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american immigration council
The Trump Admin Is Building a Mass Detention System—What Will You Do About It?
What they have not told you is that the immigration detention system is not processing people, it is accumulating them. The math shows how fast; the history shows what comes next.
Feb 15, 2026
They told you.
Not once. Not quietly. Not in some obscure corner of the internet where plausible deniability can hide. They told you in court filings and local hearings, in affidavits and field reports, in newsroom investigations and academic papers. They told you in the patient language of law and the blunt language of organizing. And for years, the country found ways to argue with the messengers, or litigate the metaphors, or change the subject.
Now the evidence is arriving from so many directions at once that warning has become record, and record demands a response. The question is no longer whether someone warned you. The question is what you do when the warnings stop coming as claims and start coming as records.
In two weeks, the machinery of American immigration detention has been more thoroughly exposed than at any point in this country's history, not because the government opened the door, but because enough people forced it. Analysts at Syracuse have tracked the population shifts, reporters at Bloomberg and the Washington Post have mapped the warehouses, the American Immigration Council has documented the deadliest year in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention on record, Austin Kocher has shown that 92% of detention growth this fiscal year comes from people with no criminal convictions. Ninety-two percent. The Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law has shown that release within 60 days of arrest fell from 16% to 3%. Hundreds of journalists, researchers, lawyers, and organizers have built a shared factual floor while the ground itself is being shaken. They deserve recognition, not rivalry. Amplification, not a race for credit.
The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat.
And still, the rest of the story has not been told.
Everything published so far answers the first-phase questions. How big is the system. How fast is it growing. Who is inside it. History asks a harder one. Not how big the system is, but where it is going. Not how fast it is growing, but when growth changes what the system is. Not who is inside it today, but what happens to the people inside it when intake keeps running, court capacity keeps shrinking, and the exits keep narrowing until the word "exit" becomes an administrative fiction. Answering that question requires a lens most of the current analysis does not use. The missing lens is not moral outrage. It is structural diagnosis, how systems change character when inputs outrun exits.
That is the lens I study. I study irregular warfare and state detention systems. That is not the career I started with. I am a West Point graduate, trained in the ethics of command and the obligations of the oath I took. I came to this work because the patterns I had studied from a distance were no longer distant, and because the oath does not expire. I have published that work in peer-reviewed journals. And I am telling you plainly: I have seen this structure before. Not in identical form, and not with identical ends, but with the same mechanics.
It appeared in the early Nazi concentration camp system before administrative pressure transformed improvised holding into something durable and escalating. It appeared in US counterinsurgency detention abroad, from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Camp Bucca in Iraq, where intake outpaced processing and produced the same result every time. Populations accumulated. Confinement lengthened. Exits never caught up. The vocabulary lagged behind the math. It always does.
Until the math catches up to you. That is why the spreadsheet matters. ICE publishes a detention statistics spreadsheet on its own website not out of transparency, but because a previous Congress wrote a disclosure mandate into law. ICE has complied reluctantly, delayed updates, and published selectively. Kocher has warned that the window is closing. But while it remains cracked, what you can see through it is damning. The crossing from processing to warehousing has already begun.
Start with scale, because scale amplifies every friction point downstream. More than 70,000 people are in ICE detention right now, across 225 facilities. The population has grown 75% in 12 months. That is not a surge passing through. It is a system swelling in place.
Then look at who is being held, because composition tells you what kind of force the system is applying. Nearly half, 48.4%, have no criminal conviction and no pending charges. They are held for the civil offense of being present without authorization. That is the government's own classification for the people in its own custody. Now look at the direction, because direction tells you what tomorrow will resemble. This year's detention growth comes almost entirely from people with no criminal convictions. The system is not detaining more criminals. It is detaining more people who have committed no crime, faster than at any point in its history. When that is the composition and that is the trajectory, the word "enforcement" stops describing what the system does. The word that fits is control.
Now follow the arithmetic, because the arithmetic tells you whether the system is clearing cases or accumulating bodies. Every month of this fiscal year, more people have entered that system than have left it. Every month. Net growth averages 3,000 per month. There is no month in which the system shrank.
