Organizers Call for Shutdown of Immigrant Jails as Trump Expands Incarceration

The number of undocumented people held in immigration jails has exploded under President Donald Trump’s brutal crackdown. Despite polls showing growing public disgust with viral videos of heavily armed officers making violent arrests, the administration is doubling down on policies aimed at filling immigration jails and detention camps with up to 100,000 people at any given time — a massive expansion from the current incarcerating capacity of 41,500 people.

Along with tax breaks for the wealthy, the “big, beautiful bill” signed by Trump on July 4 provides an unprecedented $170 billion in funding for mass deportation, incarceration, and border enforcement. That includes the approval of a historic $75 billion in taxpayer spending for hiring 10,000 additional immigration police within the country’s interior and rapidly expanding jails and shocking detention camps.

While prison wardens and private contractors are pushing to expand bed space in existing jails and prisons for incarcerating immigrants in states such as New Jersey, Georgia, and Arkansas, a new detention camp in the Florida Everglades branded as “Alligator Alcatraz” has received major media attention and visits from concerned Democrats in Congress.

After a cursory inspection of what activists are calling the Everglades Concentration Camp, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz described the conditions at Alligator Alcatraz as “disturbing, vile.” Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, another Florida Democrat, criticized the camp as a “cruel spectacle” and warned that the Trump administration is working with Florida officials to “kidnap, brutalize, starve, and harm every single immigrant they can.”

Alligator Alcatraz is just one facility in a growing network of mass incarceration, which saw a similar expansion during Trump’s first term, when thousands of migrants arriving at the southern border disappeared into a byzantine system of far-flung jails and prisons. Now, the Trump administration has loudly turned its focus to his mass deportation agenda, arresting an increasing number of people living in the interior of the nation.

The Detention Watch Network, a coalition of detention accountability and abolition groups, lists the concentration camp in the Everglades alongside 10 other immigration detention facilities that activists are monitoring across multiple states. While Democratic lawmakers attempt to access the facilities to inspect for human rights abuses, the Detention Watch Network and 100 allied groups are launching the Communities Not Cages campaign to highlight local efforts to oppose detention expansion and shut immigration jails down.

The facilities tracked by the campaign include Central Louisiana ICE Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, a rural and sprawling immigration prison operated by the private prison company GEO Group, where detainees face deportation hundreds of miles away from family and legal support. Palestine liberation activist Mahmoud Khalil was recently released from the facility after being targeted by the Trump administration for organizing protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Activists also have their sights on Krome Detention Center in southern Florida, where at least three people died while incarcerated, including a 44-year-old Ukrainian refugee who, according to his family, entered Krome with no preexisting medical conditions. The facility is notorious for overcrowding and harsh crackdowns on protests by detainees demanding their right to livable conditions. Multiple studies by physicians and human rights groups found that dozens of people have died preventable deaths in jails and prisons run by ICE and its contractors in the past.

“In the face of the administration’s unrelenting expansion of immigration detention, communities across the country are demanding to halt detention expansion and shut down detention centers,” said Marcela Hernandez, the capacity building director at Detention Watch Network, in a statement on Thursday.

“The expansion of this inhumane treatment betrays the values and communities we represent,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement on Thursday in support of the campaign. “I’ll continue to fight these brutal policies, but we can’t do it alone. It takes all of us to defend our freedom.”

The campaign comes as the administration finds new ways to intensify its offensive against immigrants. Trump officials issued a memo last week barring most immigration prisoners from being released on bond as they fight deportation orders in court. Parole will now be a rarity and decided by immigration officers, not judges. Until recently, the vast majority of the 7.6 million people on the immigration docket were released pending proceedings, according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is plundering the personal data of 79 million enrollees in Medicaid, the health insurance program for lower-income and disabled people, in search of undocumented immigrants among millions of U.S. citizens. The health records include personal addresses, and Democratic attorneys general from 20 states have filed legal challenges arguing the move is an illegal invasion of privacy.

At least 57,861 people were incarcerated for being undocumented as of June 29, a significant increase from 30,406 in December 2024, when the vast majority of people held on immigration charges were detained while crossing the border and, in many cases, surrendering to Border Patrol and requesting humanitarian assistance. In mid-2022, when jails and prisons reduced populations to implement pandemic protocols, the number of incarcerated immigrants dropped below 20,000 on any given day, prompting activists to question why people are detained in the first place.

According to the most recent data released by ICE, there were 56,816 people incarcerated at immigration jails as of July 13, a slight dip from two weeks prior. However, the ICE data trackers at Syracuse University said they found “anomalies” and a “mathematical impossibility” in the data, and that the 56,816 figure is likely an undercount.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has effectively closed the southern border while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched an aggressive campaign in the interior of mass arrest and deportation that has terrorized neighborhoods, sparked protests, led to arrests of U.S. citizens, and brought military troops into the streets of Los Angeles, California.

Trump’s officials have long claimed that their black-masked officers are going after “the worst of the worst,” but federal data tell a different story as videos of workers being violently arrested during raids on farms and businesses go viral.

As of June 29, less than 29 percent of the undocumented people incarcerated on immigration charges had a criminal record, including those with minor charges such as traffic tickets, according to the TRAC database at Syracuse University. The nearly 78 percent without criminal records now make up the vast majority of incarcerated immigrants, many of them held in jails, prisons, and detention camps run by ICE and its private prison contractors.

Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has accused the media of promoting a “false narrative” about the people targeted by ICE raids, but Austin Kocher, an immigration data analyst and professor at Syracuse University, pointed out that the agency has stopped releasing arrest data, which groups are now obtaining through Freedom of Information Act requests.

“The overall thrust of her statement, that the media is ‘peddling a false narrative,’ overlooks the fact that the source for all reporting on this topic is the agency itself,” Kocher wrote in a July 17 post.