society that is asleep, which is why they attack ‘wokeness.’ They need you unconscious. They need you out of it.”
The Final Call reached out to DHS but received no response.
Meanwhile, between the end of 2024 and spring 2025, the detained population nearly doubled, according to Aidan Perkinson, operations manager for Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest, which is based in Tacoma, Washington.
“What we’re seeing right now is mostly people who’ve been living in the U.S. for years or decades, who have families here and often have jobs. It’s a lot of people being detained in the interior of the United States,” he stated. “When someone is detained, most of the time they can’t be deported straight away. They have a right to go before an immigration judge and seek relief from removal,” added Mr. Perkinson.
“Six hundred judges, 3.4 million cases—that takes a long time to get through. And so, people are in detention, usually for the duration of that,” he said.
Nationwide, there have been concerns about the conditions in many of these facilities.
Washington state has also become a national flashpoint. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson and State Attorney General Nick Brown filed suit in April 2026 against GEO Group—the private operator of the Northwest ICE Processing Center, also in Tacoma.
The lawsuit was filed after state health inspectors were turned away 10 times despite more than 3,500 complaints of unsafe food, medical neglect, and unsanitary conditions, including water so poor that staff bring their own bottles to work. Two people have died at the facility since 2024, and six others have attempted suicide.
“GEO Group is not above the law,” Attorney General Brown declared at a news conference outside the facility. “People are being harmed in this facility and inaction is no longer acceptable,” argued Mr. Perkinson.
Ms. Taylor, a Haitian American born in the U.S., described detention as a kind of disappearance with particular danger for Black detainees. “Being in an ICE facility, it’s like being housed in a cage. You can be easily forgotten, you can get lost in the system. You could be here one moment and out the country another. There is no paper trail, helping to make sure that you are in the U.S.,” she said.
“Blacks get less medical treatment; they’re usually the first ones to be deported; they get treated worse in detainment,” she stated, especially if one upsets a guard. “They’ll take your mat away. … My husband experienced that—you get thrown into solitary confinement. And don’t be Black and disabled. Then you have two strikes against you in detainment.”
Her husband, Rodney, was placed in solitary confinement during his detention. He has since been released—“by the grace of God,” she said. But he continues to face serious health issues stemming from his time inside. The family is still fighting.
“People don’t talk about once you’re released. That’s a whole other story, because rebuilding is not easy, especially when you have so much taken away,” said Ms. Taylor, raising what she called the hidden agenda behind the facility expansion—the 1-million-plus square foot warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia.
DHS purchased it for $128.6 million, with plans to convert it into a detention facility housing between 7,500 and 10,000 people, effectively tripling the town’s population. The City of Social Circle filed a federal lawsuit in May 2026 alleging DHS violated environmental law and conducted no public review before the purchase.
However, on June 19, it was reported by local media outlets that DHS dropped plans for the detention center in Social Circle after months of opposition and a lawsuit from local leaders.
“The officials in the Trump-Vance administration got nervous because the people stood up and began to speak out,” said U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). “This White House and this administration viewed Social Circle’s concerns as nothing more than a thorn in their side,” said Senator Warnock.