Net growth matters because it proves the system is accumulating, not cycling. And once a system accumulates, the only question becomes which exits still function. Bond-posted releases account for 3-6% of all exits. For every 1 person released pending a hearing, 14.3 are deported. The system removes. It does not release. Read that ratio again. The system was built to take people in. It was never built to let them out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
That ratio points to the choke point. The court is what seals the system closed. Seven in ten detainees are tethered to a court system with 3.38 million pending cases and a bench that has lost more than 100 judges in the past year. Intake feeds backlog. Backlog extends detention. Extended detention drives growth. One loop. Self-reinforcing. Average bond wait times climbed 32% in four months. The door is not just narrow. It is closing while you watch.
Now here is the number that should end the argument. There are 7,252 people detained for more than six months. Among them are asylum-seekers who passed the government's own credible-fear screening. The government itself determined they have a legitimate claim to protection. Their average detention stands at 183 days and climbed 25% in three months. When the people with the strongest legal claims are held longer and longer, the paperwork may still say "processing." The calendar says captivity.
The calendar also tells you what captivity does when it becomes a baseline. Captivity at that scale does not hold still. It builds. If current conditions hold, the detained population will approach or exceed 100,000 by the end of 2026. The $45 billion appropriated through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds 135,000 beds through fiscal year 2029. Enacted law. Signed contracts. Revenue streams with lobbyists already defending them. Concrete does not dissolve because a press office changes its language. When a system starts building for those numbers, it is not preparing for a temporary spike. It is constructing a new baseline. The only question is what the system becomes once it reaches that capacity, and for that you have to look past the spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet was built to make sure you never see what comes next.
And when a system builds for long-term capacity, its failures stop being episodic. They become routine, and routine produces a record.
What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.
Here is what comes next.
Victor Manuel Diaz was arrested in Minneapolis. Eight days later he was found dead in ICE detention, hanging from a bed sheet. ICE sent his body not to the county medical examiner but to a military facility that does not release autopsy reports. When a government routes its dead to institutions it controls, the aim is not truth. It is the containment of the story.
Geraldo Lunas Campos died at Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss, asphyxiated while being restrained by five guards. He had asked for his medication. He was 55, Cuban, legally admitted to this country in 1996. The El Paso County medical examiner classified his death as a homicide. Two detainees who told the Washington Post what they witnessed received deportation notices days later. And it was not only the adults.
At Dilley, the South Texas Family Residential Center, the detained population tripled in three months. An estimated 800 children are inside. A measles outbreak was confirmed February 1. Members of Congress who visited described a 5-year-old as lethargic and depressed. A 5-year-old. In a facility the spreadsheet records as a line of numbers.
In the spreadsheet's categories, every one of these people occupies the same column. A man restrained until he stopped breathing is recorded the same way as a man who posted bail. A lethargic child is a digit in a headcount. An exit is an exit. A death is a departure. The system was not built to distinguish. It was built to count, and counting is not seeing.
What you see when you look past the count is containment masquerading as adjudication. A slow lengthening of stays. A piling up of people the system cannot move and will not release. A conversion of law into force so gradual that each day looks like the day before it, until you look back and realize the thing you are living inside has no name you are willing to say out loud.
Say it. The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat. None. Not one. The comparison is structural, not identical, and that is what makes it diagnostic. Structure determines what becomes possible and what becomes routine, long before anyone names the destination.
That is why the convergence matters. Every credible voice that has examined this system is arriving at the same conclusion from different directions. The analysts, the historians, the reporters, and the lawyers are standing in the same light for the first time. We were right. It is here.
One of those voices was not a professor or a journalist or a lawyer. He was a resident of Surprise, Arizona, and he stood at a city council microphone and invoked Ohrdruf. He was not performing history. He was reading the structure being built in his community and recognizing it in his bones. A windowless warehouse. A population detained for administrative reasons. A legal system too slow to process them. A government that builds faster than accountability can follow. He spoke because he understood the timing. You establish the record while the building is still going up, not after the concrete has set and the system has learned to call itself normal.
