Breaking ICE

First up, a little news: This week, the newsletter and podcast will both follow a normal schedule. Next week, however, I’ll be on vacation. Which means there will be no Tuesday or Friday post on August 10 and 14. We’ll start back up as usual on August 18 for the newsletter, with a Next Comes What episode later that week.

At this point, we’re over eighteen months into the second Trump administration. Officials have unleashed countless crises in health, science, medicine, government services, military affairs, foreign affairs, and several other arenas. On top of it all, we’re trapped in a totally unnecessary and unbelievably dangerous war that’s following the plot of Groundhog Day.

In addition to the war, there are, to my mind, three particularly significant horror shows unfolding right now—ones that may be easier for most Americans to ignore or fail to notice than the war. The first, which I try to mention almost every week, is the ongoing death toll of the cuts to USAID. We are on track for millions of deaths to take place before the end of the first Trump administration. The second, which is also easy to miss, despite current conditions, is climate change. The third—which is the focus of this post and the one I write most about on here—is the war on immigrants and the concentration camp system that Trump and Stephen Miller have prioritized expanding exponentially while they are still able to.

So many major shifts have happened, I want to use today’s post to review a timeline of the second Trump administration’s actions attacking immigrants, note the big developments and major shifts that have brought us to where we are now, and to think a little about what’s on the horizon.

But before I get to that, I’d like to take a moment to say that there’s also a lot of good news happening. As each new case comes forward, judges continue to reject the president’s demand that states to the federal government. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet.

Trump second-administration priorities

Looking back to January 2025, by the time Donald Trump and Stephen Miller returned to Washington D.C. to take the reins of government, several goals were already apparent. They had regularly spoken publicly about deporting some 20 million people—a population removal operation on a scale that would completely eclipse some of the most heinous projects in history. And since at least 2019, Stephen Miller had talked at length about building massive tent cities along the border to facilitate the expansion of the existing system.

Those first six months back in office, they didn’t wait to lay any significant groundwork, before moving ahead with the agenda they’d decided on. In March and April, the government cut a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal to outsource detention to CECOT, an infamous prison in El Salvador. The president tried to seize wartime powers that had only ever been executed in limited circumstances, claiming that the U.S. was facing actual invasion by immigrants. The government defied some judicial orders openly while resisting others, in what appeared to be collaboration with a foreign dictator to avoid complying with U.S. law and court decisions.

That spring, the administration also began aggressively arresting and detaining immigrant students, seeming to focus on those who had protested, spoken, or even simply written about the massive death toll among Palestinians as retribution for the terror attack in October 2023. Mahmoud Khalil spent more than three months detained, Leqaa Kordia more than a year. Rumeysa Ozturk was held over an opinion piece she wrote for a student newspaper at Tufts University. These student arrests fused an attack on U.S. Universities with the anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian agendas of the administration.

By June, Trump had seized control of more than four thousand National Guard troops in Los Angeles, asserting a federal law-and-order role for them in circumstances that clearly violated long-settled law. While this might seem extraneous to the question of concentration camp-style detention, the ways that concentration camp regimes federalize control of law enforcement is consistent, making Trump attempts to do so alarming.

July to December 2025

And the start of July, before the first six months of Trump’s second administration had ended, Congress finalized a budget providing $45 billion for immigrant detention. Forty-five billion dollars is a staggering sum—it’s more than 60% larger than the budget of the federal prison system. (For all that I often complain about the ways in which Democrats have failed to stand up for immigrants against the racism and violence that have dominated immigration policy over the last four decades, in this case, not a single Democratic member of Congress in the House voted for the creation and expansion of concentration camps nationwide.)

The rest of 2025 saw broader moves to implement this budget and an attempt to more systematically terrorize not just isolated immigrant communities but Trump’s opponents and the whole country. The same month the budget was passed, a plan leaked on how ICE intended to use this massive increase to expand detention capacity to more than 107,000 beds by the end of 2025. How were they going to do it? Using the kinds of tent-style camps Stephen Miller had been talking about for years: tent cities.

