Detention beds may be maxed out as Trump moves to deport ‘millions’
Samta Fe: President Donald Trump’s inauguration-day executive orders and promises of mass deportations of “millions and millions” of people will hinge on securing money for detention centres.
The Trump administration has not publicly said how many immigration detention beds it needs to achieve its goals, or what the cost will be. However, an estimated 11.7 million people are living in the US illegally, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently has the budget to detain only about 41,000 people.
The government would need additional space to hold people while they are processed and arrangements are made to remove them, sometimes by plane. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the daily cost for a bed for one adult is about $165.
Just one piece of Trump’s plan, a bill known as the Laken Riley Act that Congress has passed, would require at least $26.9 billion to ramp up capacity at immigrant detention facilities to add 110,000 beds, according to a recent memo from DHS.
That bill — named after a Georgia nursing student whose murder by a Venezuelan man last year became a rallying cry for Trump’s White House campaign — expands requirements for immigration authorities to detain anyone in the country illegally who is accused of theft and violent crimes.
Trump also is deploying troops to try and stop all illegal entry at the southern US border. He triggered the Alien Enemies Act to combat cartels. The rarely used 1798 law allows the president to deport anyone who is not a U.S. citizen and is from a country with which there is a “declared war” or a threatened or attempted “invasion or predatory incursion.”
Detention infrastructure also will be stretched by Trump’s ban of a practice known as “catch and release” that allows some migrants to live in the US while awaiting immigration court proceedings, in favor of detention and deportation.
ICE currently detains immigrants at its processing centres and at privately operated detention facilities, along with local prisons and jails under contracts that can involve state and city governments. It has zero facilities geared toward detention of immigrant families, who account for roughly one-third of arrivals on the southern US border.
“There’s a limitation on the number of beds available to ICE,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama. “There are only so many local jails you contract with, private vendors who have available beds. And if the administration wants to make a major uptick in detention capacity, that’s going to require the construction of
some new facilities.”
