Politics

Jack Norton

ICE’s jail boom

Photograph by the author.

On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to “allocate all legally available resources” to expand its detention capacity. In response, DHS began reopening recently shuttered prisons and using them to hold detainees arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There were fantasies and schemes of offshoring and black sites, including an ill-fated plan for a thirty-thousand-bed detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. That February, the administration expanded “third country” removals, flying detainees to partnered nations — Eswatini, South Sudan, Mexico, and others — where they might be held and then transferred somewhere else, or arbitrarily incarcerated in prisons like El Salvador’s CECOT.

ICE is now the most heavily funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States.…