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The violence and scale of the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and the communities they live in can be disorienting. In recent months, the terrain has shifted from roving spectacles of violence in blue cities to arrests increasingly embedded in the everyday harms of policing. Meanwhile, activists and community members have forced the administration to retreat from one of its most horrifying aspirations to date, a network of Amazon-style detention warehouses, some of which could have held as many as 10,000 people and accelerated deportations on an industrial scale.

How can we keep our bearings in these times — celebrating our wins and our solidarity while also keeping up with the shifting tactics of the deportation machine? I recently spoke with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network and author of Unbuild Walls. Silky’s insights are invaluable for understanding how the machinery of enforcement is changing, where communities still have leverage and what it will take to sustain resistance over time.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Kelly Hayes: We’ve seen a lot of headlines and outrage about the recent killings committed by ICE agents, including the deaths of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. The outrage and attention to those shootings are obviously called for. But the detention system itself is also killing people, with the death toll at its highest level in more than a decade. People are being held for longer periods in torturous conditions that can function as a form of coercion, pushing people to abandon their cases and accept deportation. I’ve also heard from undocumented people who are choosing to leave the country rather than risk prolonged imprisonment in potentially deadly conditions. What do we need to understand about detention itself as a site of organized violence — both the machinery producing these deaths and the way the threat of detention is being used to force people out of the country?

Silky Shah: It’s important to understand that detention is ultimately a site of social control. The way the Trump administration is exacerbating conditions in detention is laying bare what the system does. As our friend Mariame Kaba says, this is a death-making institution. As of July 23, there have been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump came back into office. That is a scale we’ve never seen before.

Community Activism Forced Federal Government to Abandon Plans for ICE Warehouses

Detention has also always been a place where conditions are so bad that people become ready to sign away their rights and say, “It’s fine. I’m ready to leave.” That is all being exacerbated now. The conditions are so much worse.

One of the things I’ve been struggling with is that, for many years, efforts to improve conditions have not actually made these facilities better. I think that is true of both the prison system and the detention system. There is so much emphasis on improving conditions when the answer is actually to release people. The best way for people to have good physical and mental health is not to be in these institutions.

But in this context, oversight mechanisms have been completely stripped away, and there is also a psychological mandate from this government to dehumanize people in detention even further. You are seeing the scale of violence go up and up and up. That is why more people are dying in detention and more people are dying by suicide. It is also why people are that much more afraid of being detained. They might not get the medical care they need. They might not get food or clean clothing. They might be sleeping on floors. The conditions are horrifying.

There is also the added threat of potentially being deported to a so-called “third country.” People might be thinking about the story of Tuan Phan, who was imprisoned for many years here in Washington State. When he was about to be released, instead of being deported to Vietnam, where he was from, he was sent to Djibouti. He was held for roughly six weeks in a shipping container at a US military base in Djibouti and then spent nearly a year detained in South Sudan, essentially like a prisoner of war. He is finally back in Vietnam now, but imagine what it means for people not to know where they might end up.

There is no question that detention is an institution of social control. This administration is exacerbating the conditions and heightening everything detention has always done: causing premature death, pushing people to sign away their rights and potentially compelling people to leave on their own.

I don’t think there is any going back to a system that supposedly does this better. Yes, these conditions may not have been as extreme before, but all of this was already happening. It is now happening on a much greater scale.

Kelly Hayes: That intensification of detention is unfolding alongside a shift in how ICE is operating in communities. The large-scale, roving-gang-style attacks on urban neighborhoods were enraging, but the concentration of those operations did create clearer opportunities for intervention than some of the less visible, less spectacle-driven tactics ICE is deploying now. Yet ICE agents are arresting more people than ever. What do organizers need to understand about this tactical shift, and how does it change the possibilities for intervention?

Silky Shah: I think the best way to understand the difference between how Democrats and Republicans have operated is that the right really likes the spectacle of immigration enforcement — the arrests and deportations. We’ve seen this over time.

During the Bush era, after 9/11, there were massive worksite raids. They were incredibly disruptive, especially in small communities. You would have 700 people who worked at a factory detained at once, and children would end up in foster care. It was really, really disruptive, and those raids received a lot of attention.

The Obama administration moved away from that approach and tied immigration enforcement more closely to the criminal legal system. That is where we saw more deportations taking place, with people being put into the pipeline through county jails in their own communities.

Under the first Trump administration, you again saw a return to worksite raids and these large operations. The Biden administration then retreated from that approach. During the Biden era, much of the spectacle became focused on the border.

Now, over the last year and a half, especially in places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, we have seen intense spectacles of violence. In January, Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis captured the nation’s attention because of the extreme violence, including the killings of US citizens. There were roughly 3,000 federal immigration-enforcement agents there, which was a huge number, and it was incredible to see the solidarity and resistance.

At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period.

Florida is really ground zero for how much immigration enforcement is changing and expanding. In Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas, state troopers and local police departments have entered into 287(g) agreements, which give local law enforcement authority and funding to target people for immigration enforcement.

There is so much collaboration happening between ICE and local law enforcement in those places that the scale of enforcement is much greater, without the same level of spectacle. I think that is also what we saw a lot of during the Obama years. Those years were really the last time we saw a high level of interior deportations. Again, though, everything is happening at a greater scale now.

After Operation Metro Surge began winding down, Tom Homan, who has been referred to as the border czar and was a career ICE official, held a press conference in which he emphasized that they were going to work much more with local police. That was going to be their strategy.

ICE’s workforce has also doubled in the last year. So you have a combination of more and more ICE agents and more collaboration between police and ICE, including in places like Houston, where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was just murdered. There is much more targeting happening in those places.

I think it is going to be a huge challenge. Given the scale of violence they are pursuing, they are going to find more and more ways to target people. They are also doing everything they can to strip people of legal status. With the administration moving to terminate Temporary Protected Status for multiple nationalities, and the Supreme Court allowing some of those terminations to proceed, more than a million people could become vulnerable, and the government already has data on those individuals.

That is what is so scary about this moment. It is still critical for people to know their rights. And I think that in places like Minneapolis — and I’m from Houston — seeing the way communities have come together has been phenomenal. This is about community organizing. It is about supporting people, making sure their needs are met, and maintaining ICE watch programs, phone trees and all the other things communities can do. All of that is much more critical now.

The other issue is detention. Having more detention capacity means they can arrest more people, detain more people and deport more people. Stopping that expansion is also a really critical aspect of this work.

I think those are the main tactics at this moment: trying to stop the expansion of detention and getting communities and elected officials to do everything........

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