SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
family detention
Understanding How Trump Is Building His Mass Deportation Machine—So We Can Halt It
Such an apparatus has a potentially fatal flaw: In order to function effectively, millions and millions of people must be willing to go along with it.
Mar 12, 2025
“Flights to Guantánamo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland.”
With those words the U.S. government announced the fate awaiting “criminal aliens” in its custody.
On a military base in El Paso, Texas, masked men in combat fatigues paraded a group of young Venezuelan immigrants, their hands cuffed and their ankles shackled, in front of the cameras, before loading them onto a waiting Air Force C-17, which was to deliver its human cargo to Naval Station Guantánamo Bay overnight.
This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Once there, they were to be incarcerated in the infamous Camp 6, held incommunicado in the same cells where al Qaeda suspects were once held in indefinite detention, and guarded by the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Meanwhile, a tent city, which could ultimately house as many as 30,000 detainees, rises around the prison.
Though most of those immigrants have since been returned to Venezuela, the Pentagon has pledged to continue using the base for the “temporary detention of illegal aliens who are pending return.”
Back on the mainland, the Department of Defense (DOD) is deploying thousands of troops to “seal the borders”; the Department of Justice (DOJ) is deputizing its agents to round up undocumented immigrants; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is mobilizing to meet its daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests, armed with target lists, surveillance technology, and “less-lethal” weapons; and immigration detention facilities are to be built on military bases across the country.
And that’s not all either. Entire families are set to be detained, and the grim family-separation policy of the first Trump administration revived. Humanitarian parole is to be revoked, refugees rejected, and asylum-seekers returned. And cities, counties, and states that dare to defy the deportation regime are to be punished.
The machinery of mass deportation has been set in motion in a nightmarish fashion. It is meant to be impossible to stop—or at least to appear that way. Still, history teaches us that such a machine, like any other, can be brought to a halt, if only we understand how the apparatus actually works.
Here, then, is a simple, step-by-step guide to how the Trump administration plans to build the machinery necessary to “complete the largest deportation operation in American history.”
1. Declare a State of Emergency
“Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders,” Trump pledged in his Inaugural Address. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.”
That “revolution” in immigration enforcement did indeed begin with a barrage of such orders, many lifted directly from the Project 2025 playbook.
First among them was the declaration of a state of emergency in this country’s borderlands. According to the National Emergencies Act of 1976, this allows the military to be called up for domestic duties, whether to the southern border, Guantánamo Bay, or anywhere else the president sees fit.
2. Equate Immigration With an “Invasion”
“I have determined that the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion,” reads another order signed on January 20, citing Article IV of the Constitution.
“Accordingly,” the order continues, “I hereby suspend the physical entry of any alien engaged in the invasion.” It goes on to authorize operations to “repel, repatriate, or remove” noncitizens.
This is the logical conclusion of years of far-right propaganda about a “Third World,” “Hispanic,” or “alien” “invasion” of the United States, which, over time, has spread from the stuff of 8chan manifestos to the preambles of presidential proclamations.
3. Expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The architecture of ICE is slated to expand to levels not seen since its founding in 2003.
The agency reportedly made more than 14,000 arrests in the first three weeks of Trump’s second term. With it still supposedly failing to meet its quotas, however, officials want to double the size of the force.
Now, Senate Republicans are proposing no less than $175 billion in new spending on immigration enforcement, while the House GOP is looking to fund that spending spree with billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and other essential social services.
4. Draft the Department of Justice
ICE is no longer to bear its burden alone. Since Trump’s inauguration, the DOJ, including the U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), have been pressed into the service of the deportation machine.
The FBI, for instance, has been tasked with finding “identifying information and/or biometric data relating to noncitizens located illegally in the US”—data that will fuel the detention-to-deportation pipeline.
“We’ve got special agents, intelligence analysts, and more, supporting DHS [Department of Homeland Security] teams across the country,” said then-Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, “from New York and Chicago to El Paso, Newark, and Denver.”
5. Deputize Local Law Enforcement
ICE has also partnered with local police departments, county sheriff’s offices, and departments of correction through a program known as 287(g) to “identify and remove incarcerated criminal aliens” before they can be freed.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has typically promised to reopen an ICE office on Rikers Island, purportedly as part of a quid pro quo with the Trump administration.
