Immigrant detention beds may be maxed out as Trump moves to deport 'millions and millions'

Santa FE, N.M. 23 Jan — President Donald Trump’s inauguration-day executive orders and promises of mass deportations of “millions and millions” of people will hinge on securing money for detention centers.

The Trump administration has not publicly said how many immigration detention beds it needs to achieve its goals, or what the cost will be. However, an estimated 11.7 million people are living in the U.S. illegally, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently has the budget to detain only about 41,000 people.

The government would need additional space to hold people while they are processed and arrangements are made to remove them, sometimes by plane. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the daily cost for a bed for one adult is about $165.

Just one piece of Trump's plan, a bill known as the Laken Riley Act that Congress has passed, would require at least $26.9 billion to ramp up capacity at immigrant detention facilities to add 110,000 beds, according to a recent memo from DHS.

That bill — named after a Georgia nursing student whose murder by a Venezuelan man last year became a rallying cry for Trump’s White House campaign — expands requirements for immigration authorities to detain anyone in the country illegally who is accused of theft and violent crimes.

Trump also is deploying troops to try and stop all illegal entry at the southern U.S. border. He triggered the Alien Enemies Act to combat cartels. The rarely used 1798 law allows the president to deport anyone who is not a U.S. citizen and is from a country with which there is a “declared war” or a threatened or attempted “invasion or predatory incursion.”

Detention infrastructure also will be stretched by Trump's ban of a practice known as “catch and release” that allows some migrants to live in the U.S. while awaiting immigration court proceedings, in favor of detention and deportation.

ICE uses facilities around the U.S. to hold immigrants

ICE currently detains immigrants at its processing centers and at privately operated detention facilities, along with local prisons and jails under contracts that can involve state and city governments. It has zero facilities geared toward detention of immigrant families, who account for roughly one-third of arrivals on the southern U.S. border.

“There’s a limitation on the number of beds available to ICE,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama. “There are only so many local jails you contract with, private vendors who have available beds. And if the administration wants to make a major uptick in detention capacity, that’s going to require the construction of some new facilities.”

Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S. border with Mexico leverages the U.S. military to shore up mass deportations and provide “appropriate detention space.” The Pentagon also might provide air transportation support to DHS.

Private investors are betting on a building boom, driving up stock prices at the top two immigration detention providers — Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based CoreCivic.

A fast-track budgeting maneuver in Congress called “reconciliation” could provide more detention funding as soon as April. At the same time, the Texas state land commissioner has offered the federal government a parcel of rural ranchland along the U.S.-Mexico border for deportation facilities.

Where could ICE add detention space?

The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that ICE is considering an expansion of immigrant detention space across at least eight states, in locations ranging from Leavenworth, Kansas, to the outskirts of major immigrant populations in New York City and San Francisco, said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney for the group and its National Prison Project.

The ACLU sued for access to correspondence from private detention providers after ICE solicited feedback last year on a potential expansion. Related emails from detention providers suggest the possible redeployment of a tent facility at Carrizo Springs, Texas, previously used to detain immigrant children, and the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas — one of two major immigrant family detention centers that the Biden administration phased out in 2021.

“Under the Trump administration, Homeland Security will be working to try to detain everyone that it possibly can and also expand its detention capacity footprint well beyond what is currently available in the United States at this point,” Cho said.

Cho added that Congress ultimately holds the purse strings for immigrant detention infrastructure — and that the Pentagon's involvement under Trump's emergency edict — warrants a debate.

“How does this detract from our own military's readiness?" she said. "Does the military actually have the capacity to provide appropriate facilities for detention of immigrants?”

Using the military

Advocates for immigrant rights are warning against a hyper-militarized police state that could vastly expand the world's largest detention system for migrants. Immigrant detention facilities overseen by ICE have struggled broadly to comply with some federal standards for care, hindering safety for staff and detainees, a Homeland Security Department inspector general found during 17 unannounced inspections from 2020-2023.

During Trump’s first administration, he authorized the use of military bases to detain immigrant children -- including Army installations at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Goodfellow Air Force Base. In 2014, Obama temporarily relied on military bases to detain immigrant children while ramping up privately operated family detention centers to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American families caught crossing the border illegally.

U.S. military bases have been used repeatedly since the 1970s to accommodate the resettlement of waves of immigrants fleeing Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.