ICE holds people in disgusting conditions. Now it's turning warehouses into camps [View all]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/17/ice-holds-people-in-disgusting-conditions-now-its-turning-warehouses-into-camps

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There is a vast building, reportedly the size of seven football fields, in Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix; ICE bought it for $70m. Another building, along the southern border in San Antonio, Texas, was valued at $37m; it’s 640,000 sq ft. In January, ICE bought a warehouse in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, not far outside of Philadelphia, for $87.4m. In Williamsport, Maryland, outside Hagerstown, the cost of a facility on a nearly 54-acre plot was $102m.

These are massive, industrial spaces, built for holding goods to be shipped elsewhere. Warehouses are drafty and difficult to heat, hard-floored and high-ceilinged, not meant for human habitation. But the Trump administration is aiming to convert them into vast detention camps for immigrants. Some of the buildings could house as many as 9,000 people at a time. The rapid slew of new warehouse purchases by deportation agencies brings to mind the words of the ICE director, Todd Lyons, who told a conference last year that he wanted the effort to operate “like Amazon Prime, for human beings”.

ICE currently incarcerates about 70,000 people on any given night, holding them across 224 detention facilities. The number has nearly doubled over the past year. But in recent weeks, as the Trump administration looks to accelerate its mass deportation agenda, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been scouting and purchasing huge facilities. With the $45bn in ICE funding that Congress appropriated in the “big, beautiful bill”, the agency now aims to use these new warehouses to capture and imprison vastly greater numbers of men, women and children.

The new warehouse strategy represents an apparent shift in immigrant concentration and detention practices by the Trump administration, which has previously relied on smaller facilities. But the administration has already come under fire for the conditions in which it is housing the migrants it has captured – including those at a sprawling tent facility in Fort Bliss, Texas, and in the hastily assembled “Alligator Alcatraz” tent camp in the Everglades – as well as for the unsafe, unsanitary, diseased conditions reported in prisons like the Krome detention center in Miami and the infamous facility in Dilley, Texas, one of several that houses children. “These kids are very traumatized, many of them despondent and depressed,” said the US representative Joaquin Castro after visiting Dilley.

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