CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

ICE Ready to Pack Migrants into Warehouses

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........

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