Jonathan P. Baird

In the just-passed Trump budget bill, Congress allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. That represents a massive increase in detention spending. ICE is getting 13 years of current funding which has to be spent within 4 years. With this money, ICE becomes the largest domestic police force in the U.S..

This windfall gives the agency the money to tremendously expand jailing capacity. They plan to double detention beds and carceral space while hiring 10,000 new agents.

A police state requires material underpinnings and the money is now there for its establishment. The Trump regime is creating a new prison-industrial complex where many thousands will be detained in a national network of concentration camps. They will need to fill the beds and private prison companies have a financial incentive in making that happen.

No legislative or judicial body has put a stop or even a slow down to this emerging behemoth. The failure of checks and balances exemplified by both Congress and the Supreme Court’s acquiescence with Executive Branch overreach has allowed us to reach this point. The Trump regime has been wrongly using private data gathered from federal agencies like the IRS to confirm migrants’ home addresses.

The lines between federal, state and local law enforcement are getting blurred by the Trump regime as all are being recruited to carry out immigration enforcement. Law enforcement professionalism is being replaced by a fascist mentality steeped in xenophobia, sadism and hate. It is common to see ICE agents telling people they stop that they have no rights while demanding access to their devices.

ICE is also increasing its surveillance capacity. The Washington Post has reported that ICE is sharply increasing the number of immigrants they are shackling with GPS-enabled ankle monitors. The goal is to bypass due process, arrest huge numbers and fast track a high quota of immigrants out of the country.

The Department of Defense just awarded a Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics, a $1.26 billion contract to establish and operate a 5,000 bed short-term detention facility near the Mexican border at Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. It would be the largest such facility in the country.

Because they lack the capacity for the detention space they desire, the Trump regime is looking for detention space outside the world of already-existing prisons and jails. They are following the Project 2025 recommendation for the use of “low level temporary capacity (for example, tents) once permanent space is full”.

Alligator Alcatraz is the tent model in practice. Instead of jail structures with walls, floors and insulation, tents will cover chain-link cages crammed full with bunk beds and surrounded by barbed wire.

Fort Bliss is not the only military base where the Trump regime intends to place immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has told Congress that the Department of Homeland Security plans to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana for immigration detentions on a “temporary” basis. Trump himself has suggested that 30,000 immigrants could be detained at Guantanamo.

Considering the cruelty of the Trump regime, inhumane conditions for detainees are a reasonable expectation and Human Rights Watch has already released a report showing physical abuse, medical neglect and unsafe living conditions at three Florida detention facilities.

Human Rights Watch found officers at these facilities were often abusive to those being held. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. One man wrote in the report:

“We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”

One guard who worked at Alligator Alcatraz and quit after two weeks said:

“The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes, They give you bug spray but that still doesn’t help.”

The tents at Alligator Alcatraz are flood-prone and sewage back-ups have resulted in cages flooded with feces. Detainees have reported worms in their food. Authorities have been denying media access and have illegally limited Congress people from inspecting. They have not been allowing lawyers to meet with clients. This is a retreat from any constitutional standard.

The idea that these facilities are being set up to protect national security against an invasion is absurd. There is no invasion as the Southern border has been effectively sealed. Trump’s campaign against immigrants is targeted on folks in the interior U.S. and it is based on the Big Lie that immigrants are more likely to be murderers, rapists or violent perpetrators of crime.

U.S. born citizens are far more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants. Last year, U.S. Border Patrol arrested 17,000 criminal aliens. 29 were for homicide or manslaughter. 221 were for sex crimes. The overwhelming majority were for unlawful entry into the country. They became “criminals” for violation of civil immigration law.

The massive infrastructure being created is for people who have often lived in the U.S. for decades who have committed no crime. They are being scapegoated. They pose no threat to the American public. Many perform essential jobs in agriculture, construction and home care that others won’t do.They also include such evildoers as graduate students and activists who have dared to exercise First Amendment rights.

The whole enterprise of masked agents in unmarked vehicles using ruses and ploys to gain entry into homes to disappear immigrants and perceived opponents violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. Nothing could be more un-American than creating a police state.

Fortunately, such a state is not consolidated. Americans still have some civil liberties as well as some courts that don’t roll over. Resistance remains absolutely necessary however we can all do it. We did not defeat fascism in World War 2 to passively stand by and watch our rights evaporate less than 100 years later.