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War Zones In Nigeria Leave Disabled People Behind; In the US, We’re Doing It Too
The system that has failed Disabled people during Nigeria's security crisis is the same system that fails us here in not just natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, but active shooter situations, and immigration detention as well.
Aug 09, 2026
Hurricane season is upon us, and for many Disabled people across the US, it means a renewed sense of insecurity and uncertainty around their well-being. So often, Disabled folks are too often left behind in emergency preparedness and response efforts, and are ultimately treated as afterthoughts. With the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching and a continued climate crisis with no end in sight, this glaring oversight is ever present in the minds of Disabled people nationwide.
This isn’t an issue that’s unique to the US, however. It’s something that Disabled communities face on a global scale, and it’s time we took a hard look at what countries across the world can do to center Disabled people in ensuring the safety and security of their citizens.
Take Nigeria, for example. A new investigation from Deaf Nigerian filmmaker and journalist Alexander Ogheneruemu, "Forgotten People," tells, in part, the story of Ayoade Beyioku-Alase, a Deaf man who was nearly killed as a child in Kano because the violence closing in on his house came with no siren, no interpreter, no warning he could access. "A Deaf person can walk right into the middle of danger," he says in the piece.
It’s easy for those of us in the US to read a story like this and feel far away from it. It’s easy to think, ,“This isn’t us.” The truth is that, whether we want to accept it or not, it is us. It just looks a little different.
Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.
As a Disabled person who has worked in this space for many years, I can tell you that the system that has failed Disabled people during Nigeria's security crisis is the same system that fails us here in not just natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, but active shooter situations, and immigration detention as well. The threat might be different, but we have more in common with these failings than you’d be led to believe.
The alarm itself is the most direct parallel. Federal guidance from the Department of Justice acknowledges that most emergency warning systems in this country were built for people who can hear and see. Sirens, radio, television, flashing lights are all assumed to be visible to everyone. Tornado sirens across the Midwest and South are audio only, offering nothing to a Deaf person indoors when weather becomes a threat. The National Association of the Deaf has told emergency management agencies for years that mass notification systems don’t reach people who rely on video instead of standard calls. This is a serious and blatant example of ableism, where Disabled people are treated as an afterthought in emergency planning.
In Ogheneruemu’s "Forgotten People,” produced by the Disability Justice Project, the journalist says that 4,654 lives were lost in Nigeria's insecurity crisis last year. Our own numbers are just as alarming. Research compiled by the Center for American Progress and the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies puts it bluntly: Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.
During Hurricane Katrina, people over 60 years old, who included many Disabled folks, made up 73% of storm-related deaths in Louisiana. According to the National Council on Disability, 68 of those victims died in nursing homes, some abandoned by staff who left rather than arrange evacuation. Twenty years later, not much has changed. When the Eaton Fire tore through Los Angeles in January of 2025, at least 3 of the 27 people killed were Disabled, and NBC News reported that Disabled people displaced by disaster are almost twice as likely not to return home.
Then there's our own man-made violence. Nigeria's crisis comes from armed conflict, and ours also often comes from gun violence. More than 100 US school shootings have happened since Sandy Hook in 2012, and the response drilled into an entire generation of children is to run and hide. Inherently, this completely excludes Disabled kids. The Washington Post and The Mighty have both documented children left alone in hallways, forgotten in therapy rooms, and locked out of safe zones during lockdowns because there wasn’t a plan that accounted for them. New Jersey only recently passed legislation forcing districts to build disability-specific evacuation plans after families spoke out. The message we’re sending to Disabled kids here is that they’re on their own.
The Disability Justice Project's own reporting has already shown us what this looks like at our own border: a Deaf asylum-seeker was held for five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention without a sign language interpreter, ultimately unable to explain to anyone why he was afraid to go home. If disability access can vanish inside a US federal detention facility, we have no standing to act shocked that it vanishes during a flood or a fire.
This isn’t the kind of thing that’s unknowable, either. The data is out there, and the stories are plentiful. It’s simply not prioritized by those in power, and more often than not it’s unfunded. Disability still makes up just 2% of philanthropy, despite Disabled people comprising about 25% of the US population. Every dollar that goes toward disaster response, school safety, or immigration oversight without disability at the center is putting more Disabled folks in harm’s way. And even if that isn’t you, it could be your mother, father, child, friend, or neighbor. That’s why funding disability is more important than ever. We don't need another report to tell donors and policymakers that Disabled people die preventable deaths in emergencies.
Instead, we need them to stop treating that fact as new information every single time it happens. Funders, just like lawmakers and others in positions of power, need to wake up and see for themselves just what the disability community is up against.
If we can learn one thing from the security crisis in Nigeria, it’s that Disabled people deserve the same protections and safeguards that nondisabled people have in dangerous and precarious situations. It’s already too late, but in the US, in Nigeria, and in countless other countries, there’s still time to save many more Disabled lives.
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De-ICE Citizens Bank: A Model of a Successful Civil Resistance Campaign
The grassroots effort was a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies; by chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
Aug 02, 2026
Just as a great loaf of bread requires the right ingredients to rise, a winning civil resistance campaign needs three essentials to rise up: a compelling vision, broad community engagement, and a spark for action.
The De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign had all these ingredients, which is why it succeeded in forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group, operating dozens of detention centers for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Rhode Island bank severed its ties in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the country.
Hundreds of rallies, faith-led actions, shareholder demands, billboard and flyover campaigns, and withering financial pressure—withdrawals totaling $380 million, with more still happening—created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.
It is a textbook example of sustained, targeted civil resistance that can undermine Trump administration policies. By chipping away at corporate supporters of programs like ICE, citizen activism can erode and stop these initiatives.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
“No, Citizens Bank won’t credit you at all for its decision, but it is what it is,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, during a 10-minute segment on the campaign win in late July. “Actions have consequences, including when you work hard, when you organize, and when you decide to just never give up.
"And then the day does come when you win.”
It Started With One Person
This civil resistance story began with a single person, a woman in Texas, taking a stand. She didn’t carry a protest sign or march alone. She built a website.