The concentration camp in the Everglades, which Trump and his allies officially named Alligator Alcatraz, opened on July 3, 2025. Camp East Montana opened weeks later at Fort Bliss in Texas. (Fort Bliss had previously been a site of Japanese American detention during World War II.)

Camp East Montana put in place Miller’s apparent vision of tent cities to hold immigrants in horrific conditions on purpose, to terrorize them into signing away their rights to due process. The administration simultaneously sought to engage ad hoc judges with a National Guard JAG background but without immigration experience for the Everglades camp.

Both the tent cities and the ad-hoc end run around normal processes of justice—no matter how problematic the prior everyday processes were—are both significant warning signs when considered in the light of concentration camp history. Nasty, unsafe, or ineffective shelter in deliberately hostile locations has been a hallmark of the early stages of concentration camp regimes before they expand and develop long-term infrastructure. In cases where these sort of camps have been used, health crises have been common, and public outrage over them significant.

Two weeks after the Everglades camp opened, I wrote about the heartless ways that concentration camp administrators had used mosquitoes on detainees in various systems from the twentieth century, and talked about how the Florida was repeating this history. Less than a week later, reports emerged of mosquitoes being weaponized in the same ways at the Everglades camp.

Along with tent cities, the other key element of the hyper-funded detention project could be seen on the streets, in very public terror operations nationwide to secure more detainees to fill the new sites. Operations in Los Angeles and Chicago led to whole communities of noncitizens and citizens alike being terrified to go to the store, to church, or to school.

But neighbors came together, and developed tactics from cutting-edge text alerts to old-fashioned hardware like whistles. They delivered food to people who were isolated. Those seeking to help support the detained kept vigils outside facilities, calling attention to immigrants incarcerated by the government.

By then, Gregory Bovino of the Border Patrol had made himself the face of these brutal operations, defying a judge’s orders and encouraging his men to target protesters and immigrants alike. Before the end of the year, he led Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities.

But the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti galvanized the country against these operations in ways that some prior shootings and deaths hadn’t previously—perhaps because more outlets paid attention to white casualties, and perhaps in part because even those who might have accepted the racist framing of Trump and Miller couldn’t find a way to justify killing protesters who were citizens.

Public backlash followed. Kristi Noem would soon be gone as head of Homeland Security, and Bovino would wind up in a premature retirement, as the government tried to play down the public terror, in order to sidestep massive street demonstrations while quietly pursuing the same violence against immigrants.

Trans corollary aside

When I mentioned the three big crises at the top of this post—USAID deaths, climate change, and concentration camps—I had another one in mind as well: the current, expanding demonization of trans folks. The push to exclude and erase trans people is both hateful and strategic.

My sense is that in both those ways it’s bound up tightly with the demonization of immigrants, the targeting of the homeless, as well as the removal from power of black folks and women. Each of these groups is targeted for removal from any public existence that includes full rights, citizenship, and agency.

My sense is that immigrants are the ones being attacked with the most open violence at present. But the same tactics and dynamics that radicalized a significant minority of Americans against immigrants are now in play against trans people. We’re just witnessing an earlier stage of the demonization. A story out this week about U.S. Army Captain Kai Proce traces the Department of Defense’s systematic removal of trans people from service through shameful hearings in which the outcome has been decided by top brass before each session even begins.

ICE pivots on detention

By early 2026, it was clear that tent cities like the Everglades camp and Camp East Montana were dangerous enough that their harms would create legal jeopardy for the government, as well as public resistance. In Florida, the environmental claims laid by the Miccosukee tribe also presented serious legal issues.

So ICE and DHS began to pivot. In the first days of February, Pablo Manriquez’s reporting for Migrant Insider showed that the Trump administration’s new plan, already in progress, was to use additional expeditionary contracts, this time through the process overseen by the U.S. Navy, to quickly stand up a number of camps domestically. But this dodgy scheme soon ran into problems with elected officials uneasy over the arrangement.

Within weeks, it became clear that the government was going to attempt to re-engineer ICE detention via another route. The idea was to buy existing warehouses and retrofit them into being detention camps. The specs for these proposals recalled some of the worst moments from history.

