When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he inherited from his predecessor, Democrat Joseph Biden, the largest immigration prison network in U.S. history. Trump immediately began taking steps to further expand it, claiming there were tens of thousands of illegal criminal immigrants that needed to be jailed and deported.
But, as he began the expansion, it rapidly became clear that his targets were in fact simply workers and small-business people, who began being picked up at their homes, place of work, Home Depot parking lots and more. They included people like Kilmar Abrego García, an apprentice sheet metal worker and member of the SMART union; International Association of Machinists member Maximo Londonio in Washington state; café worker Carol Mayorga, who had lived in Kennett, Missouri, for decades; high school students in New York; and many more workers.
Their neighbors, co-workers, family and friends, many of whom had voted for Donald Trump, organized to fight to win their freedom.
What is needed today is not more immigration prisons, but an amnesty for all those immigrants in the U.S. This is the road to advance the unity of the working class against the employers and their government.
But for the administration in Washington, they continue to ramp up plans to imprison tens of thousands of immigrant workers. Their goal is to intimidate the millions of workers without papers, shut them up and get people to “self deport.”
The expansion underway of prisons and other schemes to detain and deport immigrant workers is well underway.
The Department of Homeland Security has deputized personnel from the Texas National Guard; the Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Prisons; U.S. Marshals; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and members of the State Department and Internal Revenue Service to assist in immigration operations.
The DHS budget is set at over $165 billion this year, with $45 billion allocated to construction of new detention facilities. The administration’s goal is to have 100,000 beds available in the nation’s immigration prisons.
By Aug. 17, Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, will house 1,000 immigrants, with a capacity to hold 5,000.
This jail is referred to as a “soft-sided” facility — actually a gigantic tent — to hold immigrants for deportation proceedings. For those who already face removal, “ICE Air,” as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation fleet is known, is ready. Since the beginning of the year, they have deported people to Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela. Washington has also moved to obtain agreements from governments abroad to incarcerate immigrants there from the U.S. in exchange for cash or political favors.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has chosen Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey to be refitted to house several thousand more immigrants awaiting deportation, along with the U.S.-occupied Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba.
Prisons are a profitable venture
Even with the expansion of prison capacity on military bases and elsewhere, some 85% of workers in immigration detention are held in for-profit jails run by companies like the GEO Group.
Conditions in these facilities, where inmate populations have exploded as arrests have grown, are marked by overcrowding, unsanitary and unsafe conditions. In June a riot broke out at a Tennessee prison run by CoreCivic, one for-profit prison company, over abysmal conditions, where a single correctional officer was responsible for hundreds of inmates.
CoreCivic is now trying to take over and reopen the notorious maximum security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, as a privately run detention center.
CoreCivic “expects us all to have amnesia about their track record here, and then they muddy the waters with big financial promises,” said Esmie Tseng from the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The company tries to sell its profitable venture by promising the prison will provide jobs, and payments to the city of $1 million up front when its facility opens, and hundreds of thousands more over the years.
At an April 9 Border Security Expo, where bosses came to exhibit their wares for handling immigrants, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said he has a plan to round up immigrants for detention with a fleet of trucks. He said it would be similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the U.S., “like Prime, but with human beings.”
As ICE agents expand their raids and arrests across the country, they’ve run into protests by workers and their unions, who’ve come to know and appreciate fellow workers without papers in their communities.
These fights — large and small — set an example in the fight for amnesty to unify the working class.