Horrified by ICE’s mass incarceration campaign early last year, research-nerd activist Laura Berlin, a mother of two teenagers, built a website, boycottcitizens.org, to expose Citizens Bank’s role.
While Bank of America and a half-dozen other banks ended their relationships with private prison companies in 2019, Citizens strengthened its ties, providing more than $2.8 billion in loans and other credit to CoreCivic and GEO Group over a dozen years.
Drawing on Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other documents, the website showed Citizen’s duplicity, loan-by-loan, year-by-year. Still, the website didn’t get much attention when it was launched 13 months ago, only a dozen or so views a day in the first few months.
That all changed in January when ICE’s aggressive crackdown sparked and exploded. Just as a dozen Northeast activists were organizing their first coordinated protest day against Citizens Ban—an effort of the new De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition—mother and poet Renee Good was gunned down January 7 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Campaign interest and traffic on Berlin’s website took off. When Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was shot and killed 17 days later in the same city, momentum skyrocketed.
And It Kept Growing
On January 24, the campaign held three-dozen rallies in six states. By March, there were 70 protests in a dozen states. Three months later, 140 protests were organized nationwide, drawing in thousands of regular people angry about an immigration crackdown that has booked and detained more than 600,000 people, 66,000 of whom have been deported.
As protests swelled, coalition members brought new partners into the campaign. One brought in a key union group and activist students at Brown University. Others brought in faith groups. Dozens of local Indivisible groups also joined, including a Rightful Resistance group in New York City that specialized in billboard campaigns.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a powerful faith group with deep historic ties to Citizens Bank, was an especially important partner.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
In the early 2000s, GBIO teamed up with Citizens to offer a financial literacy program for its immigrant members around Boston. The bank also lowered fees for immigrants sending remittances to their families. “We were proud to bank with Citizens, and I was proud to be a member of the bank’s board of directors at that time,” wrote Rev. Ray Hammond, a key GBIO leader, in a recent column.
By winter 2026, the good vibes were over.
In early March, GBIO sent a letter to the bank requesting it cut financial ties with the prison companies. In April, Hammond and other shareholders confronted Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun at the bank’s annual meeting in Providence. As Van Saun answered questions about reputation and legal risks, hundreds of protesters, young and old, sang and chanted loudly outside. They also pledged to withdraw their deposits if changes were not made.
The financial pressure campaign, "Not with Our Money, Citizens," came at a key moment. While rallies and billboards boosted awareness and sullied the bank’s reputation, the campaign now had a lever to harm the bank financially.
Within a few weeks, GBIO and the coalition had mobilized $20 million in withdrawal pledges by churches, synagogues, nonprofits, and individual customers angered by the bank’s role in bankrolling prisons. By May, GBIO had pulled $2 million of its deposits, while a similar faith organization in Ohio, the Greater Cleveland Congregations, was threatening to do the same.
Millions of withdrawals may sound like a lot, but it’s relatively small for a bank like Citizens, with $233 billion in assets. At weekly meetings, coalition members brainstormed how it could increase the financial bleeding—to turn those millions into hundreds of millions.
New Jersey Takes a Stand
The answer came in June and the spark came from New Jersey. After weeks of hunger strikes and protests at GEO Group’s Delaney Hall ICE prison in Newark, municipalities started fighting back. The first blow was Jersey City’s June 7 vote to close its accounts with Citizens and pull all $276 million of its deposits.
The city’s pullout was a bit of a surprise, with the vote and initial withdrawal of $150 million happening in less than 24 hours. It was a clear sign that the campaign, which had swelled to 175 groups in 17 states, was now a movement.
One month later, Montclair, New Jersey did the same—another $91 million in deposits out the door. And other communities, including Bloomfield and Hoboken, were looking to follow suit.
Three days after Montclair’s vote, Citizens Bank called it quits. With no public fanfare, it released a statement to a Boston Globe reporter saying, “Citizens has determined that it is now appropriate to exit the credit facilities for these clients.”
The bank called it a ‘business decision,” while repeatedly downplaying the role of activists.
We know better.
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Trump's Deadly, Cruel Immigration Policy May Be a Political Failure As Well
As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, previously supportive voters may turn against Trump's mass deportation agenda.
Jul 24, 2026
The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people.
The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the aftereffects of an earthquake.
Some holders of this status have been in the country for a long time. Nearly 90% of the 170,000 Salvadorans who have TPS, first granted 25 years ago, participate in the US labor force, contributing over US$5 billion to the US economy.
The administration makes no exceptions in its campaign to deport anyone and everyone. Even as it has promised to fight a war on behalf of the people of Iran, it has reportedly provided information about Iranian asylum-seekers to the Iranian government. These details about their lives, such as their sexual orientation and religious beliefs, make it even more likely that they will be persecuted on return. Dozens of Russians, who don’t enjoy TPS, were flown back to Russia, where several were immediately slapped with draft notices.
The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive.
There is no length to which the administration won’t go to deport people, even American citizens like the children born in the United States who were kicked out of the country along with their parents. So far, the Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s attempt to overturn the “birthright citizenship” clause in the US Constitution. But President Donald Trump is still pushing his allies to take up the fight in Congress to change the law.
The administration even tried to add 2.7 million living people to the “Death Master File,” which is a database of dead people maintained by the Social Security Administration. Trump’s plan was to make life so difficult for people declared “dead” that they would self-deport or, if they showed up to dispute their “death,” to detain them in preparation for deportation. It was only because of a whistleblower that this plan didn’t go into effect.
But the most visible effort by the US government has been to target the approximately 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” who, as of 2023, constituted over 4% of the US population. Such immigrants keep the American economy afloat by picking fruit, slaughtering cows, building houses, and taking care of the elderly.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign, in other words, would wreck the US economy. The undocumented don’t take away jobs from native-born Americans because the latter generally don’t want the jobs that immigrants fill. But the administration is willing to risk economic disaster in its effort to keep America a predominantly white country.
Trump’s anti-immigrant plan has not just evicted people. It has not just locked them away in detention centers. It has killed them.
In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were involved in two killings. Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national living with his wife and young daughter in a small town in Maine, was not the subject of an ICE raid, but ICE agents killed him anyway. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was a businessman and father of three on his way to work in Houston when agents stopped his car and shot him.
