How Trump Used the Criminal System to Massively Expand Immigration Detention

This story is part of “Trump Two: Six Months In,” our series taking stock of the administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and criminal justice.

Over the last six months, Rodney Taylor has watched the Trump administration’s explosion in immigration enforcement from a detention cell in rural Georgia.

Taylor, a 47-year-old who had both of his legs amputated as a child, came to the United States from Liberia when he was 2 years old for medical care. In January, he was arrested and detained at Stewart Detention Center, where he has witnessed the facility become more crowded, and conditions get worse. Without enough beds, he said, men slept in common areas. Without access to enough toilets, he said they defecated in the showers. He says he has lost weight, because he can’t get enough nutritious food.

In a statement, Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private company that runs Stewart, denied that detainees had to defecate in showers and said they are provided with three nutritious meals a day.

Across the country, civil rights attorneys and detained immigrants report similarly dire conditions, as the number of people in immigrant detention has skyrocketed since President Donald Trump took office, reaching a historic high point. Statistics released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late July showed the agency holding nearly 57,000 people, a 45% increase since Trump’s inauguration.

This rapid growth means the Trump administration must quickly find places to put people. The U.S. has a gargantuan network of prisons and jails, and in the last six months, that infrastructure, built for the criminal system, has been redeployed to accomplish Trump’s immigration goals.

In some cases, that has meant repurposing empty beds or reopening facilities that were shuttered during recent criminal justice reforms. And now the administration plans to make the detention infrastructure even bigger. In July, Trump signed into law his tax cut and policy bill, or what he dubbed his “big beautiful bill,” which allocated an additional $45 billion for immigration detention centers. If spent evenly until the funds expire in about four years, this would add more than twice what ICE spends on detention each year, all but guaranteeing detention capacity will continue to grow.

The Marshall Project analyzed ICE detention data provided by the Deportation Data Project and processed by the Vera Institute of Justice and found that from late May to late June, ICE had used 432 facilities to hold immigrants, up from 315 over the month leading up to Trump’s second inauguration. Since Jan. 20, ICE has put people in at least 45 facilities that had not detained immigrants in more than a decade of available data.

ICE did not respond to questions for this story.

Here are some of the strategies that the Trump administration has used to blur the dividing line between the criminal system and the immigration system during its first six months to detain more and more immigrants.

Using federal jails and prisons

Two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, ICE agents pulled up to the federal jail in Los Angeles, which holds people awaiting trial on criminal charges, with busloads of migrants. An employee at the facility was alarmed and wrote a statement that was shared with U.S. senators. “Employees have been told that they can’t turn them away and have to make room to house them,” the statement said. “We have not been trained or employed for this purpose, and we don’t know what these individuals are being detained for.”

Since then, the number of people being held in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities for ICE has swelled from a few dozen, to more than 1,300, according to Benjamin O’Cone, a spokesman for the bureau. As of July, they were being held at federal prisons and jails in Miami, Atlanta, Kansas, Philadelphia, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, though no longer at the jail in Los Angeles.

Once in federal prison facilities, detainees find themselves in a system ill-equipped to track them, creating havoc for attorneys and family members seeking to reach them. One attorney representing people in a remote New Hampshire prison said that for months it was virtually impossible to set up phone calls with clients there, and that lack of access to lawyers delayed and interfered with immigration proceedings. This attorney asked not to be named because they fear further jeopardizing their access to clients.

Kenny Castillo, president of the union local representing bureau employees at the jail in Miami, said immigration detainees spend 21 hours each day in their cells, because the jail is too understaffed. Despite holding hundreds of new immigrant detainees, Castillo said the jail received no additional training and no new staff, forcing officers to be spread even thinner. Cooks and teachers are now being called upon to guard units, he said.

For years, the Bureau of Prisons worked closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE, and federal prisons often held immigration detainees. But the practice waned during the Obama administration. When the first Trump administration sent 1,600 ICE detainees to the federal prison in Victorville in 2018, the staff was caught unprepared, and the effort was widely condemned as a disaster.

“When you have an influx of all these detainees, they come from all over the world, they have all these medical conditions and needs,” said John Kostelnik, who was at the time president of the union representing Bureau of Prisons employees at Victorville. “We had scabies outbreaks, shingles outbreaks, we had things I had never even heard of, but we didn’t have the staff to address it.”

Reopening shuttered facilities

A federal judge once called Leavenworth Detention Center “an absolute hell hole.” In a 2021 letter to federal officials, the ACLU of Kansas pointed to stabbings, suicides and homicides that occurred with “alarming frequency.”

The facility, operated by CoreCivic under a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, was shuttered in 2021, after the Biden administration issued an executive order banning the use of private prisons by the Justice Department. But the building remained standing, and CoreCivic wants to reopen it to hold ICE detainees.

Other facilities have gone through a similar cycle.

The state prison in California City, California, was closed in 2024 and is now set to become the largest immigration detention center in the state.