The record is being built. The full analysis is published as "The War Brought Home: The Recalibration" on my Substack. Kocher's biweekly analyses are at austinkocher.substack.com. The facility-level tool built by Kocher and Sawyer is at detentionreports.com. The AIC report is at americanimmigrationcouncil.org. Read them. Share them. They are what you hand to the person at your table who still thinks this is temporary.
But proof without witness is just a filing cabinet, and the witness is already underway. Lawyers have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions and won nearly every case that reached a decision. Members of Congress have sued to inspect facilities their own government sealed from view. Communities in Surprise, Kansas City, and Shakopee have stood at microphones and said, "No." These people are not waiting for permission. They are building the record in real time.
They are also still the few. The system does not survive on the cruelty of its architects alone. It survives on three kinds of silence. Those who see it and approve. Those who see enough to be uncomfortable but have decided that discomfort is not obligation. And the rest of us, reading this right now, feeling the weight of it, not yet decided what that weight requires.
That middle is where every mass detention system in history found its operating room. Not in the enthusiasm of supporters, but in the silence of people who could see the wall going up from their kitchen window and chose to close the blinds. Every historical account includes the same figure. Never the architect or the guard. Always the neighbor who knew, who had every means to see, and who later claimed they did not.
The math is done. The facilities are mapped. The petitions are filed. The communities have shown what resistance looks like. What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.
No one else is coming. There is no cavalry over the hill. There is only the public, and the public is us. We are standing here, today, right now, in whatever light we have, with whatever we know, and it is enough to begin. Because when this is over, the record will not be in doubt. Only the witness will be.
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New DHS Database Suggests That Less Than 5% of Those Arrested by ICE Are the ‘Worst of the Worst’
The database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
Dec 10, 2025
In response to criticism of its aggressive and often lawless "mass deportation" campaign—which has entailed sweeping raids by masked agents, the use of squalid detention centers rife with torture, overt racial profiling, and the near-total abrogation of due process—the Trump administration has often fallen back on a familiar refrain: that the immigrants it targets are "the worst of the worst" dangerous criminals.
Immigration data published throughout the second Trump administration has already undermined this claim. Last month, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute published new data showing that between October 1 and November 15, only 5% of those booked into ICE detention had violent criminal convictions, while 73% had no convictions at all. It mirrored previous data published by Cato in June, which showed that 65% arrested had no criminal convictions of any kind, while 93% had no violent convictions.
Justice Department data published last month, meanwhile, showed that of the at least 614 people snatched up in the Operation Midway Blitz crackdown in Chicago, just 16 had criminal records of any kind.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security published its own "Worst of the Worst" database seeking to reverse the narrative, but it seems to have done the opposite.
"DHS has launched WOW.DHS.GOV for Americans to see the criminal illegal aliens that we are arresting, what crimes they committed, and what communities we removed them from," read a post from the agency on social media.
The post leads to a website containing the names, photos, and nationalities of those arrested by ICE. It also lists alleged past criminal convictions. In many cases, the only documentation of the allegations, if any is provided at all, is a DHS press release rather than official court records.
"Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem's leadership, the hardworking men and women of DHS and ICE are fulfilling President Trump's promise and carrying out mass deportations—starting with the worst of the worst—including the illegal aliens you see here," a header on the website reads.
Among those listed are people who DHS says have been convicted of heinous crimes, ranging from attempted murder to child abduction to domestic battery.
But the database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
"So DHS is implicitly admitting that less than 5% of the people it arrests are people they believe are 'the worst of the worst,'" said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Moreover, even some of those listed among the "Worst of the Worst" have only nonviolent offenses to their name, like drug possession, shoplifting, or disorderly conduct.
Reichlin-Melnick also noted that while immigration law does not require a criminal conviction for a person to be removed, "it matters because the administration talks as if these cases are the majority."
"There are definitely bad people on there who deserve deportation, but plenty of others on the list have nothing worse than a misdemeanor," he said. “If the administration were to actually focus its resources on people who were serious public safety threats or fugitives, there would be less of an outcry. But data shows that the big focus has been on boosting numbers by going after people no previous administration, Republican or Democrat, prioritized.”
