Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
On April 24, congresswoman Rashida Tlaib announced that she “just introduced the Ban Warehouse Detention Act.” This is an excellent idea. As Tlaib wrote, “immigrant detention is already unjust and inhumane, but Trump’s administration is trying to expand it rapidly by buying up warehouses across the country. Each warehouse could cage between 1,500 and 10,000 people.” So Homeland Security wants to pack people into buildings like sardines, where, if the overcrowding doesn’t kill them, deportation to either an El Salvadoran prison or one in another rightist garden spot probably will. And who will do the hands-on dirty work? Your friendly neighborhood gestapo that should have been disbanded years ago, namely ICE.
So how and how long has ICE been snapping up these warehouses? Quietly and for months, quite under the radar. If that sounds sinister to you, your instincts are in good working order. ICE is creating an immigrant gulag (as if the one it’s already got weren’t bad, extensive and crushing enough) capable of holding 92,000 people – note the word “people,” not “migrants,” because ICE isn’t too choosy about who it nets in its enforcement sweeps, which is not, in any way, to condone how this atrocious organization treats migrants. But lots of ICE’s victims are green-card holders, people who emigrated here decades ago, or, simply U.S. citizens by birth. Currently ICE has bought at least 11 of a projected 20 detention sites nationally, and some should be up and running by the end of the year. According to Business Insider April 3, these properties have already cost ICE between $35 million and $145 million. Overall, this is a $38.3 billion plan.
Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic representative Jamie Raskin are probing this latest ICE adventure, “looking into government contractors, real estate firms and property owners who may have ‘corruptly profited’ from sales to ICE,” the publication reports. I hope they investigate the entire scheme as well, because it sounds like a new, sick permutation on the privatize-the-prisons scam, with investors including The Carlyle Group and a Goldman Sachs partner. “Nearly every seller purchased the land and built the warehouses within the last five years,” Business Insider adds – a detail which should electrify the antennae of any investigator – “with the intention of flipping or leasing them to an e-commerce or logistics company.”
Historically, Business Insider notes, ICE “leased its detention facilities from private prison firms.” This latest assault on decency calls for 16 regional processing centers to incarcerate “1,500 people for up to a week at a time, and eight ‘large scale’ detention centers meant to hold 7,000 to 10,000 people for one to two months.” We know the lucky folk to get thrown into these prisons will mainly be non-white migrants, but don’t worry, ICE doesn’t totally neglect Caucasians. See for instance, the case of Marie Therese Ross-Mahe, reported by the New York Times April 26, 2026, “a French citizen who lived with her American husband until he died in January.”
The fact that Ms. Ross-Mahe is 85-years-old didn’t deter ICE, nor did her previous enthusiasm for Donald “Ethnically Cleanse the USA” Trump. In her bathrobe, slippers and pajamas, this luckless non-citizen was escorted to an unmarked car and thence to a jail cell, where commenced what she described as a process of humiliation. She’s lucky that’s merely what it was and that she now resides safely in France, because humiliation is small potatoes – plenty of ICE victims die in custody, or, like the two ICE-murdered Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, before they are even arrested. However, “After two weeks in detention in Alabama and Louisiana, [Ms. Ross-Mahe] feared she might die.” And die from abusive manipulation of an already criminally abusive system: a judge in this case believed that an estate fight with Ross-Mahe’s stepson “instigated her arrest.” First held “in a filthy county jail,” she was later “flown in chains to Louisiana and held in an ICE processing center…After two weeks of detention, she said, she…didn’t think she could survive much longer,” and was “waiting to die.” Quite a price to pay for coming to America.
The only reason Ms. Ross-Mahe escaped this fate was that the French consul general in New Orleans “lobbied for her release.” She now has post-traumatic stress disorder, but she’s one of the lucky ones; over 48 people have died in ICE custody or enforcement since January 2025, and the 2026 trend is upward. In other words, if ICE will do this to an 85-year-old European lady, how much care do you think they take for the health and well-being of non-white migrants or legal residents from Latin America or Africa? Or do you think the policy is to get rid of such people by any means possible, though preferably, of course, by deportation? In other words, if you’re from Tegucigalpa, as is old news, ICE ain’t too choosy about what happens to you.
That’s why it runs places like Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades, still open despite litigation over its environmental impact, not, nota bene, over its horrible living conditions or high “disappearance” rate. According to Inside Climate News April 30, “thousands of undocumented migrants have been detained [there] since the facility opened last summer.” As a result of a very recent 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, this hellhole “may keep operating while the environmental groups’ and tribe’s [Miccosukee] litigation proceeds.” Back on December 4, Amnesty International released a report on this place called “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida.” “These findings confirm a deliberate system built to punish, dehumanize and hide the suffering of people in detention,” wrote an Amnesty official. “Immigration enforcement cannot operate outside the rule of law or exempt itself from human rights standards.”
It’s no surprise, therefore, that in 2025 Florida had the nauseating distinction of hosting the most deaths in ICE custody of any state, while Amnesty’s research “concluded that people arbitrarily detained in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ are living in inhuman and unsanitary conditions, including overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy – including cameras above the toilets.”
These are the sorts of detention camps ICE runs. If it gets its way and snaps up who knows how many warehouses, expect more of same. The idea appears to be to make life intolerable for those ICE wants to deport, so they’ll never, ever, dream of returning here again. Or, what is even more wicked, just let them die in these sewers, of disease or of injuries. The Trump regime also doubtless hopes that word will spread back to countries these migrants came from that the American gestapo is so barbaric, it’s not worth the risk of coming here. That, I suspect, is the true motive: terror.
