Inside ICE’s Plan to Build Detention ‘Mega Centers’

0:00Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London with the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets you're hearing it while it happens It's smart, calm and to the point And it fits into your morning You can find new episodes of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris On Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts

1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Questions are mounting about what's happening inside Camp East Montana. Another person has died in immigration custody on the Fort Bliss Army Base in El Paso, Texas. It's the third death reported in just a month and a half at Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, which is the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S. Immigration and customs enforcement officials said in a statement that Victor Manuel Diaz, an immigrant from Nicaragua, appears to have died by suicide. Advocates say the facility has proven to be inhumane and continue to call for it to be shut down.

1:45DHS has defended the facility, saying ICE makes everyone's safety and health a top priority. Detention facilities like the one at Fort Bliss have been under scrutiny from human rights advocates as ICE detains record numbers of immigrants and ramps up enforcement tactics on the ground in cities like Minneapolis. Anger and outrage in the streets of Minneapolis over the fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. But as ICE continues making arrests across the U.S., even larger facilities could be on the way. The agency currently has more than 70 ,000 people in immigration detention, according to CBS News.

2:21And to meet the Trump administration's goals of deporting a million people a year, ICE is now looking to another kind of facility, large converted warehouses. Under previous administrations, many of the people who have been arrested, who are being arrested, were not typically targets of immigration enforcement activity. And so now that this administration has decided to cast such a wide net, that has required all of this jail space, which is quite expensive. Bloomberg reporters Fola Akinebi and Sophie Alexander have been following ICE's plans to expand its detention capacity. These are the facilities we're talking about now, large, empty warehouses that contractors are looking to turn into jails.

3:07It's a shift that's backed by a new influx of funding for ICE. The agency got$45 billion for detention in President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill just last year. But the rapid expansion that ICE is proposing has raised questions about which companies will be awarded contracts to convert those facilities and how they will manage them. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. I mean, we're talking about detaining human beings in tents or in warehouses at a large scale. Again, like the sizes of these jails that they're proposing in some of these warehouses, it's more beds than in entire county jail populations.

3:54So whenever you're doing something at this scale that's involving human beings, I think that there is a concern around safety.

4:08I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, I talk to Bloomberg reporters Fola Akinebi and Sophie Alexander about ISIS' push to expand its detention capacity, the lucrative government contracts that companies are vying for, and the mounting concerns around conditions for the people being detained.

4:33In the streets of Minneapolis over the past few weeks, we've been seeing ISIS escalating arrest tactics on the ground. But you both have also been covering ISIS parallel efforts to open more detention facilities to meet the Trump administration's aggressive deportation goals. What has the administration been doing over the past year to expand its detention capacity? First of all, the administration has been trying to massively, and in some ways it has massively, expanded its ability to detain immigrants. The administration talked about plans to deport up to a million people a year, right? That's the goal.

5:13At the outset of 2025. At the outset of 2025. And to do that takes a lot of jail space, more jail space than ICE as an agency has ever had, right? But if you look back under Biden, over his four-year term, the immigration detention capacity never really exceeded or at its peak was 39 ,000 people, just over 39 ,000 people. Almost immediately, the Trump administration, after taking office the second time, really pushed to massively expand its detention space. And so right now, there are more than 70 ,000 people in ICE custody. That's a record. And in order to house all those people, what did the administration have to go from, you know, detaining maybe 40 ,000 people to over 70 ,000 people?

5:58First, they turned to these sort of methods that they had been used to working with private prison companies to look for unused jail space to find more beds for immigrants who have been detained. But after that, that's just not enough. They're really desperate for more space. They claim that they need 100 ,000 beds to be able to meet their goals of detaining a million people a year. And so they had to pivot and look for other ways to build more detention, which is why they started using soft-sided facilities or tents. And they started looking to build more tent camps. What have the conditions been like in these more temporary facilities that ICE has been erecting over the past year?