More than a dozen people have died in these kinds of interactions with ICE, including two US citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—protesting ICE actions in Minnesota.
The number of detainees who have died in custody is even higher. Tens of thousands of people are being held in detention facilities that the Trump administration has established around the country. Despite administration claims that it is only deporting dangerous criminals, more than 70% of those detained have no prior criminal convictions.
More than 50 people have died in the detention facilities, a rate that is more than twice as high as Trump’s first term. They have died because of conditions inside the facilities or because they didn’t receive sufficient medical care. Several have died by suicide.
The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million people a year. It hasn’t quite reached that benchmark, with the administration itself claiming around 900,000 deportations as of mid-May. It has also claimed that more than 2 million people have self-deported. However, without transparent data from the Department of Homeland Security, it is difficult to verify the administration’s claims.
These numbers are critical to the administration’s approval rating. On virtually all other policies, Trump is losing popularity. Inflation numbers remain high, and the economy is failing millions of Americans. The war in Iran continues to push up gas prices. The administration is still dogged by controversies around budget cuts, corruption, anti-vaccine policies, and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The overall approval rating for the administration is around 37%, with a large percentage of independent voters now adopting negative views of the president.
The one issue where a sizable number of Americans still approve of administration policies, however, is immigration. Compared to the economy at 33% and the war in Iran at 29%, 40% of Americans approve of his immigration policies. But even here the numbers are declining, since half of Americans supported his approach to immigration when he took office in 2025.
The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive. The detention and deportation of key members of communities—hard workers, religious leaders, even those espousing the same conservative family values of the administration—have led to a significant decline in anti-immigrant sentiment among Republicans.
Still, with the economy on the rocks and the war in Iran nowhere near an end, the Republicans will likely try to emphasize the “success” of the administration on immigration policy in the upcoming midterm elections in November. It will be a desperate strategy. As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, the administration’s deportation strategy may turn out to be a failure politically as well for the president and his party.
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ICE’s New Immigration Detention Center Guidelines Make Them Even More Dangerous
These new guidelines are a gift for private prison companies. By lowering standards across the board, they empower them to more thoroughly exploit detainees without fear of legal ramifications.
Jun 19, 2026
On June 15, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new rules governing immigration jails intended to “streamline requirements” and “reduce the burden on our detention operators.”
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that during the revision process, The GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison firms in the country, requested that ICE make changes that would benefit its businesses and court cases.
The GEO Group has significant ties with the Trump administration. It was a major donor to President Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund and Trump-aligned super PAC. In 2025, they spent more than $3.6 million on lobbying expenditures. Perhaps most importantly two of Trump’s top immigration officials—Border Czar Tom Homan and Acting Director of ICE David Venturella—were previously employed by them.
In a statement, ICE claimed it “consulted with a variety of stakeholders, including facility operators responsible for implementing the standards,” and “considered that input” during the revision process. The end result, however, is a series of policies that overwhelmingly benefit private prisons.
Detention centers have always been inhumane institutions by design. Under Trump, they are becoming even worse.
This includes: first, clarifying that detainees “are not considered facility and/or government employees and are not entitled to wages or benefits.” This effectively eliminates a prior rule that stipulated that detainees “shall receive monetary compensation of not less than $1.00 per day for work completed.”
That change alone is a major win for private prisons. The GEO Group has faced multiple lawsuits for violating minimum wage laws. In 2023, the Washington Supreme Court ordered the company to pay $17.3 million to hundreds of detainees in back pay.
By designating detainees as non-employees, ICE is providing private prisons with the legal excuse needed to engage in even more egregious wage theft.
Second, the new guidelines specify that detention centers do not “have a right of refusal for any ICE detainee that ICE decides to detain.” As such, they will likely be forced to admit people who are severely ill or injured, regardless of whether they are able to provide appropriate medical care.
A related rule change notes that “in cases where a detainee has medical or mental health needs that exceed the capabilities of the facility, the facility shall notify ICE and request a transfer.” This process may take days—time that a detainee with a life-threatening condition may not have. To date, at least 50 people have died in ICE detention since the start of Trump’s mass deportation campaign in January 2025.
Notably, last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funneled $10 billion through the Navy to accelerate the construction of new detention centers that could house as many as 10,000 people each. Under the Navy’s terms, contractors building and staffing those new facilities do not have a “right of refusal and shall take all referrals from ICE as applicable.” ICE’s new guidelines expand that “right of refusal” to existing immigration centers.
This sets a dangerous precedent at a time when more US citizens are being swept up in ICE’s immigration raids. This includes people like Dulce Consuelo Diaz Moralez, a US-born citizen, who was wrongfully imprisoned by ICE for 25 days late last year. Denying detention centers a “right of refusal” will likely protect them from any lawsuits resulting from US citizens arrested and held by ICE.
Third, detention centers are permitted to use “machine learning-based translation or generative AI” for “non-critical communication (i.e., those of moderate importance, urgency, or significance) or during informal interactions with detainees.” This includes “reviewing and responding to a detainee’s non-English grievance or other request related to basic issues/concerns within detention.”
As Dr. Homer Venters, an expert on correctional healthcare, remarks, such grievances often include “very urgent or even emergent information such as when a patient has been denied lifesaving care.”
Many detainees have reported that guards routinely ignore their pleas for medical care and assistance. In May 2026 at The GEO Group-operated Delaney Hall, one detainee, Elder Guerra, suffered a seizure after falling and hitting the back of his head. It was only after detainees begged that guards finally called an ambulance for him. According to his relative, Guerra’s condition continues to worsen.
Substituting human translators with AI provides guards with a built-in excuse for their lack of responsiveness. Going forward, they can simply claim that the translation tool failed to communicate the urgency of their request, which led to inaction on their part.
After all, such tools are far from infallible. For instance, volunteers with Respond Crisis Translation, an organization that offers human translation and interpretation services for migrants and refugees, described a case where a woman seeking asylum due to domestic abuse used the phrase “mi jefe” to describe her father—a common colloquialism in her country. The AI tool translated the phrase literally as “my boss,” and her application was denied.