The privately run D. Ray James Correctional Facility in southern Georgia, which closed in 2020, is also slated to reopen as an immigrant detention center. It will merge with a nearby immigration processing center to create a 3,000-bed facility, one of the largest in the country.

Federal officials are also considering repurposing the prison in Dublin, California, nicknamed the “rape club,” after widespread and pervasive staff sexual assault against the women housed there. The facility also had major problems with its infrastructure, including mold and asbestos, and eventually closed.

Criminal justice experts like Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, said that when shuttered facilities are resurrected, it underscores why constructing new buildings or expanding old ones can be treacherous. Once a prison is built, there are business motives to find ways to put more people in it, for one purpose or another.

Expanding contracts with private companies for more space

Even though Biden ended private prison contracts for the federal prison system, he left them in place for ICE, and many detained immigrants are in facilities run by private companies.

Companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic have secured new or expanded agreements for immigrant detention across the country, including in California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan and New Jersey. During an earnings call this spring after soaring stock prices, CoreCivic President Damon Hininger celebrated what the Trump administration has meant for business, saying that “never in our 42-year company have we had so much activity and demand for our services.”

Many of the facilities have troubling histories. CoreCivic’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, came under fire during the first Trump administration because it housed children separated from their parents; a toddler died in 2018 shortly after being released. The center was closed last year, but CoreCivic has now reopened it to hold families and children, and in court filings, civil rights lawyers say their clients have had poor access to medical care, food and education for children.

Paying for local jails’ space

Local jails across the country are detaining immigrants, sometimes with the promise of rewards, or the threat of punishments.

Thousands of counties operate their own jails. Sheriffs and other local officials sometimes rent out beds to other counties, or to federal agencies like the U.S. Marshals Service and ICE. And to many sheriffs, federal detention contracts are a financial boon. The Marshall Project identified more than 150 local jails that are together holding more than 6,600 detainees for ICE.

“It’s easier to get sheriffs and counties to sign on to holding people for ICE than it is to build brand new facilities,” said Austin Kocher, a professor who studies immigration at Syracuse University.

In Ohio, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones told a local news station that he is doing his part to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants — and that holding them in his jail helps his bottom line. Similarly, Sheriff Josh McAllister of Winn Parish, Louisiana, told The Washington Post that profits from ICE underwrite other programs: “Our office goes out and checks on the elderly. I don’t charge our schools to provide resource officers. Because of that facility, I can do that.”

In some places, sheriffs are required by law or pressured through other means to hold immigrants for ICE. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a law in 2022 requiring counties with detention centers to cooperate with ICE. The Trump administration has sued the city of Los Angeles and the state of New York to try to force their cooperation, and has, in other instances, threatened to withhold federal funding from places that won’t cooperate with ICE.

But according to immigrants and attorneys, county jails are often woefully unequipped to deal with immigrant detainees, many of whom arrive traumatized from the treatment in their home countries that led them to flee.

“The vast majority of sheriffs — they don’t have enough beds for the people they have,” said Patrick Royal, a spokesman for the National Sheriffs Association. Even among sheriffs who support Trump’s deportation efforts, Royal said he often hears sheriffs say, “I barely have enough people to run my jail on a daily basis.”

Many jails that ICE ended contracts with during the Biden administration due to poor conditions, such as the Glades County Detention Center, in Florida, are now holding detainees again. In 2022, ICE announced it would stop sending people to the Etowah County Jail, in Alabama, citing “a long history of serious deficiencies identified during facility inspections.” The jail became infamous in 2021 after a pregnant woman detained there was forced to give birth to her baby alone in a shower. Since March, ICE has resumed sending detainees there; by June, there were often over 100 immigrants detained there.

Supercharging existing facilities

The Trump administration has been able to quickly detain a growing number of migrants because of the foundation built and maintained by past administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Some of the facilities with the largest growth in the number of detainees since his inauguration have been in operation for years.

Stewart Detention Center opened in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 2006. Since the beginning of the new Trump administration, the number of immigrants ICE has detained at Stewart has risen sharply. From inauguration day to late June, the population of Stewart increased by more than 600 people.

Rodney Taylor has been detained at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, since January. He came to the United States for medical care when he was 2 years old. Courtesy of Mildred Pierre

Taylor, the man who came here as a child and is now detained at Stewart, said that as the facility became more crowded, it’s been hard to get medical care. He said he had to wait a long time to get his prosthetics fixed and has been waiting months to get a tooth pulled.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Stewart detention center, said Taylor has an upcoming dental visit and that medical services at the facility meet a high standard of care. However, Wired reported that as the population swelled at Stewart, 911 calls for medical emergencies at the facility have also spiked.

Amilcar Valencia is executive director at El Refugio, an organization that provides help to people who are visiting loved ones at Stewart. He said they’ve gone from helping about 20 families in a weekend, to regularly serving 40 to 60.

“The system was already built, and what [Trump] is doing is just to use it to its max capacity, using the tools of the system to inflict pain,” Valencia said.