6:50There's been wide reporting about how horrific the conditions are in some of these facilities. And when the conditions are poor and when the conditions are bad and they're jail-like, right, people will give up their cases. People will ask to be deported. And we've seen cases like this where people give up their case and say, well, I don't want to fight the government anymore. Because, again, these cases can take years and you don't want to spend years in some of these facilities. And again, in order for the administration to achieve its goals of mass deportation to do a million deportations a year, they actually have to be quite efficient, right?

7:20Like they have to be getting people out of facilities quickly. I talked to one person who used to work in this world who said you would have to be getting people out in under a month. You would have to be moving people through the system and deporting them. That's quite hard to do. And as far as I'm aware, the administration has not achieved that in mass. Well, Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill, which he signed into law last year, allocated a lot more money to ICE's detention expansion, right? $45 billion. How has that changed the agency's strategy and changed the kinds of facilities they're looking to invest in?

7:54I mean,$45 billion is so much money. And we should just say that we have not seen that money spent because it is not easy to contract out with the government. It's not easy to build new jails quickly. And so I think the pivot to tents was supposed to be in an effort for speed. It was to try to build more jail space quickly. And you actually saw references to soft-sided facilities for immigration detention in Project 2025. So this was part of the initial plan. I think what you saw with the Everglades facility in Florida, that's referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, and then later with the facility at Fort Bliss, these things are just not meant to be turned into jails.

8:52It costs so much money to erect these things in the first place, let alone to detain thousands of people in them. Not to mention the conditions inside these facilities are abysmal, according to reports from human rights groups and other news outlets. But it seems like because of all of that, because they haven't been able to contract out for enough bed spaces in these tent facilities, that's why they're turning their attention to warehouses now. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn't respond to questions about conditions in immigration detention facilities or their plans to expand.

9:35You alluded to this already, Sophie, but Fola, we're seeing ICE pivot from erecting temporary structures to converting existing structures into detention facilities. They're looking at warehouses now. Why? What is behind that shift? Is it the new money? Is it the lack of space? I think it's a combination of these things, right? They're looking for sort of hard-sided facilities, right? Like there's not enough empty jail space out there. I mean, I think it also points to the massive amount of money that the agency has at its disposal now. I mean, that it can even carry out a plan like this is proof that it has a lot of money to use.

10:14And I want to note as well that this is not the first time a plan like this has been proposed. Years ago under Trump One, according to some of our reporting, a plan like this was proposed. and folks in the agency looked at the plan and decided that it wasn't practical or safe to hold this many people in facilities like this. And so the plan was scrapped. So one of the distinctions you're drawing between sort of the old approach and the new approach is soft versus hard. I'm wondering if you could draw out the difference a little bit more between like a temporary tent structure or even using existing local jails and using warehouses as detention facilities.

10:55What is the material difference there? I think the idea with the soft-sided facilities was we want to do this quickly. And you really could see that from the fact that they were tapping all of these tent companies that usually build base camps for oil companies or they respond after natural disasters like hurricanes. They're the ones who are building these great tent cities where, you know, there's all these emergency services, rescue services, things like that that are set up. And from the very beginning, the people that we spoke with who have been looking at immigration detention for a very long time had a lot of concerns about whether tents could ever meet immigration detention standards that are nationally set.

11:43And I think that the administration is learning that this plan isn't working out as it had hoped, because, for example, the facility at Fort Bliss, the initial plan was for that to be a 5 ,000 bed facility. As far as we know, they haven't built that out yet to that extent. I think at this point, there are as many as 3 ,000 people who are detained in the facility right now. And again, over the past month and a half, you've seen three people die there. So I think that the pivot to hard-sided facilities with the idea around warehouses is, well, this is an actual building. At least that's got to be better.

12:26But I think that similar concerns arise when you have what's essentially an empty shell of a building that was not built to hold people, let alone thousands of people. A traditional jail facility is purpose created, right? It's created to detain people. It has the beds, it has the showers, it has the lockup, it has the health area, it has all of these things built in. It's not clear to us, and I think some of the folks we've talked to as well, it's not clear to them either what or how they're going to convert these, what is essentially a blank shell into a jail space.

13:09So just how does ICE plan to get warehouse detention facilities up and running? And what kind of hurdles could the agency's proposal face? That's coming up.

