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ICE holds people in disgusting conditions. Now it’s turning warehouses into camps | Moira Donegan

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.

Still, the extent of the abuses inside ICE’s detention camps is not well understood, in part because the Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to limit oversight. ICE has repeatedly refused members of Congress access to the facilities, in defiance of the law, and has gone to court to prevent House members from visiting the camps as they are entitled to do. It is worth asking what the DHS is trying to hide.

Reporters, too, have managed only partial, sporadic and limited access to information about what is happening in the camps, though some immigrants imprisoned there have tried to make their suffering known: in California, one captive inside the Otay Mesa detention facility wrote a note detailing allegations of widespread illness and inadequate food inside. “It’s cold here, the food is very poor, for 290 [days] we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit,” they wrote. “We’re in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We’re constantly sick.” To smuggle their account of life in the detention center to the outside world, the prisoner tied their note to a lotion bottle and threw it over the camp fence.

Merriam-Webster defines a concentration camp as “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard”. By that definition, ICE already operates a sprawling network of concentration camps where captured immigrants, the largest group of whom have committed no crime, are housed in what countless accounts describe as inhumane conditions, designed to degrade, hurt, sicken and punish them, despite Trump administration claims that ICE facilities are held to “national detention standards”. With its new warehouse purchases, the Trump administration is seeking to expand and intensify this archipelago of torture. Mass illness, abuse, immiseration and death will be the inevitable result. How will we live with the shame?

To their credit, many local communities in areas surrounding the newly purchased warehouses are organizing swiftly and powerfully against the camps, objecting to them on moral grounds. Protests have erupted, with locals packing municipal government meetings and picketing in the streets, expressing outrage at the building purchases and pressuring local officials to try to block the facilities. They have had some help from Democratic elected officials. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland joined a large protest against the proposed Hagerstown camp, and said the facility would “further fuel the Trump administration’s cruel and inhumane immigration agenda”.

Erin Mendenhall, the Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City, sent a letter to the owners of a warehouse ICE was considering on the outskirts of her town to warn them that any use by ICE would violate local ordinances; she has called ICE’s aggressive and violent enforcement operations in other cities “utterly deplorable”.

In Kansas City, a Democratic county legislator, Manny Abarca, uploaded a video online that showed federal officers harassing him in his car when he went to inspect a local facility that was being considered as a potential ICE camp. After the video went viral, the local city council overwhelmingly passed a six-year moratorium on approvals for detention facilities. “They need to understand that you are not going to sell out our community for short-term profit,” one council member said.

Increasingly, the camps are being opposed even by Republicans, and even by those who do not seem to hold a principled opposition to the Trump administration’s mass ethnic cleansing agenda. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, met with the owners of a warehouse close to a largely Latino school district that had been targeted for acquisition by ICE, and succeeded in getting the property holders to back out of a deal with the DHS. “I commend the owners for their decision and thank them on behalf of the people of Oklahoma City,” Holt said in a statement. “As Mayor, I ask that every single property owner in Oklahoma City exhibit the same concern for our community in the days ahead.” Even Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi – hardly a softhearted immigration dove concerned with human rights –wrote to the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, to ask the agency to back off plans to open a camp in his state. “I support the enforcement of immigration law,” he emphasized, but said that the detention center would strain the local economy and infrastructure.

He is not opposing the detention center out of the goodness of his heart: he is opposing it because of the vast opposition, both locally and nationwide, to the network of camps that the Trump administration is building. Those who want to spend taxpayer money and insult American values to pursue this project of mass concentration and ethnic cleansing are relying on non-immigrant Americans to be deferential, quiet and scared in the face of what is being done to their migrant friends and neighbors. This is one small ember of hope for this country: it is not working.