When ICE agents injure and abuse people on city streets, they often do so in full public view, with witnesses recording their actions. Behind the high walls of ICE detention facilities, though, elected officials, attorneys, and detainees describe unchecked abuse.
ICE now detains more people than at any point in its history. Three out of four have no criminal conviction; only one in 20 been convicted of a violent crime, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute. Yet the 73,000 currently detained is not enough for the agenda of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. With billions in new federal funding, ICE is working to expand its detention network to a scale that will dwarf the federal prison system.
"I think every American should be alarmed," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "They are building and have built a black box system that disappears people, both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike."
Resistance to these detention facilities is growing rapidly at the local and state level. But Congress has the real power to stop a growing network of what scholars are now calling “concentration camps.”
“Democrats must push to reallocate ICE warehouse funds to programs that were devastated by Republicans like Obamacare, Medicaid, and SNAP,” said Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, a national advocacy group.
Begging for medical care … and mom
More than 30 people died in custody in 2025—a death toll that is both unacceptable and preventable, according to a letter signed by 22 Senate Democrats who cited violence, neglect, and lack of medical care.
Appearing on MSNOW, immigration attorney Eric Lee described the five-year-old twin girls whose family he represents: “They have recurring nightmares. They wake up screaming every night.” They beg for their mother, he said. Lee also described guards wrapping flannel around their fists so they can "beat detainees while minimizing the evidence, and a child with appendicitis writhing on the floor in pain and told to take an aspirin and come back in three days.”
The return home of five-year-old Liam Ramos drew national relief, but more than 3,800 children were in detention at some point in 2025, including 20 infants, and 1,300 were held longer than the legal limit of 20 days, according to an analysis by the Marshall Project. The twin five-year-olds have been incarcerated for eight months. Parents reported difficulty getting bottled water for formula, and food contaminated with mold and worms.
These stories are not isolated. The Marshall Project documented ICE agents breaking a family’s car window to seize a 2-year-old; a US citizen child deported with her mother without seeing a judge; and three siblings sent to a shelter for months after their parents attended a fingerprinting appointment. Judges have ruled more than 4,000 ICE detentions illegal, Reuters reports.
Despite this, the Trump administration is doubling down. Its solicitation to private prison companies seeks facilities that can hold up to 8,000 people each—twice the size of the largest federal prison.
Detention for profit — and the opposition
Expansion is lucrative. The private corporations building and operating ICE detention camps reported record revenue, according to TIME magazine. They received $22 billion in ICE and CPB contracts 2025 alone; 86 percent of detention beds are run by for-profit companies.
As private prison profits climb, public support for ICE is collapsing. Two-thirds of respondents to an NBC News poll disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, with 55 percent “strongly disapproving.” According to a recent Economist/YouGov Poll Americans support abolishing ICE by 46-41 percent.
Even more opposition emerges when communities are faced with massive new detention facilities adjacent to their own communities.
In Social Circle, Georgia, residents are organizing against a proposed conversion of a warehouse into a detention facility.
Oregon’s congressional delegation, pushing back on a proposed ICE facility in that state, wrote: “We find it increasingly difficult to believe that ICE can responsibly house and care for people humanely given the well-documented cases of overcrowding, medical neglect, and insufficient nutrition at the facilities it currently operates.”
New Mexico passed legislation barring state and county collaboration with ICE, forcing at least one county-run facility to close.
While local resistance is powerful, congressional action to stop the funding is the surest way to stop the mass detention build-up. Congress has the power to defund ICE or to place limits on growth.
So far, negotiations over DHS and ICE funding—which was held up in the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good—have centered on reining in the violent and chaotic behavior of federal ICE agents on American streets. However, in spite of strong words from Senate Democrats, negotiations have largely omitted placing conditions on ICE detention facilities, where the abuses occur out of sight. None of the Democrats’ official negotiating positions challenge the $45 billion expansion.
Stop the cages
Advocates warn that without Democratic leadership and coordinated, cross-movement intervention, ICE camps, and the cruel treatment of those detained, will spread like cancer across the American landscape.
“We need immigrant justice, criminal justice, and pro-democracy leaders to break out of their silos and work together at an unprecedented level to organize against ICE prison expansion,” said Janos Marton of the advocacy group Dream.Org.
For some lawmakers, the only answer is abolition. “ICE is a rogue, violent agency that has operated with callous disregard for human life,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). “Congress should not be funding their campaign of cruelty. We must abolish ICE.”
“The 20th century tells you, when mass detention and camps are being built across the country that can house hundreds of thousands of people … we are going down a very dangerous path if the population doesn’t stand up and fight back,” warned Lee.
Congress can choose to spend tens of billions building a continent-wide archipelago of detention camps—or it can choose to invest in the things that strengthen freedom: health care, schools, communities, climate resilience, and the basic dignity that every person deserves. Pouring money into mass detention is not just wasteful; it is a moral decision about the future of this country. What lawmakers decide now will determine whether we move toward greater justice, or toward a future in which confinement — not rights — defines who we are.
