My heart aches for all impacted by this brutal madness. Heartbreaking, horrifying, infuriating! Imagine instead how the billions being spent on these immigrant detention prisons — and on ICE, the military industrial complex, and other systems embedded in the dehumanizing violence of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy — could instead be spent on radical changes to our immigration policies and practices, actually creating a humane process rooted in justice and compassion and caring for all human beings. Just imagine how these billions of dollars could also be spent on healthcare, housing, mental health and addiction treatment, infrastructure, employment, a livable wage, and more available and affordable for everyone. Just imagine if our values reflected caring for life, truth and justice, grounding in the consciousness of our interconnections with all beings, and the commitment to protecting humans, nonhumans, and the Earth. Imagine ending this profound cruelty — and a humanity awakening to the power of truth, compassion, wisdom, and love. Just imagine. — Molly
People ARE coming here legally.
This has absolutely nothing to do with law and order. Under mass deportation, we’re seeing the construction of a mass immigration detention system on a scale the United States has never seen, in which people with no criminal record are routinely locked up with no clear path to release,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “Over the next three years, billions of more dollars will be poured into a detention system that is on track to rival the entire federal criminal prison system. The goal is not public safety, but to pressure people into giving up their rights and accepting deportation.”
According to the report, the number of people held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention rose nearly 75 percent in 2025, climbing from roughly 40,000 at the start of the year to 66,000 by the start of December, the highest level ever recorded. And with Congress authorizing $45 billion dollars in new detention funding, the report warns that the system could more than triple in size over the next four years.
There is a dramatic shift in who is being detained. Arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450 percent in Trump’s first year, driven by increases in tactics like “at-large” arrests, roving patrols, worksite raids, and re-arrests of people attending immigration court hearings or ICE check-ins. The percent of people arrested by ICE and held in detention with no criminal record rose from 6 percent in January to 41 percent by December.
The detention system has expanded so rapidly that already deleterious conditions have worsened. Through the start of December, ICE was using over 100 more facilities to detain immigrants than at the start of the year. For the first time ever, thousands of immigrants arrested in the interior are being detained in hastily-constructed tent camps, where conditions are brutal. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the last four years combined.
People are stripped of their chance to ask a judge for release. New policies have made prolonged, indefinite detention the norm. The Trump administration is pursuing policies that strip millions of people, if they are detained, of the right to have a bond hearing where they can make a case to be released into their community while their immigration case is under review, including for those with decades of life in the United States.
As the administration expands detention, it is simultaneously gutting oversight.
The rapid growth of detention has been paired with deep cuts to internal watchdogs and new restrictions on congressional inspections. This erosion of oversight has consequences that extend beyond detention facilities themselves: as ICE is operating with fewer checks on its authority, aggressive interior enforcement in cities has led to preventable harm and deaths, underscoring how a lack of accountability is putting lives at risk.
— Laura Kittel, PhD, Ethics & Human Rights Advocate
No comments:
Post a Comment