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For Immediate Release
January, 12 2011, 03:43pm EDT
Contact:
Tony Kreindler, 202-445-8108, akreindler@edf.org
Sharyn Stein, 202-572-3396, sstein@edf.org
Texas Loses Third Court Battle to Block New Air Pollution Regulations
Statement from Environmental Defense Fund
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. today denied the State of
Texas' third attempt to block the implementation of greenhouse gas
pollution control measures for the largest sources of pollution. At
stake in the current case is a narrow federal action to ensure the
largest sources in Texas can obtain construction permits. Environmental
Defense Fund released the following statement:
"Three strikes should mean 'you're out' in this case. The state
government in Texas has now filed three cases in the federal courts to
block EPA's greenhouse gas pollution reduction policies, and it has been
rejected three times. If Texas put half the effort into carrying out
greenhouse gas pollution control measures that it put into fighting
them, EPA would not need to be involved. Plus, Texas businesses could
then enjoy the same certainty that businesses in every other state will
have."
- Steve Cochran
Vice President for Climate and Air
Environmental Defense Fund's mission is to preserve the natural systems on which all life depends. Guided by science and economics, we find practical and lasting solutions to the most serious environmental problems. We work to solve the most critical environmental problems facing the planet. This has drawn us to areas that span the biosphere: climate, oceans, ecosystems and health. Since these topics are intertwined, our solutions take a multidisciplinary approach. We work in concert with other organizations -- as well as with business, government and communities -- and avoid duplicating work already being done effectively by others.
LATEST NEWS
Trump's Concentration Camp Build-Out Includes Nearly $40 Billion for Warehouse Conversions
"Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours," wrote talk show host Thom Hartmann recently. "History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting."
Feb 13, 2026
President Donald Trump's anti-immigration agenda has supercharged opposition in cities where he has deployed federal agents to conduct raids, and communities in states including New York and Missouri are already working to block the next step the Department of Homeland Security plans to take in its push for mass deportations: acquiring massive warehouses across the country to use as immigrant detention centers.
US immigration and Customs Enforcement documents that were provided to Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire—one of the states where ICE aims to acquire a building and retrofit it to house at least 1,000 people at a time—show that the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion on its mass detention plan.
It would buy 16 buildings across the country to use as "regional processing centers" that could hold 1,000-1,500 people. Another eight detention centers would hold as many as 10,000 people at a time, with the detainees awaiting deportation.
The Washington Post reported that a review of state budget data showed that the amount of money the White House intends to pour into the project over the next several months is larger than the total annual spending of 22 US states.
"Thirty-eight billion dollars," said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). "That's what Trump is spending to turn warehouses into human holding facilities. Not on schools. Not on healthcare. Not on veterans. On warehousing humans."
Moulton also condemned ICE's claim that the new network of detention facilities will ensure the “safe and humane civil detention" of immigrants.
At least six people died in ICE detention centers in January, and one of the deaths, that of Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was ruled a homicide.
Medical neglect and abusive treatment—including some that amounts to torture—has been reported at multiple facilities.
ICE has already spent more than $690 million purchasing at least eight warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in recent weeks. Documents posted on Ayotte's website show the agency is pursuing additional acquisitions in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia.
Communities are already rallying against the plan and questioning whether the small towns ICE has selected have sufficient water and sewer infrastructure to support thousands of people detained in a warehouse.
In New York, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) said last week that 25,000 people in his district have signed a petition opposing the use of a local warehouse to house immigrants and pointed to the "major corruption and graft" evident in the plan to purchase and run the warehouses.
"The site in my district that's proposed is owned by one of Trump's multibillionaire donors, who would directly financially benefit from this site," said Ryan, referring to former Trump adviser Carl Icahn.
“I’m telling you, we are not going to let this happen in my district.”@PatRyanUC is pushing back on the Trump administration’s plan to buy warehouses across the country to turn them into mass detention centers, including one in his New York district. pic.twitter.com/KYOQb4WJx6
— The Recount (@therecount) February 5, 2026
As Common Dreams reported Friday, private prison firm GEO Group raked in a record $254 million in profits last year as it secured contracts with the Trump administration to build new ICE facilities across the US.
ICE has attempted to make purchases in Oklahoma City; Kansas City, Missouri; and in Virginia, but those plans have fallen through, with the Kansas City Council passing a five-year ban on new nonmunicipal detention centers after the public learned that DHS was the potential buyer of a warehouse in the city.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also joined his constituents in speaking out against ICE's $100 million purchase of a warehouse in his state to house at least 1,000 people at a time.
"This administration is spitting in the face of communities from Minneapolis to Maryland and wasting our tax dollars. We won't back down," said Van Hollen late last month.
The details of the administration's planned conversion of warehouses were reported less than two weeks after Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider revealed that a US Navy contract originally valued at $10 billion "has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda" and to help build "a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US."
At Common Dreams last week, talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote that the warehouses Trump plans to use to hold people—purchased by an agency whose own data shows it has largely been detaining people with no criminal records—are best described as concentration camps like those used in Nazi Germany.
"By the end of his first year, [Adolf] Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings," wrote Hartmann. "By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America," with hopes to "more than double both numbers in the coming months."
"Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now," he continued. "History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting."
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Private Prison Firm GEO Group Reports Record $254 Million Profit After New ICE Contracts
"Trump’s donors are making money from this violent separation of our immigrant families," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib. "This is corruption."
Feb 13, 2026
Private prison company GEO Group on Thursday reported a company record of $254 million in profit last year—a roughly 700% increase over 2024—driven by asset sales and contracts with the Trump administration to build several new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities across the US.
GEO Group secured approximately $520 million in new or expanded contracts in 2025, based on annualized revenue, according to company founder and executive chairman George Zoley.
"This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company's history," Zoley said during an earnings call on Thursday. "We have entered into new contracts to house ICE detainees at four facilities totaling approximately 6,000 beds."
Those facilities are: Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan; Folkston Processing Center at the D. Ray James Correctional Institution in Georgia; and a so-called "deportation depot" at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida.
"The census across our active ICE facilities has continued to steadily increase from the third quarter at approximately 22,000 to presently approximately 24,000, which is the highest level of ICE populations we have ever had," Zoley said. "This past year, we also significantly expanded the delivery of our secure transportation services on behalf of both ICE and the US Marshals Service, valued at approximately $60 million in incremental annualized revenue."
"We continue to be optimistic about the importance and growth potential of the ICE contract," he added. "The new two-year contract includes pricing for 361,000 participants in year one and 465,000 participants in year two. With the capital investment we made in 2025, we believe we have the capability in scaling monitoring devices and case management services to achieve those significantly increased participation levels and far beyond if desired by ICE."
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed last July by President Donald Trump contained a massive increase in funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE's parent agency, including about $45 billion for expanding immigrant detention capacity.
Days after Trump's 2024 reelection—which private prison companies funded to the tune of over $1 million—Zoley hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" of the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign.
“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s [and] country’s history, and the opportunity that it will bring,” he beamed.
Unlike state prisons or county and local jails, which are accountable to oversight agencies, privately operated ICE detention centers are not subject to state regulation or inspection. These facilities are plagued by a history of abuse, often sexual in nature, and sometimes alleged deadly medical neglect—problems that carried over from previous administrations.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the agency's deadliest in two decades. Most of these deaths reportedly occurred in privately operated detention centers, and 10 immigrants died in GEO Group facilities, according to data collected by attorney and independent journalist Andrew Free.
GEO Group's earnings call came just days after three detainees at one of the company's facilities in Washington state filed a lawsuit accusing two guards there of sexually assaulting and beating them, and then trying to cover it up. The company has been previously sued for alleged inadequate medical care, wrongful deaths, and forced labor.
This, in a system in which immigrant detention is meant to be nonpunitive and in which only a tiny fraction of those detained have been charged or convicted of any violent crime, according to a leaked DHS document exposed earlier this week.
Another private prison company, CoreCivic, on Thursday reported $116.5 million in 2025 profits, a nearly 70% increase from the previous year. The operator of ICE facilities including the notorious Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas—which detainees describe as a measles-infested "living hell" where they’ve been served moldy food full of worms and forced to drink putrid water—said it expects 2026 to be even more profitable.
Some private prison investors expressed frustration that ICE isn't jailing enough people to generate even more revenue.
"One of the big questions, I think... has been the pace of detention by ICE, that it's been below what people... thought [it] was going to be," Joseph Gomes of NOBLE Capital Markets, Inc. said on Thursday's CoreCivic earnings call. "I think... people thought we'd be at that 100,000 level. We're at... a little over 70,000."
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Yet Another Case of ICE Agents—and DHS Officials—Lying About Shooting Incident Emerges
"This agency cannot continue to exist," said Rep. Rob Menendez of ICE.
Feb 13, 2026
Two US immigration enforcement officers are now under federal investigation after it was revealed that they seem to have lied about the circumstances that led up to the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant last month.
As reported by Politico on Friday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that two federal officers appear "to have made untruthful statements" about a confrontation in Minneapolis in January that culminated in one of the officers shooting Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg.
The officers claimed that Sosa-Celis and another Venezuelan immigrant, Alfredo Aljorna, assaulted them with a broom and a shovel, which forced one of the officers to open fire in self-defense.
While the two men had been charged with assaulting the officers in the wake of the shooting, charges against them were abruptly dismissed on Thursday when prosecutors revealed that "newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations" made under oath by the officers.
Lyons said that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is now investigating the two officers, who have been placed on administrative leave until the probe concludes.
US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month defended the officers and parroted their claims about the shooting.
"What we saw last night in Minneapolis was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement," Noem claimed. "Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot."
Noem has come under fire in recent weeks for lying about shootings involving federal immigration officials, such as when she falsely claimed that slain Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was aiming "to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement" while filming officers' activities.
In reality, video footage showed Pretti never drew his handgun during his deadly confrontation with federal immigration officers, while also clearly showing that officers disarmed him before they opened fire.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that the newly uncovered evidence in Sosa-Celis' case showed that the officer not only didn't discharge his weapon in self-defense, but he "fired his gun through a closed door, striking the people inside."
The Minnesota House of Representatives Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Caucus accused federal immigration agents of systematically lying to cover up unjustified shootings.
"They’re hiding evidence, stifling investigations, and fabricating information," wrote the Minnesota House DFL on social media. "They’re lying to your face. We won’t let them get away with it—Minnesotans deserve justice."
US Rep. Rob Menedez (D-NJ) said that lying appears to be endemic in the entire Trump administration.
"The Trump administration has consistently lied about ICE's violent acts toward Americans and the abuses that this agency perpetuates every day," he wrote. "They aren't afraid to lie about members of Congress, and they certainly aren't afraid to lie about any American they have killed, shot, or assaulted. This agency cannot continue to exist."
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