As Mass Incarceration of Immigrants Rises, Detention Centers Eye New Contracts

Advocates breathed a sigh of relief in March 2022 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it would stop holding federal immigration prisoners at the Etowah County Detention Center, an isolated Alabama jail known for being one of the worst places to end up in the ICE detention system.

For years activists inside and out documented harsh and harmful conditions at Etowah, and in an internal memo, ICE said the facility had long been a “serious concern due to the quantity, severity, diversity and persistence of deficiencies.”

“I spent four years detained at Etowah, a facility that operated with no regard for human dignity, safety, or the law,” said Karim Golding, a Black Muslim activist originally from Jamaica, in a statement. “The inhumane conditions weren’t just neglect — they were deliberate.”

Now, as the Trump administration begins to make good on threats to arrest, detain and deport millions of undocumented people, the sheriff in charge of Etowah has announced the county jail will once again be holding up to 60 immigrants at a time. Reopening Etowah to ICE is part of a larger push to rapidly make space for jailing people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan, reversing one win of the immigrant rights movement under the Biden administration after abuse scandals, civil rights complaints, COVID-19 outbreaks, and pressure from activists and Democratic lawmakers.

“To be clear, the plan to reopen this facility is not only a reckless waste of taxpayer dollars and local resources — it is also a direct attack on our immigrant neighbors, aiming only to fuel Trump’s mass expansion of immigration detention,” said Tania Wolf, the southeast advocacy manager at National Immigration Project, in a statement last week.

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expand infrastructure for detaining and incarcerating immigrants and recent arrivals seeking asylum while authorizing ICE to make arrests in place such as schools, churches, hospitals and courthouses. The number of immigrants arrested in the interior of the country has spiked as ICE works to meet aggressive quotas set by the White House, and the number of people sitting in ICE jails has increased by more than 4,000 since Trump took office.

As of February 27, more than 43,700 people in ICE custody were being held at local jails and privately run prisons across the country, the highest level since 2019. Many of these people were removed from communities where they live, not long lines at the border with Mexico, where the number of new arrivals has plunged. The existing jails and detention enters used to incarcerate immigrants are reportedly reaching capacity. The Detention Watch Network, an immigration justice group, warned in a statement this week that the ICE detention system is plagued by “a culture of violence that results in egregiously poor conditions and even death.”

“We are living in an absolute humanitarian crisis in ICE detention centers,” said Kate Blankenship, managing partner of the human rights group Sanctuary of the South, in an interview. “There is gross abuse happening every single day, there is mass overcrowding, and the opportunity for bond and parole are quickly disappearing.”

At least three detainees have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, including two at the Krome Service and Processing Center in southern Florida. Blankenship is working with the family of one of the men, a 44-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Maksym Chernyak who died suddenly last month.

Chernyak’s family said he entered ICE custody with no preexisting medical conditions. He was transferred to Krome from a local jail after being arrested in January during a domestic violence incident, although his wife says police misunderstood the situation due to language barriers. Blankenship said Chernyak requested medical help in February but didn’t receive adequate care despite registering high blood pressure. Other detainees called for help days later when Chernyak suffered a seizure in the shower.

“We called the officers, and they didn’t want to come until we told him that he was dead,” said Greg Welch, a witness who is also in ICE custody and represented by Blankenship, in an interview to a local NBC affiliate. “He passed out. We tried to call medical. They didn’t want to come because they didn’t have no staff until hours later, until he was mostly unresponsive.”

In a statement, ICE said Chernyak was taken to the hospital on February 18, where a brain scan revealed severe bleeding, and staff began “brain death protocol” on February 19 after attempts at stabilization failed. In the statement, ICE also said it is committed to ensuring “safe, secure, and humane environments” to people in its custody and providing “comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.”

Blankenship said the death of Chernyak and two other men since October 2024 at the Krome detention center is part of a much larger and well-documented pattern of medical neglect at immigration jails that will only intensify as more people are arrested and detained under Trump. A 2024 review by Physicians for Human Rights of 52 previous deaths in ICE custody over a five-year period found that nearly all were preventable.

“People hear ‘overcrowding’ they don’t necessarily understand the depth, that it is quite literally killing people,” Blankenship said.

One a recent visit to the Krome detention center, Blankenship said she saw men sleeping on bare floors in waiting rooms. Detainees pounded on windows and pleaded for help as she passed by in the hallway. Others reported being forced to sleep on buses in a parking lot without access to a shower for days, Blankenship said.

“Krome is a crisis that is happening everywhere,” Blankenship said.

That crisis is set to grow as detention expansion continues. Last week, ICE signed a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the private prison company GEO Group to reopen an empty jailhouse in Newark to incarcerate up to 1,000 immigration prisoners at a time, the first large detention expansion under Trump’s crackdown.

GEO Group pushed hard for the contract and sued New Jersey in 2024 to successfully overturn a state law originally supported by racial justice activists that banned private companies from contracting with ICE to house immigrants. Now, GEO Group reportedly has plans to increase the facility’s capacity to incarcerate people and potentially generate an additional $500 to $600 million in annual profit. The company has faced multiple lawsuits after immigrants were subjected to what attorneys describe as underpaid and forced labor. Most recently, a federal court upheld a ruling requiring GEO Group to pay $23 million in damages after the company paid ICE detainees $1 a day for labor at a detention center in Tacoma, Washington.

GEO Group is the largest immigration jail contractor for ICE, and private companies run a majority of immigration detention facilities across the country. A similar growth of immigration detention occurred during the first Trump administration, when 28 of 40 new contracts for detention space did not include required documentation from ICE field offices demonstrating the need for such an expansion, putting taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars a month in unused jail space.

Others sites for incarcerating immigrants are run by local sheriffs who open their jails to ICE detainees — often in far-flung rural areas far from immigrant communities and legal support — in exchange for daily payments from ICE for each individual in custody. The Etowah County jail in Alabama is a good example.

Golding, the activist who spent time at the Etowah County jail, said he was not excited when ICE ended its contract with the facility in 2022 because U.S. citizens still had to endure the miserable conditions at the geographically isolated jail. In a statement echoing other previous ICE detainees, Golding said the inhumane conditions were not an accident and were instead implemented deliberately.

“This place consistently violated the Prison Rape Elimination Act, with security and safety nearly nonexistent,” Golding said. “This was a place where quarantine protocols meant nothing during the pandemic. Officers were forced to work without protective gear. People got sick, and Etowah didn’t care.”

Golding said he contracted COVID-19 and became a “long-hauler” suffering from chronic symptoms while awaiting release from Etowah. He also joined the movement to shut the facility down, both for immigrants and economically impoverished locals who cycle through the jail, which is known for keeping people locked up as long as possible.

“We fought to shut this place down because we knew the truth — detention isn’t about safety or justice; it’s about cruelty, control and profit,” Golding said. “They locked people away, denied them medical care, ignored their suffering and allowed the worst kinds of violence to happen under their watch.”