And in February, Florida became the first state to sign a statewide 287(g) agreement, which would train officers of the Florida Highway Patrol and State Guard to “interrogate any suspected alien or person believed to be an alien.”
6. Criminalize all Immigrants as “Criminal Aliens”
When White House Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt was asked how many of those arrested since January 20 had a criminal record and how many were “just in the country illegally,” she replied, “All of them. Because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore, they are criminals.”
Tellingly, fewer than half of the 8,200 people arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration had criminal convictions of any kind. And of the approximately 4,400 detained in the first two weeks of February, more than 1,800 had never been charged with a crime.
7. Hunt for “Criminal Aliens” Everywhere
“Police, open the door! Policía, abra la puerta!”
Those words echoed across a Denver apartment complex, as ICE agents with long guns backed by BearCat tactical vehicles went door-to-door, asking residents for identification. Twenty-nine members of the Cedar Run community were rounded up in one go.
But ICE and its partners are not just hunting for undocumented immigrants in their homes. Thanks to a rule change instituted by DHS, federal agents are also pursuing their prey in locations previously deemed too “sensitive” for immigration enforcement purposes like schools, hospitals, courtrooms, and churches (though a federal judge in Maryland has already forbidden the Trump administration from carrying out such actions in certain houses of worship).
8. Collect Biometric Data
Another of Trump’s executive orders announced his intention to reauthorize the DOJ and DHS to collect DNA samples from all detained “non-United States persons.”
This DNA collection program is just one part of a vast surveillance apparatus that has been built up over the years, which now requires vast troves of biometric and biographic data to be collected, stored, and analyzed.
Increasingly, that task has fallen to for-profit firms. Since 2020, the federal government has spent an estimated $7.8 billion on such surveillance technologies, including a $96 million contract with Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm Palantir.
9. Put Immigrants in Prisons
The most recent data shows that America’s immigrant detention centers are already over capacity, with 41,500 beds and 43,759 inmates. ICE is now seeking to more than triple that capacity.
Trump pledged, on Day One, that he would allocate “all legally available resources” to immigrant detention, evidently including America’s prisons. In February, the Federal Bureau of Prisons took in the first ICE detainees at facilities in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
The policy also embraces military bases. The Northern Command is currently “providing facilities at Buckley Space Force Base… to enable [ICE] to stage and process criminal aliens within the US.”
10. Privatize Immigrant Detention
More than 90% of such detainees are already overseen by private contractors. Now, ICE is planning to warehouse thousands more by leasing mobile structures from a shipping container company.
And a new plan, floated by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, would sell the government “outside assistance” in the form of privatized “processing camps,” along with a “small army” of private citizens with the power to arrest and detain immigrants.
For the prison industry, the deportation drive has proven to be a profitable enterprise indeed. “This is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” said CoreCivic’s CEO on a recent call with investors.
11. Bring Back Family Detention
During the first Trump administration, America was haunted by the specter of immigrant children in cages. Now, the architect of the president’s “zero-tolerance” policy and recently appointed “border czar” Tom Homan plans to revive family detention on a whole new scale.
Family detention centers, according to the Detention Watch Network, have a “well-documented history of negligence and abuse.” Despite that sordid history, ICE is reportedly readying a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) for “detention facilities intended specifically for families.”
At the same time, the administration is making it harder for sponsors of immigrant children to free them from detention.
12. Send Asylum-Seekers to Other Countries
The deportation machine is no longer simply an American enterprise. It is now an international affair, with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama already taking in thousands of “third-country deportees.”
“We have offered the USA the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” says El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose prisons are rife with human rights violations.
In Panama, hundreds of deportees of Central and East Asian origin were recently locked in a hotel, then relocated to a makeshift camp in the middle of the jungle. “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” according to one eyewitness.
13. Designate Gangs as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”
One of the president’s most egregious orders asserts that alleged gang affiliations are sufficient to warrant a “terrorist” designation.
Declaring it “time for America to wage war on the cartels,” Trump has specifically targeted Mexican, Central American, and Venezuelan nationals suspected of having ties to the drug cartels, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), or the Tren de Aragua gang, seeking their “expedited removal” or their “total elimination.”
The same order signals the president’s intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law dating to 1798, which would subject “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile” nation to being “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed, as alien enemies.”