The basic problem is that machine learning algorithms are trained on datasets consisting of whatever is most represented in digital sources. While there are over 7,000 languages and dialects spoken worldwide, the vast majority of digital content is written in English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. This limitation means that AI tools will be far more prone to error when it comes to translating idioms from underrepresented parts of the world as well as underrepresented languages, such as Wolof or Hausa.
Given that the new guidelines do not require any form of human oversight for AI translations, if the AI makes a mistake (and it will), that error may never be corrected. What’s more, if that error has serious consequences for a detainee, it’s unclear who, if anyone, would be held responsible.
ICE claims that it is constantly reevaluating its detention centers “to ensure we are providing the best care to illegal aliens in our custody.” And yet, while there have been hunger and labor strikes at three The GEO Group-operated immigration jails within the last three months, none of the new guidelines address those systematic failures.
This is not surprising, however. Since Trump retook office, DHS has eliminated and restricted oversight, while also rescinding regulations meant to hold detention operators responsible for their mistreatment of detainees. On June 4, ICE announced it will no longer investigate or report the deaths of those who have been recently released from their custody. This move is meant to absolve ICE of responsibility for the deaths of people like Daphy Michel. A medical examiner said Michel, a Haitian asylum-seeker, was “suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier.” Despite this, ICE agents released her 25 miles away from Pittsburgh in the middle of winter without a coat or any regard for how she would get home. She died of hypothermia three days later.
Neither DHS, The GEO Group, nor any private prison firm care whatsoever about the health and well-being of detainees. On June 8, The GEO Group filed a lawsuit against Colorado challenging a new law that requires them to always have medical and mental health professionals available at their detention facilities. It is currently being sued by the state of New Jersey for refusing to allow its Department of Health to conduct a full inspection of Delaney Hall.
These new guidelines are a gift for private prison companies. By lowering standards across the board, ICE is empowering them to more thoroughly exploit detainees without fear of legal ramifications.
Detention centers have always been inhumane institutions by design. Under Trump, they are becoming even worse. There is only one viable solution here: abolish detention centers; abolish ICE.
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When ICE Detains a Father, a Child Pays the Price
As Father's Day approaches, many children are already missing fathers they were unfairly separated from, not because those fathers failed their children, but because of a failed immigration system that is increasingly willing to separate families.
Jun 19, 2026
When I was little, I’d wake up when I heard my dad getting ready for work. I’d run downstairs hoping to catch him before he left so I could hug him goodbye. My father, an immigrant from India, came to the United States as a child with my grandparents in search of stability and opportunity. They worked hard to build a life here, and I grew up watching my dad do the same—out the door early, home late.
Sometimes I cried if I missed him before he left. Sometimes I cried even after a hug, because the day felt so long without him. But there was one thing I never questioned: He would come home.
Too many children in immigrant families don’t have that certainty today. In recent months, high-profile cases have shown how quickly stability can disappear, as families are swept into immigration enforcement and children are separated from their parents, often with little warning. New research from the Brookings Institution estimates that more than 100,000 children have been separated from a parent during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and that most of those children are likely US citizens. Researchers also warn the true scale may be even higher because the government does not consistently track whether detained immigrants are parents.
A father can leave for a shift and not come back, not because he chose to abandon his family, but because immigration agents arrested him on his way to work, during a scheduled court check-in, or even in everyday places like airports. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed in airports across the country, where travelers have witnessed arrests unfold in real time. We are already seeing the consequences in deeply troubling ways, including the case of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minnesota, whose detention alongside his father drew national attention.
For years, politicians have lamented a “fatherlessness crisis.” We should name what we are doing when we detain and deport fathers without regard for their children. We are actively manufacturing it.
When parents are detained, children are often pulled into the system with them, or families are left scrambling to stay together. Recent court filings describe hundreds of children held in family detention facilities beyond court-ordered limits, often without adequate food, medical care, or mental health support. Many other children are left with relatives, neighbors, older siblings, or informal caregivers while parents remain in detention or face deportation proceedings, forcing children to navigate sudden loss and uncertainty.
According to federal data compiled by TRAC, more than 60,000 people are currently held in ICE detention, and nearly three-quarters have no criminal conviction. The Trump administration claims that ICE targets “the worst of the worst,” but the data tell a different story. Because immigration arrests disproportionately target working-age men, many detained are likely fathers. That gap matters deeply in a country where more than 4 million US citizen children live with an undocumented parent. That omission makes it easier to debate immigration enforcement policy while overlooking the children who are directly impacted. Even if only a fraction of those detained are parents, that still means thousands of children losing a caregiver, a provider, or both, frequently overnight. They are neighbors and community members, often fathers who were actively raising their children until the day the government took them away. I know this not only from policy data, but from listening to fathers talk about their children.
As a senior policy researcher at Children’s Rights, I study how family stability shapes a child’s well-being and how quickly it can be shattered by the government. We have found that current immigration policies are not only separating families but causing measurable harm to children, including mental health challenges, developmental delays, and disruptions to their education. Federal data show children being held in immigration custody for months at a time, often averaging more than 150 days, exposing them to prolonged instability and stress.
In a qualitative study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, my co-authors and I interviewed 85 Latino fathers raising young children in the United States. Many were immigrants, primarily from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. They spoke about love and connection, wanting to be present, witness milestones, and serve as role models. They reflected on their own parents and their hopes for their children. They described the burdens of responsibility, but also of joy. They sounded like parents everywhere, underscoring how universal these parenting motivations are.
That is why detaining fathers is not just harsh, it is shortsighted. Decades of research show fathers play a unique role in children’s emotional well-being, behavior, and learning. When the government removes a father without warning, holds him for weeks or months, and ultimately deports him, children do not experience it as “policy.” They experience it as a profound loss.
As Father’s Day approaches, I am thinking about the fathers who show up for their children every day, who work long hours, provide stability, and try to build better futures for their families. Across the country, many children are already missing fathers they were unfairly separated from. Not because those fathers failed their children, but because of a failed immigration system that is increasingly willing to separate families.
