ICE Plans to Descend on Phoenix
ALTHOUGH DONALD TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION PROGRAM IS BECOMING less and less popular with voters, the president has shown no interest in slowing or scaling back it in the new year.
In fact, federal repression will likely only increase in scale and intensity as Reuters reported. And as three former DHS officials in touch with their former colleagues at the agency each described to me, current officials expect that one Democratic-run city in particular is poised to become the next target for arrests, detentions and deportations: Phoenix.
A stronger DHS presence in the Phoenix metro area would mark a new phase in Trump’s operations — not only because it would take place in one of the nation’s most important swing states (and border ones, at that), but because it would likely involve a greater expenditure of federal resources than previous operations in other cities have required.
THE ICE IS full of money following the passage last year of the president’s signature bill, the “Big Beautiful Bill.” And the administration is looking to use that money to dramatically expand its detention capabilities. Arizona residents have already been struggle plans to turn the former Marana Prison outside Tucson into a detention center. And the Washington Post reported recently, ICE plans to build seven large-scale industrial detention centers, including a facility in Glendale.
One of three former top DHS officials said adding thousands more beds to areas surrounding Phoenix would allow the administration to transform the city into a “moving hub” in the Southwest.
“Right now, if you put 5,000 more beds in Phoenix, you have more throughput,” the former top DHS official said. An increase to that level would allow federal agents to significantly expand their operations in other Western cities, including Denver, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
“Arizona is becoming another hub as [the Rio Grande Processing Center]”added the official.
As part of its growing presence in Arizona, DHS is expected to build controversial soft-sided facilities, the former official said. Tent-like structures are easier to erect quickly, but they are difficult to humanely manage due to their greater exposure to the elements, which contributes to a range of serious problems for inmates. The soft-sided facilities have already sparked controversy during Trump’s second term: Florida opened a detention center in the Everglades, soon dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by the administration, and continues to operate it despite horrifying reports about the conditions detainees are in. 6,725 men who have been or are currently detained there. (A legal case is pending that could result in the closure of the detention camp; it has already survived multiple legal proceedings. challenges continuing its operations.)
Elsewhere, the use of flexible detention centers has become widespread. The $1.24 billion facility in Fort Happiness it held 1,000 inmates when it opened in August; it is planned to accommodate up to 5,000 people.
The timeline for increased operations in the Phoenix area is unclear. While it’s a safe bet that the administration plans to use the same manual used in other cities, there could be notable differences.
Andrea Flores, who served as director of border management at the National Security Council under the Biden administration and oversaw coordination between ICE and CBP, warned that using soft-sided facilities as surplus detention space for immigrants raises significant humanitarian concerns.
“It’s extremely expensive, and frankly, these are not spaces that people should stay in for long — they were very poorly managed, even under Biden,” she told me. “The problem is you have to expand the soft camps to expand the detention space, but just because you do that doesn’t mean you can expand the removals. Then you’re just going to have a bunch of people detained in the desert.”
Flores added that in its obsessive quest to overhaul immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has treated every new idea as a good one. This fixation on novelty has led to the implementation of some really bad ideas.
“Alligator Alcatraz was unique and also a failure,” she said. “It didn’t necessarily speed up evictions, it just put people in extremely inhumane conditions.” »
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not respond to a request for comment on the prospect of increased enforcement in the Phoenix metro area in January.
There’s another reason DHS operations in Phoenix will be different from those the department has undertaken in other cities: Arizona’s history of wrenching political struggles on immigration and the border.
Arizonians bear many scars from these battles. Fifteen years ago, many fought the state senator. Russell PearceThe law show me your papers, BS 1070. At that time, a constellation of activists and organizers mobilized against then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Alongside Republicans who balked at the party’s embrace of Trumpism, they transformed Arizona from a ruby red state — which hadn’t turned blue since 1996 — to one that Joe Biden won in 2020. Arizona now has two nationally known Democratic figures: Senators Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly; it also has a Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs.
What Arizonans told me is that they now see Trump as an Arpaio nationally — and an even broader threat to immigrants.
“Here, especially in southern Arizona, we expected something like this to happen,” Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told me. “In Tucson, the mayors met with Pima County elected officials and the Tucson Police Department, all of whom took a strong stance that none of our government resources will be used to assist ICE in any way. »
From the Marana prison in Grijalva’s backyard to reports of future warehouses filled with immigrants, the congresswoman has her sights set on many drivers of DHS operations, and she said she will continue to oppose all of the department’s encroachments in her state.
“I don’t want a detention center here, where people languish, without any process,” she said. “I haven’t been able to see the voters in Florence and Eloy, so I think I’ll just start showing up. They have to meet that quota, and the only way to do that is illegally.”
Representatives of grassroots groups preparing for the influx of federal agents say the groups currently work as a loose network of organizations without a formal leadership structure. Members of the ad hoc coalition include NDLON; LUCHA AZ, a pillar of organizing and political work activating Latino voters in the state; most local unions; established groups like Chicanos Por La Causa; and certain more radical entities such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Activists I spoke with say the state has found itself in this precarious situation before.
“This has been tried before and failed with Joe Arpaio’s tent city and Arizona’s experiment with early Trumpism that moved the state from red to blue,” said Chris Newman, general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). Newman noted that even the current backlash against Trump’s immigration crackdown has reminded many Arizonans of what happened in their state during the Arpaio era. “Virtually all of the activism we see in the immigrant rights movement today mimics the type of response that civil rights leaders demonstrated in Arizona in 2010, which was the watershed year. »
So what will the reaction be in the Phoenix area to more aggressive anti-immigration operations?
Alejandra Gomez, the director of LUCHA AZ, spotted several clues. She told me her group conducted a study in the spring and summer of 2024 among 1,400 Latino voters, from the first to the fourth generation, from the most traditional voter to the most skeptical. The study found that Latinos in Arizona felt a sense of “connected fates” regardless of their immigration status or length of time they have been here.
She also recalled the March tens of thousands of Arizonans to the state capitol in 2010 to protest SB 1070. That type of resistance will be increasingly important if Trump ramps up enforcement in the state, she said.
“There is a muscle memory that will come together when we start to see the supercharged version of this,” she predicted. “If there is fear, people continue to act. If there is anger, people still act. If there is sadness, people continue to act. What is also true is that people are still living and not allowing this administration’s intimidation to stop quinceañeras or weddings.”
Newman agreed.
“If the Trump administration escalates its enforcement activities in Arizona, it will result in an escalation of nonviolent protests,” he said.
But is it possible that we live in another era? Could it be that what worked in 2010 during a nascent anti-immigration era might not work today? The state has dealt more directly than others with looser border policies under Joe Biden; Could the story have helped prepare him to embrace something more extreme in the opposite philosophical direction?
One of the state’s top pollsters, who worked for one of the state’s most prominent conservatives, doesn’t think so.
Chuck Coughlin served as campaign manager for former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer during the battle over SB 1070; today he is president of HighGround, a voting operation in Arizona. He told me that increased enforcement in Phoenix would not be welcomed by voters, and especially by voters in Maricopa County, home to Maricopa County. 60 percent of the state’s electorate.
“I don’t see this as a positive move in Maricopa County, it’s not going to go over well,” Coughlin said. “Everyone thinks the border control problem is under control. That’s always the issue that created anxiety when I worked for Brewer. Back then it was people crossing the border with impunity, that’s not the case now, so that feeling isn’t there.”
