Communities Not Cages: Stop ICE Detention Camps

STOP ICE Detention Camps: News to Know & Share

Flush with new cash — $85 billion in new funding, with around $45 billion specifically to expand immigration detention over four years
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is moving fast to lease and acquire warehouses and buildings across the United States with the aim of retrofitting them into detention spaces.
ICE is also expanding contracts with local jails and private prison facilities as it builds out its sprawling detention footprint.
Ultimately, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aims to build bed space for 100,000 immigrants

  • On average, detention facilities daily now hold nearly 70,000 immigrants, a scale of mass detention not seen since the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and nationals during World War II.
  • Corporations have a major financial incentive for selling their warehouse space to ICE – from high value property sales, some bailing out struggling real estate with expedited cash out, to lucrative broker commissions. The perverse financial incentives are glaring as companies profit off of the prospect of disappearing people into ICE’s abusive detention system. ICE has paid nearly 10 times the assessed value of existing warehouses. 
  • Detention warehouses divert critical resources such as water, electricity away from the local communities, could cut off tax revenue and foreclose other economic opportunities for local communities, further exploiting working class people and people of color who are overburdened by the negative impact of the logistics industry. 
  • Industrial warehouses do not have the sewage and water infrastructure to ensure basic health for thousands of people who shouldn’t be detained there in the first place, and threaten to overwhelm local water and sewer system infrastructure leading to harmful pollution into local waterways.
  • The number of deaths of people in detention during 2025 exceeded the highest seen in over two decades, and deaths in 2026 are on track to meet or exceed that number. Detention facilities have a history of inadequate compliance with health and safety standards, insufficient health care, shortages in health care staffing and limited oversight.
  • The increased number of people in detention facilities and overcrowding of facilities may further increase health risks, particularly for communicable diseases like measles and people with complex medical conditions.
  • Reports have documented instances of lack of access to prescribed medications, mistreatment of pregnant women, malnutrition and dehydration, unsanitary conditions, sleep deprivation, and abuse in detention facilities. There have also been instances of medical and mental health care lapses, and lost medical treatments and prescriptions during transfers between detention facilities.
  • Overcrowding and delayed vaccinations may lead to an increase in preventable communicable diseases, such as measles.

ICE is bypassing local elected officials and regulations and pursuing warehouse detention in spite of community opposition, diverting critical resources from local community needs and deepening ICE’s culture of secrecy and complete lack of transparency.
BUT…

  • This fight is winnable. Communities across the country have already stopped more than a dozen proposed sites, in red states and blue. Property owners have walked away from deals under public pressure. City councils have passed moratoriums. Republican senators have come out against proposed facilities in their own states. We’ve even seen a federal judge halt construction at a site ICE had already purchased in Maryland. The mass deportation agenda is deeply unpopular, and organized communities are proving it can be stopped. 
  • Local communities are making it clear from coast to coast – they don’t want detention centers or warehouse detention, and they will fight tooth and nail to block ICE and ensure people are protected and safe. Instead, communities want local leaders to champion projects that bring investment to support all families like education, healthcare and housing for everyone to thrive.
  • Small towns are courageously taking on ICE to fight detention warehouses from entering their community and winning in Utah, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Virginia, Mississippi, and more.  People are uniting together, uplifting their shared values to welcome people and keep everyone safe, calling on businesses to take a stand, and demanding ICE out of their communities.
    • In Merrillville, Ind., reports that ICE intended to convert a vacant 275,000-square-foot warehouse into a detention facility caught local officials completely off guard. The town quickly passed a forceful resolution opposing the conversion and publicly criticized ICE for failing to inform local officials of the move.
    • Resistance groups in Indiana are pressuring officials to close the detention operation at Miami Correctional Facility where two detainees have died.

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