In the five months since those plans were made public, local movements have shown how powerful they can be in stopping ICE. After nearly a billion dollars was spent by the government to buy up warehouses, as people found out what was planned for their communities, they rose up. In some cases, they even garnered support from Republican elected officials, from the local to the national. In every case, they brought together people who did not want a concentration camp in their backyard.

As effective resistance mounted, Trump’s allies appeared to realize the broad re-engineering they had tried to move forward with wouldn’t go according to plan. Both the tent cities approach and the warehouse approach to massively expanding ICE detention have been failures, though the former has persisted long enough to harm thousands at Camp East Montana and in Florida.

“Alligator Alcatraz” is now shuttered. But despite rumors of plans for Camp East Montana to close after deaths—including one homicide—there, that facility is still open today and remains the largest immigrant detention site in the country.

What lies ahead

Last month, Charles Davis wrote in the Redoubt about a call for companies to develop plans on servicing ICE flights deporting people around the world. The government referenced 1,000-bed facilities for detention of deportees in foreign countries—the creation of a global network of concentration camps.

Around the same time, Project Salt Box reported on a solicitation that had just gone out. The solicitation lays out a construction program worth up to $10 billion—what Salt Box refers to as “a move to build and expand detention space on land the agency owns rather than lease it.” Proposals are due in mid-August, with a two-year window in which to complete construction and begin operations.

If these plans move forward, I expect to see attempts to fight their implementation. But in foreign countries, or on land in the U.S. that the government already owns and controls, it will—at least in some cases—be harder to prevail using the same tactics that have been so successful in fighting the warehouse approach.

In the meantime, we’ve almost reached the one-year anniversary of National Guard troop presence in D.C., with federal plans to extend it through the end of Trump’s rule. Elsewhere, Republican governors have welcomed similar contingents of guard members to their states, bending the knee to Trump’s attacks on cities as dens of crime and filth.

Leaders in some blue states who were willing to stand against Trump effectively regained control over their own National Guard members through open defiance or legal action. But the District, with its legacy colonial role in the U.S. political system, still faces a second status as a city that Republicans can and do seek to control and punish at almost every turn.

This November will bring elections, which are vitally important to the future of democracy—but which can also only change so much, at least for now. Even if, by hard work or miracles, the Democrats manage to retake both houses of Congress, they’re not going to have a veto-proof majority. (To do so, in the Senate, they would have to hold every Democratic Senate seat in addition to winning 20 of 22 Republican Senate seats—which is not going to happen.)

As a result, Trump will retain a lot of power to block any new legislation through veto. But if the Democrats get control of one or both houses, their ability to launch investigations of ICE practices, DHS officials, and corruption in federal contracts will expand tremendously. And just as Trump will be able to obstruct Congress, they will be able to stonewall parts of his agenda as well.

What you can do

We shouldn’t wait until November to act. There are so many examples and resources now on how to tackle ICE abuses, illegal detention practices, and the very existence of detention facilities around the country.

Take a look at the recent Project Salt Box rundown of the possibly $10 billion proposal in which ICE appears to be pivoting to yet another style of detention. See if any of the sites referenced are in your state, and begin planning now. Watch for who submits bids. Organize against them now. In 2026, the movement protecting immigrants and fighting Trump’s concentration camps is larger, less naive, and far more powerful than it was even two years ago.

Public disapproval of Trump, ICE’s methods, and arbitrary detention itself have grown to include a lot of normie folks. The entire system of immigrant detention is in the process of being de-legitimized. When the government can’t find enough people to hire, because ICE is unpopular, it buys more time for the people those agents would be rounding up. Each time the government has to pivot to a new approach to creating new beds at new sites, it buys more time in which to create conditions in which that money can be clawed back and put to better uses.

So many people have been harmed, and are continuing to suffer this very minute. But we—and by we, I mean you—have already done so much amazing work to fight that harm. Today, there are existing movements in place involving those who have resisted everything from the neighborhood roundups to facilities like Dilley and the Everglades camps, or people who have worked to end city and county collaborations with ICE.

Those opposed to Trump and Miller have created a network that is both local and national. However many suggestions I make for ways that people can push back, I’m always amazed at the new strategies that everyday people come up with and make work on their own, creating a better world one tactic at a time.

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