For years, politicians have lamented a “fatherlessness crisis.” We should name what we are doing when we detain and deport fathers without regard for their children. We are actively manufacturing it. If we truly care about children’s health and well-being, we must treat family integrity and stability as essential.
Congress and the administration should require ICE to collect and publicly report whether those it detains are parents of minor children, and ensure children are not left without safe caregiving arrangements. This is especially urgent given recent reporting that ICE is failing to follow its own policies designed to protect family unity, including requirements that agents ask whether someone has children and allow parents to make decisions about their care. ICE should use detention more sparingly for parents and expand community-based alternatives that allow people to keep working and caring for their children while their cases proceed.
I still picture my younger self at the top of the stairs, running toward my father’s morning hug. Every child deserves to believe, with confidence, that a parent who leaves in the morning will come home at night.
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Bearing Witness to ICE Abuses at Delaney Hall
We must work together to keep the pressure on the Trump administration to meet detainees' demands for human rights, due process, and for their freedom.
Jun 10, 2026
The warehouses of human suffering are all around us. Filthy, inhumane prisons where immigrants are hidden away and brutalized. It's up to us to keep pushing to end these modern-day concentration camps. To expose them, empty them, and tear them down.
For months we New Jerseyans have mobilized to defend our brothers and sisters locked away in Delaney Hall in Newark. Many there are on a hunger and labor strike to protest the inhumane conditions inside—the rotted food, untreated illness, physical abuse and mental anguish—and the injustice of their detention in the first place. They are demanding their freedom.
Delaney Hall is just one part of a national network of immigrant abuse. It’s not about enforcing immigration laws—it’s about a paramilitary operation to attack and imprison immigrants and people of color, and keep them in inhumane conditions without the possibility of freedom until they give up their rights and accept deportation. In prisons all over the country—Adelanto, Dilley, Krome, Otay Mesa, Hutto, and others—corporate contractors like GEO Group are profiting from human isolation, sickness, and death. The Trump administration is supplying the bodies. And Congress is pumping billions of dollars more to feed this obscene, corrupt system.
Right now there is so much we can and must do to support the people suffering and protesting inside those walls. Some courageous fighters have already been released. But the struggle continues. We must work together to keep the pressure on the administration to meet their demands for human rights, due process, and for their freedom, starting first with the release of the most vulnerable, the elderly, young, pregnant, and sick.
We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families.
At a bare minimum, we must bear witness. The ICE Out of New Jersey collective has brought together several state and local community and grassroots organizations to be in the front lines to defend immigrants and expose and resist the administration's abuses. The groups are the New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program of the American Friends Service Committee, CATA - The Farmworkers Support Committee, Cosecha NJ, DIRE (Deportation and Immigration Response Equipo), El Pueblo Unido, Estamos Unidos NJ, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Resistencia en Acción NJ, and Semilla Roja NJ.
Also, Eyes on ICE is building a network of watchful vigilance and mutual aid. Community members, elected officials, faith leaders, students, unions—it's going to take all of us, all across the country. To show that we could be different. We must not look away. And we must not stop.
President Donald Trump and those enforcing his white-supremacist campaign of mass imprisonment and mass deportations want us to feel afraid and powerless. The police—like the New Jersey state troopers who attacked peaceful protesters at Delaney Hall—want to intimidate us. We need to work together to shift this narrative, at all levels, from the governor and state and federal representatives to mayors and grassroots leaders.
When we say, “No justice, no peace,” we mean it. We are neither afraid nor powerless. And we are not strangers. We are human, like those just inside those walls.
Our freedom out here is linked to their freedom inside. We must fight for the liberation of all. The attack on one is an attack on all of us.
We must be witnesses when we are ordered to leave and told there's nothing to see. Even when Immigration Custom Enforcement agents and state police officers beat, trample, and pepper spray us in the name of "keeping the peace."
We must keep saying no—not now, not ever, never again. We must not allow the Trump administration and its state and local partners to keep abusing their power and using our money to commit moral atrocities in secrecy.
We the people must hold firm to our humanity and reject their barbarism.
The administration's top goal is to dehumanize immigrants. But despite all their violence, they have failed. The men and women behind the bars of immigrant prisons like Delaney Hall refuse to be dehumanized. Those who are on a hunger and labor strike are asserting their human dignity, which can never be erased.
We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families. We must keep up the pressure, for as long as it takes and with all the power we have.
We must not let their inhumanity dehumanize us.
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Abolish Immigration Detention Centers
Depriving detainees of medical services, hygiene products, fresh food, and basic accommodations is part of a deliberate strategy aimed at maximizing profits for private prison companies as well as achieving the Trump administration's xenophobic goals.
Jun 09, 2026
For more than two weeks, hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall immigration detention center have been on hunger and labor strike. They are protesting consistent medical neglect; being fed rotten, maggot-filled food; as well as overcrowded and poorly maintained living conditions. Outside the facility, protesters have clashed with federal agents, leading to dozens of arrests.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Geo Group, the private prison company that operates Delaney Hall, have severely restricted access into the facility. On June 8, they finally granted New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill a “closely controlled and limited tour of the facility.” This is unsurprising. DHS has unlawfully prevented elected officials from entering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado, Mississippi, Texas, New York, and California.
Geo Group has likewise sought to restrict access to their facilities. In fact, on June 8, they filed a lawsuit against Colorado challenging a new law that requires all detention facilities in the state to undergo more regular inspections. The law further mandates that such facilities must always have medical and mental health professionals available on site. A spokesperson for Geo Group claimed that the new law has “the purpose of making it more difficult for federal immigration officers to carry out their responsibilities in Colorado and impose direct burdens and requirements on facilities used in immigration operations.”
Describing more oversight and requiring medical staff as “burdens” is a telling admission that ultimately points to the broader problem here. What is occurring at Delaney Hall is not an isolated incident. In fact, there is another hunger and labor strike currently happening at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. From April to mid-May 2026, hundreds of detainees at North Lake Processing Center in Michigan also went on strike. Both are operated by Geo Group.
The current system of mass deportation and detention is cruel, costly, and ultimately unnecessary.
Depriving detainees of medical services, hygiene products, fresh food, and basic accommodations is part of a deliberate strategy aimed at maximizing profits for private prison companies as well as achieving the xenophobic goals of DHS.
