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On the campaign trail more than a year ago, Donald Trump proclaimed, “On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Almost immediately after being sworn into office for the second time, the president made it clear that this was not just a grandiose campaign promise, but a call to action that quickly and drastically exceeded expectations. Fifteen months into the second Trump administration, data tells us that not only have arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement risen drastically compared to during the Biden administration, but agents are disproportionately arresting immigrants without criminal records, and targeting refugees, green-card holders, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients, and even U.S. citizens. More horrifyingly, a record number of people have died while in ICE custody in fiscal year 2026. Despite this brazen unlawfulness, Trump is forging full speed ahead and his endgame is coming into clear view: a dystopian United States, stripped of any immigrants and littered with warehouses detaining everyone the administration deems un-American.

These stakes sound hyperbolic, but they were illustrated very clearly on Tuesday in the Senate testimony of the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, David J. Bier, who noted that the Department of Homeland Security has “joked” about deporting 100 million people. In an exchange with Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, Bier clarified what such an effort would actually mean. “I think that advocating 100 million deportations is ethnic cleansing,” Bier noted. “When I talk about population purge, I talk about the fact that they’re trying to deport U.S.-born citizens, people born here. They’re trying to deport them as well. So it’s not a mass deportation agenda, it is also an agenda intended to reduce the population in the United States, including U.S.-born people.”

Amid all this, Homeland Security has been quietly snapping up warehouses across the country after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act awarded the agency $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers. It wasn’t until February, when internal agency documents were made public, that a coherent plan was revealed: the “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative.” It details how ICE intends to spend $38.3 billion to develop “non-traditional” facilities—industrial warehouses—into detention facilities. “For ICE to sustain the anticipated increase in enforcement operations and arrests in 2026, an increase in detention capacity will be a necessary downstream requirement,” the document concluded. This plan seemingly represents the sentiment behind acting ICE director Todd Lyons’ comments last year in which he explained that........

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