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According to recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, the agency made more than 43,000 arrests in June, the highest number since President Donald Trump returned to office.
For many of the people arrested, the first stop is in an ICE temporary holding center. Last week, The Washington Post reported that amid that spike in arrests, some holding centers have become dangerously overcrowded, with the average monthly population increasing by roughly fivefold compared to the numbers before the administration’s crackdown began.
These “centers” are generally better thought of as temporary cells. They typically lack beds, showers, infirmaries, and similar basic services, and are designed to hold a small number of people for hours at a time. As arrest numbers have increased and the stays have stretched into days, conditions have turned unsanitary, people have been forced to sleep sitting up, and some with serious illnesses have gone untreated, according to the Post’s reporting.
From these holding centers, people are generally transferred to more long-term detention facilities, part of a broader system that the Department of Homeland Security is expanding in a historic push.
Earlier this year, that effort was largely anchored by a $1 billion shopping spree on commercial warehouses, with an eye toward repurposing them as detention space. Sustained public pushback and lawsuits from local governments and communities helped stymie those efforts, alongside the logistical challenges of retrofitting buildings that were not designed for long-term confinement. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin admitted in congressional testimony in June that “there was some due diligence that maybe wasn’t actually checked off.”
So the administration has recently moved to offload most of these properties and has pivoted to a more traditional approach of trying to expand existing facilities and soliciting bids from private prison contractors to reopen shuttered lockups.
This week, NBC News reported that DHS is seeking bids for facilities in its Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver regions with a total bedspace of 5,500. One requirement in the government’s request is that buildings be ready to accept detainees within 30 days of the contract being awarded.
In North Carolina, GEO Group pitched exactly that kind of turnkey readiness months ago to the federal government, claiming that the Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, near the Virginia border, could open immediately. The company boasted that the location’s “rural setting offers a secure operational environment with minimal community disruption,” seemingly addressing the administration’s challenges in rolling out the warehouse idea.
According to reporting from the New York Times last week, internal ICE documents show that the agency plans to reopen Rivers by the end of the year. Rivers would then become one of the largest immigration jails on the East Coast, with a planned 1,400 beds. DHS has not acknowledged the reopening of the facility, but told media that it was actively trying to expand bedspace.
One former ICE official speaking with the Times tied the Rivers reopening to the administration’s efforts to find detention capacity in places perceived as “more friendly” to their immigration agenda. North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Josh Stein has publicly criticized the effort, but the Republican-controlled legislature recently passed a bill mandating state and local cooperation with the federal immigration crackdown — overriding a Stein veto.
Despite opposition from Stein and some members of the local community, North Carolina represents a far friendlier political and legal environment than the federal government has found in states like New Jersey, where the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark has been subject to intense scrutiny, pressure and oversight efforts by state and local officials.
Writing for the Atlantic this week, Nick Miroff noted that while local pressure can be effective at pushing for oversight, efforts to actually close the facility could wind up being counterproductive for detainees. “ICE is going to find the bed space,” John Gihon, a former ICE attorney and board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the outlet. “A lot of time, it’s going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.” ICE detention facilities are overly represented in Louisiana and Texas, which are both in the deeply conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Still, the limits of state-level resistance do not make it meaningless. In California, the Democratic-controlled state government has mounted an intense campaign for oversight over privately operated detention, inspecting buildings and regularly issuing scathing reports on their conditions. Some lawmakers have also pursued legislation to raise taxes on private prisons to levels intended to push them out of the state.
In response, the Trump administration is testing a novel approach. This month, DHS bought two private prisons in California from CoreCivic for a combined $1.5 billion. The counterintuitive move — as the administration unloads most of its warehouse portfolio and signs more contracts with private prisons — appears designed to weaken the state’s regulatory leverage. CoreCivic is expected to continue running the facilities under the new contract, changing the name on the deed but likely very little about the daily operations.
Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, state governments generally cannot directly regulate the federal government. A former senior ICE official told the Bay City News Service that federal ownership would likely shield the facilities from California health inspections, and provide protection from some state and local laws, particularly zoning and environmental requirements, though legal challenges are likely to follow.
DHS is also reportedly trying to circumvent state and local oversight without buying properties at all. On Wednesday, WIRED reported that the contract solicitation for private prisons contains draft language simply declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities. A U.S. district court judge in Washington has already rejected this language in a preliminary ruling, after it appeared in another contract. GEO Group is appealing that decision. But as WIRED noted, “written into contracts across four states, the same language could restart that fight in each of these locations at once.”