In addition to multimillion-dollar government contracts, private prison companies profit by exploiting the labor of detainees via the “Voluntary Work Program.” Participants are typically paid $1 per day regardless of the number of hours they work.
Despite the name, this program is far from voluntary. First, because basic amenities are not provided, detainees must rely on the company’s commissary and its limited assortment of overpriced goods. In 2019, the Adelanto facility charged $3.25 for a can of tuna, $7.12 for a 2.5oz tube of denture cream, and $11.02 for a 4oz tube of toothpaste.
Second, those who refuse to work may be subject to retaliatory measures. In 2022, detainees at the Mesa Verde Detention Facility and Golden State Annex—both operated by Geo Group—went on a labor strike. Like the detainees in Delaney Hall, they too were protesting inhumane living conditions. Those who participated in the strike reported being kept in prolonged solitary confinement and denied medical treatment due to their involvement.
This is the economics of detention: intentionally underserving detainees generates demand for overpriced commissary goods. Their desperation and vulnerability are exploited to force them to work long hours for meager wages. All the while the company generates millions in profits.
Amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation regime, Geo Group’s profits soared from $32 million in 2024 to $254 million in 2025. The company spent over $3.6 million on lobbying expenditures over the same period.
Geo Group is not alone here. About 86% of all detainees are held in facilities operated by for-profit companies, including CoreCivic, Lasalle Corrections, Ahtna Technical Services, and Management & Training Corporation (MTC).
This brutality also serves the interest of DHS. For instance, in 2025, a family from Venezuela was given permission to live and work in the US while their asylum case was pending. At their hearing, the judge immediately dismissed their case without even listening to their testimony. They were then detained by ICE and transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center—a privately-run facility operated by CoreCivic.
After a month, they were released, but the damage had been done. The psychological stress, trauma, and fear of being detained again drove the family to self-deport. As one of the parents put it, “As soon as we got out [of detention], I told my husband, we’re leaving this country, I don’t care where we end up, but we’re not staying here.” She even called other neighbors to warn them to stay inside. “I never want anyone to go through the same experience we went through inside the detention center.”
That’s the point. Deportations are expensive. In January 2026, DHS reported that the “current cost of a single enforced deportation is $18,245.” For this reason, DHS has adopted a practice of “attrition through enforcement”—the explicit goal here is making life so incredibly difficult that immigrants will decide to leave the US rather than endure the hardship. To this end, the Trump administration has abused its authority to cut off immigrants—both documented and undocumented—from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits, and even childcare.
Detention centers are also part of this strategy. Kamel Maklad, a former detainee who spent more than two years at the CoreCivic-operated Eloy Detention Center, explained that guards consistently tried to find excuses to put people in solitary confinement. “They do it so that the detainee, out of desperation, will hurry up and request voluntary deportation.” He further added that one guard explicitly told him: “It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.”
All immigration detention centers—and ICE more broadly—must be abolished. They are dehumanizing institutions born out of capitalist greed, xenophobia, and the callous indifference to the suffering of others.
A better path is possible. In fact, before Trump, the US was on a (relatively) better track. In 2017, he eliminated the Family Case Management Program (FCMP). FCMP paired immigrants with pending court cases with social workers who offered legal guidance. On average, 99% of participants complied with ICE check-ins and appointments, and 100% attended their court hearings. Out of 954 people, only 23 were reported as absconders. FCMP cost about $38 per family per day in 2017. By contrast, in 2019, DHS estimated that the average daily rate for family beds at a detention center was $318.79. This is one of many cost-effective and humane alternatives to the current system of mass detention.
It is worth stressing here that only 5% of people detained by ICE have violent criminal convictions—73% have none. Detention centers are not protecting the public from dangerous “foreign invaders.” The vast majority of immigrants meaningfully contribute to our communities—they pay taxes, drive innovation, and contribute to the economy. Even if they didn’t, however, they are still human beings worthy of respect and dignity.
The current system of mass deportation and detention is cruel, costly, and ultimately unnecessary. We can and must do better.
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‘What I Witnessed and Experienced Today Was Shameful,‘ Says US Senator Pepper Sprayed by ICE
Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said federal immigration agents "poured gasoline on the fire" as protesters condemned appalling conditions inside the Delaney Hall detention facility.
May 26, 2026
A sitting US senator was pepper sprayed by federal immigration agents on Monday during a demonstration outside of the notorious Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where migrants are engaged in a hunger strike to highlight deplorable conditions inside the facility and demand their release.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said he rushed to the migrant detention center—which was reopened by the Trump administration last year—after learning of the hunger strike, which began late last week. Following Monday's protest, Kim wrote on social media that he saw "chaos" and "more of the same lawlessness we've see elsewhere around the country," alluding to horrific—and sometimes deadly—abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents (ICE) in Minnesota, Georgia, Texas, and elsewhere.
"Instead of engaging with me and others about the poor conditions, ICE sent in an armored vehicle and a line of armed agents that only poured gasoline on the fire. Civilians were tackled and restrained, and agents fired pepper balls and spray into the crowd," said Kim. "Our country deserves accountability. Our country deserves the humane treatment of every person here. In fact, our Constitution demands this. What I witnessed and experienced today was shameful."
"Delaney Hall is a failure; it’s this administration’s failure," Kim added. "The only way to make this right for our communities is to shut it down and make sure the failures we’ve seen never happen again."
NJ.com reported that Kim, who was visiting the facility along with other New Jersey representatives including Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill, "initially tried to broker a temporary agreement between the demonstrators and federal agents, in which the agents would scale back tactical teams and immigrant advocates could inspect cars leaving the facility to see if detainees were inside."
Demonstrators had earlier expressed concern that ICE was planning to secretly transfer hunger strike participants to other detention facilities.
"But in the meantime, agents began pushing the crowd backward, firing less-lethal rounds containing an irritant toward the protesters and making several arrests," NJ.com continued. "At times, Kim stepped between the protestors and agents putting his arms up in a 'stop' motion as the scene grew chaotic. Later, Kim was among those who received first aid after being exposed to pepper spray."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, issued a statement characterizing protesters as "dangerous rioters" and claiming that "no individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles."
DISGRACEFUL: ICE agents tear-gassed U.S. Senator Andy Kim at Delaney Hall detention facility in NJ today!
Kim was supporting hunger-striking detainees protesting spoiled food, no medical care & extreme heat when federal agents unleashed tear gas & pepper spray. Kim struggled to… pic.twitter.com/CyPQJCkW50
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) May 26, 2026
Delaney Hall is run by the private prison corporation GEO Group under a $1 billion, 15-year contract with ICE.
The families of people detained at Delaney Hall have decried "dangerous conditions" inside the facility, alleging "medical neglect, lack of air conditioning, and lack of food—including rotten and spoiled meals." The ACLU of New Jersey noted earlier this year that "when food is provided—as it is not often supplied—people have reported that it is frozen or otherwise inedible, in small portions, and distributed at odd hours, which is particularly harmful for people who are diabetic and trying to maintain a stable blood sugar level."
After seeing the inside of the facility over the weekend, Kim wrote that "our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like Geo Group and CoreCivic make billions."
"No profiting off of human misery," Kim added.
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The Dead and the Dying in Trump's American Gulag
A system of concentration camps is being built and it's time the nation reckon with this monstrosity before any more people are killed.
Mar 24, 2026
The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.
In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.
And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026:
“ICE… has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed ‘to hold all claims submissions.’”
Emmanuel Damas’s unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind. In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55, at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.
Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that “the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Of course, it’s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: “Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.” At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.
Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, “like Amazon Prime for human beings.” (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual title, according to ICE, is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”)
What Is a Concentration Camp?
Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. “Gulag” is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union’s concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin. The term stands for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps” and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, “gulag” came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago.
As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies — for example, in the enclosed Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe — the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun. That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place.
Concentration camps have a number of defining features:
- Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures. The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees. So, we find people of all ages, from infants to ancients, in concentration camps. In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime. Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as non-citizens, or in the case of Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin. This is true for the people held in ICE detention today. Their alleged offenses are against U.S. civil, not criminal law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can’t order anyone detained. That’s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
- Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. That’s why the U.S. has never recognized the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, continues to hold as prisoners of war in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guantánamo was first used to house detainees in the “global war on terror,” the U.S. held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans. Trump’s January 29, 2025, executive order entitled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guantánamo Bay To Full Capacity” directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there. As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.
- Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes. They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime. In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my book Mainstreaming Torture. Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature. In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter those facilities. But such detention centers can’t fulfill their full repressive function if people don’t know anything about what goes on in them. So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who “has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.” Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.
- Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there. Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination. In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of their inhabitants. But for a decade before the first death camp was even opened, prisoners had already been concentrated in thousands of “labor” camps. In fact, they were not there to be killed directly, but to be removed from society. As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains, “Initially, the population of these concentration camps were not usually Jews, but Communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men, and ‘asocial’ elements (alcoholics, criminals, people with mental disabilities, the poor).” Notably, like undocumented people in the U.S. today, these were groups who then received little sympathy from the larger German population. The conditions they encountered — lack of food and medical care, crowding, and unsanitary conditions — sickened and killed as many as a third of those who passed through them.
A Brief History of U.S. Concentration Camps
The Soviet gulag was not the world’s first concentration camp, although such institutions are, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. Human beings have long contrived to isolate groups they identify as enemies, as Americans at times did with enslaved Africans and the native peoples of this continent. Indeed, when the Cherokee nation was evicted from its lands under the 1830 Indian Removal Act and forced to travel the “Trail of Tears,” many of them were kept for some time in “emigration depots” in Alabama and Tennessee.
Almost everyone in this country has heard of Nazi Germany’s camps, but the history of the modern concentration camp really began at the end of the nineteenth century. As Andrea Pitzer recounted in a recent interview, Americans first became aware of such camps in the 1890s, when Spain instituted a policy of reconcentración in its efforts to put down a rebellion in Cuba. As has happened in ICE detention camps today, malnourished men, women, and children were shoved into holding camps there, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation led many to sicken and die. News of the horrifying conditions in Cuba led Americans to organize material aid for those being held.
The United States then dispatched the battleship Maine to accompany the ships carrying relief supplies to Cuba. When the Maine sank in Havana harbor under murky circumstances, the U.S. government had the pretext it needed to mount a military campaign against the remnants of Spanish colonial control in the Americas and the Pacific. That relatively short war ended with the U.S. in possession of most of Spain’s remaining colonies, including the island of Puerto Rico, and what would eventually become the nation of the Philippines. Almost immediately, the new American colonizers reproduced in the Philippines the kind of reconcentración camps they had supposedly gone to war to eradicate in Cuba. In another parallel with the twenty-first century, it was during the occupation of the Philippines that U.S. forces invented the form of torture we have come to call “waterboarding.”
Most Americans know about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order creating 10 concentration camps to hold people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens mostly living in the western United States. Over 120,000 men, women, and children were interned for the duration of World War II. Many lost their homes, farms, businesses, and other property (often seized by their non-Japanese neighbors). A much smaller number of Italian and German nationals were also interned, as Germans had also been during World War I.
The Japanese camps were constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the same federal agency that provided mass employment for millions during the Great Depression under Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Few Americans know that, in addition to building roads, schools, dams, and the occasional zoo, the WPA also built the barracks and strung the barbed wire that enclosed World War II internees.
ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), ran about 20 of those camps, primarily ones imprisoning Japanese, German, and Italian non-citizens. Three of them were built in Texas to hold people from those countries who had been deported from Latin America. (Most of them were Japanese from Peru.) Those camps were guarded by the Border Patrol, rather than the military police. In other words, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a long history of running the U.S. version of concentration camps. They’re used to it.
American Gulag
It’s no exaggeration to say that ICE detention camps now threaten to become a central instrument of repression under the Trump administration. As many as 40 people have died in the camps since Trump returned to office in January 2025. And those are only the deaths that have been publicly acknowledged.
If Camp East Montana is the biggest ICE camp in the country, the most notorious may well be the Florida site in the Everglades that has come to be known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Constructed hastily over just a week, according to Amnesty International, it “houses” people in horrific conditions:
“Inside, people are crammed into overcrowded cages around bunk beds with little room to move. Food is spoiled and maggot-infested. Mosquitoes swarm constantly, showers are scarce, and extreme heat and humidity make the center unbearable. There appear to be almost no reliable or confidential means for detainees to communicate with their attorneys or family members.”
That description is echoed in the testimony of people held in ICE detention camps nationwide. A complete report on the conditions at all of those camps would run to hundreds of thousands of words. Indeed, it’s hard to get a handle on the full scope of ICE’s concentration camp program, since reports on the number and size of such camps change quickly as new ones are proposed or come online. The organization Freedom for Immigrants maintains an interactive immigration detention map which identifies at least 200 separate locations where immigrants (and the occasional U.S. citizen) are detained. And the Trump administration is not done. According to the Guardian, DHS plans to spend $3.8 billion “upgrading” 24 existing warehouses to implement ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons’s dream of treating immigrants like human widgets.
And that brings us back to the point of all this. Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. Like state torture programs, concentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination. Such a process often begins by describing the target group as non-human, as “vermin” or “garbage” (as Trump has, of course, done). Ironically, the very act of placing people in inhumane conditions can amplify the public’s perception of their inhumanity. After all, would genuine human beings submit to such treatment? Would our good nation treat genuine human beings that way?
One other significant aspect of all this: the enrichment of a few corporations. President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gave ICE upwards of $45 billion to spend on those camps, which meant that there was a lot of money to be made. Today most of them are run by two private prison companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group. The president’s Big Beautiful Bill also allows the Department of Homeland Security to expedite that money-making by using the U.S. Navy’s Supply Systems Command program, which serves as an end-run around the usual bidding process for federal contracts.
This morning, I asked my partner whether she thought that the Trump administration could make the transition from concentration camps, where people die as a “side effect” of their internment, to actual death camps. “I think it’s possible,” she responded — and so, horribly — do I.
It’s possible, but not yet inevitable. To date, local actions have provided the most effective means of resisting the creation of the American gulag our federal government is constructing. These have included organizing to oppose siting camps in specific communities, efforts to leverage local zoning laws to stop them, and attempts to generate state-level political opposition to them. (The Washington Post had an excellent roundup of recent efforts in one county in Maryland to block such a camp.)
We know what’s at stake. We know we can dismantle the American gulag, because some of us are already doing it. It’s time for the rest of us to get to work.
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Immigration Detention Is No Place for a Child
As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again.
Feb 25, 2026
Each day, I read more news about children as young as two years old who are detained in a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Dilley, Texas, away from their friends, schools, and communities. I see reports of handwritten letters from children asking to be released, as they describe the fear they experience day in and day out while in detention. As an applied developmental scientist who spent more than 13 years studying child and youth development, as well as someone who has firsthand experienced the horrors of encountering immigration enforcement and the inhumane treatment and conditions that follow, I am deeply concerned for children impacted by immigration enforcement surges.
There is no shortage of research that demonstrates the connection between family detention and deportation proceedings of children and negative educational outcomes, elevated levels of distress, mental and physical harm, trauma, and decline in multiple aspects of well-being. Currently, approximately 1 in 12 children in the US face risk of deportation of a loved one and the lasting negative impacts on their psychological and physical well-being. ICE has detained at least 3,800 children since mid-January 2025. Of those 3,800 kids, more than 600 unaccompanied children have been put in custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and were taken from their parents in many cases.
Regardless of my role as researcher, on a human level I am constantly thinking: What do children feel when they first encounter immigration enforcement, who are usually armed and masked? Do their little bodies tremble or freeze? What happens when federal agents take their parents away from them? What does it mean for a preschooler to be detained? What is their crime? Is it being born or, perhaps, seeking asylum? What sense of childhood remains when immigrant children are detained in inhumane conditions?
What I experienced as an adult paints enough of a bleak picture. As a 30-year-old, I was unlawfully abducted from the street by masked and armed agents for being a co-author in a school op-ed at Tufts Daily that advocated for Palestinian human rights. I was sent to a for-profit ICE prison thousands of miles away from school and the community I’d built in Boston, not to mention thousands of miles away from my family in Turkey. The experience has been profoundly harmful to me, even as an adult. Despite the immense care, love, and support from my community, there has still not been a single day when I have felt safe walking the streets again—not even on my way home or to school. It’s not just the moment of abduction that is terrifying, but also where one will go and the inhumane treatment they may face that cannot be considered developmentally appropriate for any single child. Research suggests that interacting with the immigration system poses harm to children’s long-term development. Previous personal accounts indicate that suffering continues throughout the lifetime.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again. I worry about how they will grow up and carry this adverse experience for a lifetime. Interacting with immigration enforcement not only poses developmental risk to children detained in those shameful places for longer periods of time, but also to children (including citizen children) whose parents are detained at the for-profit ICE prisons. In the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully detained, I met countless mothers who cried everyday longing for their children. I met mothers in the deportation process whose hearts were shattered when their children were taken into foster care. I listened as some mothers tried to speak with their children on tablets, only to have officers order them to close the tablets or take them away, leaving their children in tears. I met mothers whose babies were taken from them just weeks after birth. I met with a pregnant mom waiting for her deportation. Her children are American citizens.
But these cruel immigration raids aren’t only harming immigrant children or children with immigrant parents. The experience also affects classmates who are waiting for their detained peers to return. These same children are trying to make sense of what they see on news reports of kids being detained, of disappearing classmates, students, and adults on the street during ICE raids. Children and their teachers are being taken from their communities, leaving classrooms and communities in fear. There are accounts of BIPOC and immigrant children being bullied at school.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
I hope there is an end to family detention so that these parents and young children can proceed with their cases while living in their communities, going to school, getting medical treatment, and playing with their friends. Too many children are facing detention because of ICE’s rampant operations. But detention is no place for a child. It’s cruel and unnecessary. We can all take action, whether that means raising our voices to demand an end to child detention, or simply educating ourselves on how current immigration policies are impacting children.
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