13:33ICE has aggressive deportation targets. The Trump administration has set a goal of one million deportations a year. To hit that target, the agency says it needs more space to house the people it detains. And I've been talking to Bloomberg reporters Sophie Alexander and Fola Akinebi about ICE's plans for a new kind of detention facility. Huge converted warehouses. What kind of contractors might be submitting these proposals to convert warehouses into ICE facilities? You know, as soon as the reconciliation bill passed and ICE was given all these funds, there's been like a feeding frenzy and a level of excitement in these industries about the potential windfall, right?

14:16Like the potential to make a lot of money. And so we're seeing defense companies orient themselves around this. We're seeing tent companies and companies that provide these like oil and emergency service base camps. We're seeing traditional private prison operators. We're seeing, I'm trying to think. New companies. We're seeing new companies that are being purpose built just to try to go for this work. And so it's a wide range of folks who are reaching for this. And to put into the context, like the amount of money that is on the table here is more than many of these companies have ever seen in, you know, their years of contracting with the government.

14:55So it really is, to Fulha's point, a feeding frenzy. It's just people are drawn to this. I want to talk more about the way the administration is going to secure these contracts and choose who does this building. What stood out to you about the way the government is running this process? So the administration started by trying to run these contracts through ICE because they are essentially, they're going to be ICE detention facilities. But that got stalled. So then later in the year, later last year, the administration started going through a process with the Department of Defense, something called WEXMAC, which is this typical Defense Department contracting vehicle that they use for all sorts of things all around the world.

15:47And because it's run through the Department of Defense, there is more of a delay in what information is shared. So it's harder to know what is happening real time with the contracting process and who is a winning what when, which means, you know, who is going to be building out these facilities and where. Have we been seeing any pushback to the administration's efforts? Like on the ground in Minneapolis after the killing of Renee Good, we're seeing polling shift slightly, seeing people questioning the extent of ISIS tactics. What kind of pushback is the administration getting, if any, on this expansion plan?

16:29With a facility like Fort Bliss, it's on an army base. It's sort of sequestered from people's day-to-day lives. I think with this latest proposal for these sites, these warehouse sites, which seem to include locations across the country that are much closer to towns, to population centers, to, I think, people's everyday lives, we've already started to see pushback. The Washington Post reported some of the proposed locations. And folks in those towns have already said, well, we don't want this here, right? Again, you know, the Fort Bliss facility is the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S.

17:04There's, on a daily basis, like an average of 2 ,900 people there. What's being proposed with these warehouse facilities? We're talking about 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 ,000-person facilities. It's interesting to see the list of municipalities where ICE is considering these warehouse facilities. But you talk to people in these towns and it doesn't matter what their politics are. They do not want a jail, a 20-minute walk from the school. They do not feel like they have the sewage capacity or the water resources to be able to send to an 8 ,500-bed detention facility. So you've already been seeing protests in some of these.

17:46towns against the proposed detention facility. And these are, again, these are just proposals. There's no ground that's been broken yet. We're only aware of one facility that's officially been purchased by ICE. But even still, people do not want these in their towns, ideology aside. As we think through the implications of ICE's rapid detention expansion, I want to bring the conversation back to Fort Bliss. Sophie, you've alluded to some of the questions and the concerns about the conditions there. Over the weekend, another death was reported at the facility. What does this tell you about the risks of ICE's rapid expansion and what we might see next?

18:31We are seeing this administration with a goal of deporting a million people a year and building out 100 ,000 beds, there's just so much urgency in this that I think there are questions around the safety and how much attention is being paid to these things like the National Immigration Detention Standards. I've covered jail and prison conditions in the criminal legal context, and I think what you find is that as these facilities become larger and larger And as you deal with issues with crowding, safety becomes a serious challenge. And so as the administration pushes for larger and larger facilities, it just sort of follows that like safety incidents sort of follow that.

19:17Right. And Bliss is the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S. And still, the administration has not been able to expand it to the capacity that was originally proposed, 5000 beds. I think it's extremely challenging to open facilities that are this large and to run them, to run them well and to run them safely.

19:41This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

20:01Thank you.