Dozens Of New Migrant Detention Centers Spawn As Trump Admin’s Deportation Agenda Marches On

The Trump administration is expanding migrant detention centers across the country as it seeks to bolster the resources needed to carry out its massive deportation agenda.

Through various agreements with local jails and private contractors, the Trump administration has been able to dramatically expand migrant detention capacity across the U.S., according to government figures analyzed by Bloomberg. Altogether, around 60 additional federal, state and local jails and prisons have started holding newly-apprehended migrants facing removal since President Donald Trump re-entered office in January.

The newly-established detention centers include five operated by Federal Bureau of Prisons, four run by private contractors such as GEO Group and CoreCivic and two sites at Guantanamo Bay, according to Bloomberg. Based on daily average population data, these facilities together held an estimated 5,600 individuals between May 27 and June 9.

Adequate detention space is crucial for the Trump administration as it pursues the wide-scale apprehensions and deportations of illegal migrants.

“Very soon this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” Trump said earlier in July during a press conference for the opening of Alligator Alcatraz, a state-run migrant detention center in southern Florida built to hold thousands of migrant detainees.

“We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation and a lot of the people are self-deporting back to their country where they came from,” Trump said of the detention center. ” We took the FEMA money that Joe Biden allocated to pay for the luxury hotel rooms where he was paying hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City and we used it to build this project.”