14. Deport International Students and Workers Who Protest U.S. Policy
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” So warned the statement accompanying the president’s January 29 executive order, which singled out supposedly “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals” in higher education for “removal.”
Authorities have evidently already begun implementing that order, with reports of Arab students facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine protests. Over the weekend, ICE agents showed up at the door of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University whose green card had reportedly been revoked by the Trump administration. While in government custody, Khalil was disappeared for several days.
“I’ve seen enough,” says Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “to know that targeting is happening.”
15. Freeze Refugee Admissions
“Refugee arrivals to the United States have been suspended until further notice.” That was the message on January 21 from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, now under the leadership of a senior ICE official. With a stroke of the pen, President Trump has frozen America’s Refugee Admissions Program.
In so doing, he has left at least 10,000 refugees in legal limbo, while abandoning hundreds of thousands more to their fates in places like Afghanistan, the Congo, and Myanmar.
Ultimately, the president would make one exception to the rule—for white South Africans. An executive order signed on February 7 would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees” as a protected class.
16. Terminate Temporary Protected Status
Under the new administration’s policies, hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans, among others, are set to lose their Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a form of humanitarian parole that permitted asylum-seekers from those countries to continue living and working in the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced an “administrative pause” on all pending parole requests, while DHS, claiming parole is a right “to which no alien is entitled,” has authorized its agents to strip immigrants of such protections.
ICE agents have already started making arrests of TPS holders in Texas.
17. Undermine the Principle of Birthright Citizenship
Of all the president’s orders, the most consequential for citizens is the one that would rescind birthright citizenship, which would deny the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to “persons born or naturalized in the U.S.”
In practice, it would mean stripping citizenship rights from children born here to mothers who are “unlawfully present” or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.”
For now, the order has been blocked by a Seattle judge’s injunction, but it will undoubtedly fall to the Supreme Court to decide its fate (and the fate of the Constitution of which it’s a part).
18. Investigate Citizens Who Would Defend Immigrant Rights
As it happens, immigrants and their American-born children are not the only ones in the crosshairs. Federal agents are now actively soliciting bids for “internet-based threat risk mitigation and monitoring services” in order to surveil suspected political enemies on social media.
That initiative is part of what could become a coast-to-coast crackdown. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has, ominously enough, launched a “formal investigation” into a local radio station, the San Francisco-based KCBS 740 AM, for reporting on the whereabouts of ICE agents.
And only recently, Tom Homan, designated the “border czar” by President Trump, invited the Department of Justice to investigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), reportedly in retaliation for a “Know Your Rights” training session held under the auspices of her office.
19. Punish “Sanctuary” cities, Counties, and States
On Day One of the president’s second term, the White House announced that it was going on the warpath against “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where local laws place limits on the involvement of law enforcement in the business of immigration.
Since then, the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group within the Office of the Associate Attorney General has been engaged in an all-out lawfare campaign against cities, counties, and states suspected of being insufficiently cooperative.
And on February 19, Trump signed yet another executive order cutting off federal funding for such jurisdictions, so that “federal payments to States and localities do not, by design or effect, abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies.”
20. Manipulate the Truth
All the while, the deportation machine’s defenders have been seriously manipulating the truth.
First, ICE has turned images of inmates in captivity into a televised spectacle, with federal agents bringing film crews and TV celebrities with them for ride-alongs, even as they covered up evidence of their more controversial tactics.
Second, the agency has attempted to make itself look better by rewriting history and gaming the Google algorithm by manipulating the timestamps on thousands of press releases from the first Trump administration.
Finally, ICE has scrubbed all mention of the foreign nationals held in Guantanamo from its public communications. For days on end, 177 detainees effectively disappeared.
This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
In the end, however, such an apparatus has a potentially fatal flaw. In order to function effectively, millions and millions of people must be willing to go along with it.
The moment too many Americans cease to cooperate, that machinery will begin to break down in a serious fashion.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Cruelty Is the Point': Private Prison Giants Set to Cash In as Trump Revives Family Detention
"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment."
Mar 07, 2025
Private prison companies in the United States can hardly contain their excitement as the Trump administration moves to revive the practice of detaining migrant families at facilities with records of horrifying abuses, a decision that advocacy groups say highlights the White House's disdain for human rights as it carries out its large-scale assault on immigrants.
"Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies," Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Thursday after CBS News reported the administration's moves.
According to CBS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—newly empowered by President Donald Trump—"was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children" on Thursday "in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors."
"The group includes three children," the outlet added, citing an internal government report.
Separately, NBC News reported Thursday that "U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown."
"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes," NBC observed. "The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories."
As part of the revival of family detention—which was used by the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, and largely ended by the Biden administration—immigration officials are "refitting" two Texas facilities, including the notorious detention center in Dilley, Texas.
CoreCivic, a private prison company, has been newly contracted by ICE to reopen the facility for family detention.
"I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career," Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's CEO, told investors last month.
George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, said last week that "we've never seen anything like this before," referring to the speed with which the Trump administration is moving to procure contracts for migrant detention.
The New York Times reported Friday that "a GEO Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million to Republican PACs that accept unlimited donations, with the bulk going to groups that supported House Republicans and Mr. Trump."
"It is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
The Detention Watch Network noted that while the Dilley center was "in operation for family detention, there were reports of foul water and negligent medical treatment, with hospitals confirming that children are consistently released with health issues they dubbed 'Dilley-ish.'"
"In 2018, a 19-month-old girl, Mariee, tragically died after leaving the facility, and in 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a 5-year-old," the organization said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote earlier this week that he visited the center in December 2018 and "it was horrifying."
"The cruelty and abuse of Trump's family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation," Merkley wrote on social media. "I'm calling on the admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said Thursday that "it is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
"Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children," said Ghandehari. "Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community-based groups—never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence."
"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment," Ghandehari added. "Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Concentration Camps': Border Czar Says Trump to Detain Migrant Families
"Decent people all over the world will hate this country... and they should," said one critic.
Dec 26, 2024
Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plans, his "border czar" told The Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up."
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Homan—who oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position."
Incoming "border czar" Tom Homan on shipping U.S.-born children out of the country with their undocumented parents: “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child.” "Chose"? That's an odd word choice. The right wants to force women to give birth, not give them a choice.
[image or embed]
— Mark Jacob ( @markjacob.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 9:30 AM
Harris and President Joe Biden have come under fire for various immigration policies, but their administration did stop family detention—and when it was reported last year that the White House was weighing a revival of the practice, 383 groups urged the president to keep the pledge he made when he took office "to pursue just, compassionate, and humane immigration policies."
Under Biden, the government ended mass worksite immigration raids and—eventually—the "Remain in Mexico" policy that stopped asylum-seekers from entering the United States. Homan told the Post that the next Trump administration should bring them back.
Less than a month before Trump's inauguration, Biden is now facing pressure to "use the power of the pen to protect those seeking sanctuary from the coming deportation machine that will crush the human rights of our immigrant neighbors and those who have dreams of finding refuge here," as Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O'Brien put it earlier this month.
The Post reported that "of all the border hard-liners in the incoming administration, Homan is perhaps the most cognizant of the limits of the government's ability to deliver on promises of mass deportation—and the potential for a political backlash."
Those hard-liners include dog-killing Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security; family separation architect Stephen Miller, the president-elect's homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy; and Caleb Vitello, the next acting ICE director whom Miller previously
tried to install at the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
"We're going to need to construct family facilities," Homan told the newspaper. However, he also said: "We need to show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it... We can't lose the faith of the American people."
Critics of the next administration have suggested that—although Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote last month—pursuing the GOP immigration policies, including "concentration camps" for migrant families, will anger the public.
Maximum cruelty is the goal https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/12/26/immigration-border-tom-homan-trump/
[image or embed]
— Ric Steinberger (@ricst.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 9:29 AM
"Decent people all over the world will hate this country... and they should," media columnist and Brooklyn College professor Eric Alterman said on social media in response to the Post's reporting.
Author and New York University adjunct associate professor Helio Fred Garcia said: "Trump's next border czar previews performative cruelty. In the first term it included kidnapping of children from their parents and returning the parents to their home countries, with no record of which kids came from which parents. A crime against humanity."
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who has argued many major immigration cases, told the Post that "the incoming administration has refused to acknowledge the horrific damage it did to families and little children the first time around and seems determined to once again target families for gratuitous suffering."
"The public may have voted in the abstract for mass deportations," he added, referring to the November election, "but I don't think they voted for more family separation or unnecessary cruelty to children."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular