Adam Isacson

Adam Isacson

Director for Defense Oversight

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With this series of updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past updates here.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

THE FULL UPDATE:

Bloomberg reporters Fola Akinnibi and Sophie Alexander revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is pursuing a “plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents” all around the United States. Flush with $45 billion in funding for detention from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress’s Republican majority passed in July 2025, the agency is purchasing large indoor spaces that, in many cases, were originally “designed and marketed as e-commerce distribution facilities.”

Examples of purchases, which cover just the land and empty buildings, include:

“ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas, and then run them as detention centers,” Akinnibi and Alexander recalled.

The Bloomberg reporters’ full list of potential new warehouse sites totals 76,500 additional ICE detention beds. As of January 25, ICE had a record 70,766 individuals in its detention system, up from 39,703 at the end of the Biden administration. So the “warehouse” plan could potentially double ICE’s capacity to nearly 150,000 people detained at any one time.

A new analysis from the Deportation Data Project, which has obtained large datasets on ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) arrests, detentions, and deportations, found that the Trump administration quadrupled ICE arrests during its first nine months, compared with the final nine months of the Biden administration.

ICE street arrests (i.e., arrests not at jails) went up by over a factor of eleven. Street arrests at this order of magnitude are a new phenomenon. For both types of arrests, ICE was much less likely to target people with criminal convictions. These changes led to over a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions.

As of January 25, 74 percent of ICE’s detained population had never been convicted of any crime (26% were charged with crimes, but not convicted).

Planned warehouse facilities are facing opposition from local governments and rights advocates, even in some Republican-leaning areas.

New Mexico’s state legislature, meanwhile, approved the Immigration Safety Act, which prohibits state or local government agencies from signing agreements for ICE detention and cancels existing agreements. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed it into law on February 5, and it goes into effect on May 20. There are currently three contractor-managed centers in New Mexico—Torrance, Cibola, and Otero; all have faced frequent allegations of poor conditions and abuse of detainees.

Sargent pointed out that a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 64 percent of American respondents oppose keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided, compared to 35 percent in favor.

“Imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation,” wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie of the expanding ICE detention system. Recent reports about detention conditions, some cited in Bouie’s January 24 column, are unremittingly grim.

ICE “halted all movement” at the South Texas Family Residential Center, ICE’s detention site for parents and children in Dilley, Texas, after medical staff confirmed two cases of measles there.

This 2,400-bed facility was opened during the Obama administration, closed during the Biden administration, and reopened under the Trump administration. It currently holds about 1,000 parents and children. It is run by the private prison company CoreCivic. “ICE has the authority to release these families, who are not flight risks, on parole,” but it is choosing not to do so, even as many in custody did not violate any immigration laws, explained Elora Mukherjee of Columbia University in a New York Times column.

The Dilley facility “is a hellhole,” Mukherjee continued. “Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food (both children and parents have told me they found worms in their meals), adequate medical care, or meaningful educational opportunities. Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep. Officers have repeatedly threatened to separate families, including those I represent.”

“The guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities,” immigration attorney Eric Lee, who witnessed a January 24 protest there, told Texas Public Radio. “This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes.”

“There were a lot of sick people in there, and no doctors,” an eight-months-pregnant asylum seeker told USA Today after being one of 240 people quietly released from Dilley in January. “No one tried to do anything like separate sick people from healthy people,” said another person who was released.

ICE is holding many children with their parents in Dilley for more than 20 days, which goes against the 1997 Flores legal settlement governing humane treatment of children in migrant detention, which the Trump administration has gone to court to seek to overturn. One family told a Laredo shelter operator that “they had been locked up at the Dilley facility for eight months,” according to USA Today reporters Lauren Villagran and Rick Jervis.

The Dilley facility’s profile was raised after ICE sent 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father there following the father’s January 20 arrest in Minnesota. Photos of the boy in custody wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat went viral, along with accounts of how ICE agents used him as bait to draw his father out of their house. On Jan. 31, Judge Fried Biery of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ordered ICE to release Liam and his father. His scathing ruling noted, “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” Nonetheless, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now seeking to place the father and child in expedited removal proceedings in order to quickly resolve their asylum claim and presumably deport them.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), whose El Paso district includes the part of the Fort Bliss army base where an ICE contractor is running what right now is the largest detention facility, paid her fifth visit to “Camp East Montana”—a complex of tents holding over 3,100 people, including over 325 women—on January 28. “Things are not getting better, they are getting worse” at a facility where three people died in a 44-day span in December and January, Rep. Escobar said to the El Paso Times.

Rep. Escobar shared alarming details about the conditions suffered by women who were arrested in the ongoing ICE-CBP offensive in Minnesota, then brought to the camp, which is managed by a company, Acquisition Logistics, that got a $1.2 billion contract.

Most of the women have been wearing the same clothes—even Minnesota snow boots—for three weeks. Guards allow them to use a cellphone to talk to their lawyers—for two minutes, once per week. “They were tearfully describing how they were trying to get in touch with their lawyers, but they’d call their lawyers. They’d be put on hold, then the two minutes would be up, and the guard would grab the phone and hang it up. They would have to wait another week before trying again,” Rep. Escobar said.

It remains unclear whether local El Paso authorities will be able to prosecute the January 3 death of Gerardo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man, which the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled a homicide, according to the Texas Tribune.

The family of Victor Manuel Diaz, a Nicaraguan man in his mid-thirties who died in the camp on January 14, is demanding an investigation. ICE has said Diaz may have died of suicide, but the agency had offered that same explanation in Lunas Campos’s case, only to be contradicted by the medical examiner and by witnesses who said the Cuban man was in a scuffle with guards.

The Nicaraguan man’s family’s lawyer said it is “suspicious” that this time, the autopsy will be performed by the U.S. Army, not the county medical examiner. Diaz, an asylum seeker with a pending case who ICE arrested at the Minneapolis Korean restaurant where he was working, had been at East Montana for eight days when he died.

Beyond Acquisition Logistics, ICE’s private contractors have been the subject of recent journalistic and NGO reports, as well as litigation.

To conduct an inspection visit at Fort Bliss, Rep. Escobar had........

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