The administration of Donald Trump He has resorted to up to 150 local prisons to retain migrants before a 49 % rise in the number of people who are detained by the Customs Immigration and Control Service (ICE, in English) since its presidency began in January.
The ICE had 55,568 migrants in custody in the first half of July, almost 18,000 more than the 37,317 in the late January, according to the latest official data of the agency, which uses prisons of counties, federal prisons, and new detention centers, such as ‘Aligator Alcatraz’ in Florida, to deal with this increase.
Newsletter return to the world
In this context, ICE had 436 “active” sites in June, which retained at least one person in the month, an increase of 7.13 % compared to January 407, when Trump’s management began, and 14.44 % more than the same month of 2024, Documenta Vera, civil organization that investigates the arrests.
This and other associations have documented migrants in sites not reported in ICE reports, so the prison policy initiative registered an average of 10,547 held in 80 local prisons between May and Junewhile The Marshall Project identified 6,600 arrested in 150 local prisons.
Foreigners are arrested for migratory reasons in these prisons, since seven out of ten do not have criminal sentences, 71.1 %, says Trac, project of the University of Syracuse in New York that analyzes the data of migratory arrests.
Even so, three out of four sites that report detained migrants above their capacity, 30 of 45, are prisons of the counties, says the association based on the 181 centers that ICE reports officially in July, according to Trac.
The difficulty of obtaining a concrete figure of detainees in prisons is explained by the “lack of transparency” in ICE reports, Professor Susan B. Long, co -founder of the Trac project, assures EFE.
The president of the United States launched the “defends the nation” program, an initiative to recruit US citizens who help in the detention and deportation of immigrants. (Photo: Getty images)
As an example, quote ‘Aligator Alcatraz’, the Detentions Center to the West of Miami that opened on July 3that I was not listed in ICE statistics despite the “press reports about how they are keeping people there.”
“There is a lack of transparency here, we have a lot of information, there are a lot of sites that have and change over time, there are a lot of reports about adding new centers that are appearing,” he explains in an interview.
It is not a phenomenon “but impacts” by numbers
Even before Trump, The United States operates “the largest immigration detention system in the world”indicates to Efe Michael Flynn, executive director of the Global Detention Project.
“You have to be very clear that this is not new. The United States has been using police prisons and stations (to stop migrants) for decades. There is nothing new in this, at all. It is only that the numbers are really shocking,” he says in an interview.
The researcher attributes the phenomenon to which the United States “ignores” international treaties and conventions on the treatment of migrants and about the separation of people detained for migratory reasons against those of criminal proceedings.
Flynn warns of “serious problems with the way in which the United States has embraced the prison system, local prisons, local sheriffs, as a measure to keep more people arrested for the perception of insecurity related to them,” migrants.
More money for ICE and more complaints
Jeff Migliozzi, communications director of Freedom for Immigrants, also alerts conflicts of interest while ICE will receive 45,000 million dollars around 2029 to build detention centers, 62 % more than the federal prison system, according to an analysis of the American Immigration Council (AIC).
This is because nine out of ten immigrants detained are in centers where private contractors are involved, according to Freedom for Immigrants.
“Migrants are housed wherever (ICE) can expand. But this detention system has always operated as a patch of federal centers, sites administered by private and local centers,” he describes.