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Reagan-Appointed Judge Rips Into Trump Admin for Illegally Targeting Pro-Palestine Student Protesters
Politico's senior law reporter called it "the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era."
Sep 30, 2025
A federal judge issued an emphatic ruling Tuesday that the Trump administration acted illegally when it targeted pro-Palestinian student activists for deportation, describing it as part of an effort to "strike fear" into protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.
In the 161-page ruling, US District Judge William Young, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, concluded that the Trump administration undertook illegal efforts "unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech."
He also launched a broadside against the Trump administration's entire authoritarian ethos, describing President Donald Trump's "palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains."
Politico's senior law reporter Kyle Cheney described the ruling as "the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era." Young himself called it the most important he's ever issued in over 30 years on the bench.
The first page immediately captures this gravity, containing a scan of an anonymous postcard Young received in June as a prologue: "Trump has pardons and tanks... what do you have?" the sender asked.
Young included his response: "Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People ... have our magnificent Constitution. Here's how that works out in a specific case."
The case was launched following a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which represent hundreds of college professors around the US who testified that they felt intimidated by what they described as "ideological deportations" by the Trump administration of students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.
Often without warning, the State Department revoked nearly 1,700 visas from lawful immigrants before targeting many of them for deportation under an executive order by Trump that allegedly responds to "antisemitism," but in practice extends far out to encompass any expressions of solidarity with Palestinians or criticisms of Israel.
During the trial, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that it determined who to target using an anonymously operated pro-Israel "doxxing" website known as the Canary Mission, which publishes dossiers on college students around the country who express unfavorable views about Israel.
One of those students was Mahmoud Khalil, an activist at Columbia who held a green card, who was whisked away from his address in the middle of the night by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent to a detention facility for months. As Young acknowledged in his ruling, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of homeland security, stated plainly in an interview that the effort to deport Khalil was because of "basically pro-Palestinian activity." After a federal judge ordered Khalil's release, the Trump administration began efforts to deport him to Algeria or Syria.
ICE agents also snatched Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, off the street in broad daylight after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her university to divest from companies participating in Israel's genocidal war in Gaza. Although the administration acknowledged that Öztürk, who had a legal student visa, committed no crime, she remained in an ICE detention facility for more than six weeks before a judge ordered her release.
Young said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials, such as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees ICE, "acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech."
He refuted the professors' contention that the administration had waged an "ideological deportation policy," which he said "could have raised a major outcry." Instead, Young said, their intentions were "more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated noncitizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome."
To strip visas "solely on the basis of political speech, and with the intent of chilling such speech," Young said, "is not only unconstitutional, but a thing virtually unknown to our constitutional tradition." The First Amendment of that Constitution, he added, "does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens."
Young did not order any changes to Trump administration policy with his ruling, but only because Trump "poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech" as a whole, and further proceedings would be necessary in order to rein in those abuses more comprehensively.
He specifically identified the use of masks by ICE agents during arrests, which he described as "disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable."
"ICE goes masked for a single reason: to terrorize Americans into quiescence," Young said. "In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed, masked secret police."
The final 12 pages of the ruling, which American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick described as "truly remarkable," focus on "the nature of our president himself," who Young said "simply ignores" rulings he dislikes.
Young concluded that the courts, which he described as one of the few remaining bulwarks to Trump's excesses, needed to do more than issue nonbinding cease-and-desist orders, but instead issue permanent injunctions that can result in contempt charges if the administration refuses to stop illegal policies.
Trump, he said, is not "entirely lawless," but "has learned that—at least on the civil side of our courts—neither our Constitution nor our laws enforce themselves and he can do most anything until an aggrieved person or entity will stand up to him and say 'Nay.'"
Young also put the responsibility of resistance on the institutions that have capitulated to Trump's demands.
"Our bastions of independent, unbiased free speech–those entities we once thought unassailable—have proven all too often to have only Quaker guns," he warned. "Behold, President Trump’s successes in limiting free speech—law firms cower, institutional leaders in higher education meekly appease the president, media outlets from huge conglomerates to small niche magazines mind the bottom line rather than the ethics of journalism."
"I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected," he wrote in conclusion. "Is he correct?"
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