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The scale of<\/span> the Trump administration\u2019s plans to warehouse human beings is hard to fathom. Here\u2019s one way to put it in perspective: On a given day, New York City\u2019s notorious Rikers Island jail complex holds approximately 7,000 detainees. President Donald Trump\u2019s regime, which is currently holding a record 70,000 people in immigration detention, now plans to develop a network of Rikers-sized concentration camps for immigrants nationwide.<\/p>\n The Department of Homeland Security is racing to buy up and convert two-dozen-plus warehouses into mass detention centers for immigrants, some capable of holding up to 10,000 people. According to documents released<\/a> last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion acquiring warehouses across the country and retrofitting them to collectively hold nearly 100,000 beds.<\/p>\n \u201cIf these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they\u2019ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight,\u201d noted<\/a> Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. \u201cThe federal government hasn\u2019t operated a prison camp inside the United States that large since Japanese Internment<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Trump\u2019s border czar, Tom Homan, last week announced that ICE\u2019s \u201csurge\u201d in Minnesota would wind down, it marked a significant victory for the thousands of Minnesotans who have fought back<\/a> against the federal forces terrorizing their state; resistance forced the Trump regime to change its plans. But nothing is ramping down when it comes to the deportation machine at large. When billions of dollars are spent to turn industrial spaces into detention camps, authoritarian desires meet market logic: The warehouses must be filled.<\/p>\n Local communities are nonetheless pushing back, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable federal forces with unlimited funding, abetted by powerful private interests who stand to gain from this carceral build-out.<\/p>\n As The Appeal reported<\/a> last week, investors on a recent quarterly earnings call for private prison giant CoreCivic were worried that ICE\u2019s unprecedented detention numbers were still not high enough. \u201cI think people thought we\u2019d be at that 100,000 level,\u201d one caller reportedly said of the number of people currently held by ICE. \u201cWe\u2019re at a little over 70,000.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The company\u2019s CEO stressed the major financial gains made though Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant campaign and assured callers that the drawdown in Minnesota did not, in his view, portend \u201cmeaningful changes in enforcement style or approach.\u201d That is to say, the racial profiling, cruelty, and mass roundups will continue, and private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group, alongside giants of surveillance infrastructure like Palantir, will collectively make billions<\/a> from DHS spending. What author John Ganz<\/a> has called \u201cICE\u2019s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob\u201d \u2014 now with 22,000 officers \u2014 will also continue to be handsomely funded.<\/p>\n None of this is a surprise: When Congress passed Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocating ICE nearly $80 billion in multiyear funding, the administration made clear that money would be no object in enacting its project of ethnic cleansing and the expansion of the carceral system for targeted groups of immigrants and opponents. The warehouse purchases and related government contracts have, as The Lever reported<\/a>, been a boon for Trump-connected real estate brokers and a bailout for \u201ccommercial real estate owners, who have struggled to sell their properties over the past year under the weight of macroeconomic headwinds<\/a> and Trump\u2019s tariff war.\u201d<\/p>\n Economic stimulus based in ethnic cleansing would, of course, be despicable. But the Trump regime can\u2019t even pretend this dizzyingly expensive project serves its own base. Only a small number of interested businesses and parties stand to gain. Meanwhile, as public resistance in both Republican- and Democratic-majority locales has already made clear, everyone else stands to lose. And hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors stand to lose the most.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s mass deportation plan is estimated<\/a> by the libertarian Cato Institute to have a fiscal cost of up to $1 trillion over a decade. And the losses? Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, the American Immigration Council<\/a> found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It\u2019s money that could be spent improving our collective lives. The $45 billion total budgeted for ICE detention centers is nearly four times the $12.8 billion the U.S. spent on new affordable housing in 2023. The huge budget for ICE mega warehouses reflects the most Trumpian mix: cronyist dealmaking in service of white nationalism.<\/p>\n The historian Adam Tooze has at various points recalled<\/a> the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, who said in 1942 that \u201canything we can actually do we can afford.\u201d Keynes was arguing that sovereign governments have extraordinary capacity to mobilize finances; the constraints lie elsewhere. Tooze has stressed that the limits of what a government can \u201cactually do\u201d are political, technical, material, and logistical \u2014 and extremely complicated as such. But, he points out, they are not budgetary. The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters. That, however, does not mean the government can actually do<\/em> everything it wants.<\/p>\n A number of warehouse owners, facing local backlash and pressure, have already backed out of lucrative sales to ICE. According<\/a> to Bloomberg, Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison\u2019s company announced that a transaction to sell a 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, \u201cwill not be proceeding.\u201d The company made clear that the move was political, saying, \u201cWe understand that the conversation around immigration policy and enforcement is particularly heated, and has become much more so over the past few weeks. We respect that this issue is deeply important to many people.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n