Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign | The New Yorker

For those in Donald Trump’s orbit, with great power often comes great necessity. Take Kristi Noem, who as head of the Department of Homeland Security was in charge of the president’s top domestic priority—carrying out mass deportations—until she wasn’t. She became the first cabinet secretary to be fired in Trump’s second term earlier this month, when he announced he would replace her with Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator and former mixed martial arts fighter. Noem, who was willing to do virtually anything to improve her reputation, was a product of the White House agenda, but never one of its creators. Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and there is little reason to think Noem’s ouster will change Miller’s approach. It may even serve to embolden him, giving him new cover. The department temporarily suspended its large-scale arrest operations following a national outcry over abuses in Minnesota, and it is in the midst of a partial shutdown due to opposition from congressional Democrats. The government’s larger ambitions, however, show no signs of slowing. In fact, they are leading to a new humanitarian and legal crisis.

DHS now holds some seventy thousand people in prisons across the country, more than at any time since the department’s inception in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody this fiscal year, putting it on track to surpass the previous fiscal year, which recorded the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the administration has opened new facilities, redeveloped others closed by previous administrations and converted temporary holding cells in federal buildings in cities like Los Angeles and New York into longer-term detention spaces.

Overcrowding, abuse, and neglect worsened living conditions, and basic agency oversight was removed. The government also arrested at least four thousand children, sending many of them to a notoriously sinister facility in South Texas called Dilley. A legal regulation in force since the late 1990s is supposed to prohibit the government from keeping minors in detention for more than twenty days, but ICE systematically flouted this rule. “Since I came to this center, all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” said a 14-year-old Honduran girl, who has lived in New York for seven years. ProPublica; at that point, she had been in detention for forty-five days awaiting deportation.

The nation’s largest detention site, housing three thousand people, is a tent camp called East Montana, located on a military base in El Paso. It was built in less than two months, but began welcoming people two weeks after construction began. “Dust is coming in through the holes in the vents,” one inmate said in a sworn statement to the ACLU. ICE report, obtained by the Washington Jobshowed more than sixty code violations in fifty days, including inadequate medical care and a lack of telephones, which prevented detainees, eighty percent of whom have no criminal records, from speaking with lawyers or family members. Three people died at the facility in six weeks this winter, including a fifty-five-year-old Cuban named Geraldo Lunas Campos, who the government said was “in distress.” (After an El Paso County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, ICE attempted to expedite the expulsion of witnesses who had observed an altercation between Lunas Campos and a group of guards.) Outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles occurred at the site, and ICE officers took advantage of the dangerously poor conditions to pressure detainees into signing papers authorizing their deportation.

Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress gave DHS $45 billion to build more prisons. This credit, which was part of the President’s domestic spending bill, helped maintain ICE lots of money during the shutdown. The administration used this money, in part, to begin creating a network of larger facilities, investing thirty-eight billion dollars to purchase large warehouses across the country and upgrade them. One of them, near Camp East Montana, in a small town called Socorro, is expected to accommodate eighty-five hundred people. The same is true for Social Circle, in Georgia, which, according to the Timeswould be “larger than any prison or correctional building in America.”