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.”
The facility is located in the middle of the Everglades, a vast swampland estimated to hold more than 200,000 alligators — making escape an incredibly dangerous endeavor. The idea of Alligator Alcatraz was first proposed by Florida officials as recently as June. The Trump administration — which has made immigration enforcement a top policy property — quickly got behind project and confirmed federal funding would go toward it.
The Everglades project is just the latest in the Trump administration’s work to bolster migrant detention bed space.
While signing into law the Laken Riley Act in January, Trump revealed he would be ordering the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to construct a facility at Guantanamo Bay — a Naval Base in eastern Cuba known for housing suspected terrorists — to detain as many of 30,000 illegal migrants and other noncitizens amenable to deportation.
Migrant detention will also see its funding bolstered exponentially after the signing of the Big, Beautiful Bill on July 4.
Roughly $170 billion in funding from the mega-bill has been designated for immigration and border enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council. Over $45 billion is specifically earmarked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention space, which will open up tens of thousands of new beds at ICE facilities across the country.
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