On with Kara Swisher - Inside the ICE Detention Boom: Soaring Abuse Claims and Little Oversight

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

While the Department of Homeland Security publicly claims to be resetting its tactics around immigration arrests, it's been building out its capacity to house detained migrants by buying up almost a dozen warehouses. If opened, they would dramatically expand a system that’s seen more than 40 deaths since Trump took office and is facing staggering accounts of human rights abuses. Kara speaks with three experts who’ve been tracking the Trump administration’s detention boom: Ximena Bustillo, Homeland Security Department and immigration policy correspondent for NPR; Austin Kocher, a political and legal geographer and a research assistant professor at the Syracuse University who tracks immigration enforcement data on his Substack; and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

His goal is a million deportations a year. I don't think they're going to hit it, but they're going to try to spend every penny of that funding that they can in order to reach that goal. And that means more people caught up in this rapid system, more people held in detention, more people subject to awful conditions, and more people who see what's happening and say, I can't take it anymore. I just want to give up, even if I could have a chance to stay in this country. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

this is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. The Department of Homeland Security is in the middle of a major shakeup. President Trump fired Secretary Christine Nome earlier this month, making her the first cabinet departure of the second term. Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen is expected to take over once he's confirmed. By all accounts, Nome's downfall had more to do with her attention-seeking and not because she failed to deliver on Trump's mass deportation agenda, nor did it have anything to do with the horrifying allegations of human rights abuses

at U.S. detention centers under her leadership. 2025 was the deadliest year to be in immigration custody in decades. This year is on track to be worse. We've got three experts here to talk about the U.S. detention system and how it's being radically reshaped by the Trump administration. Jimena Bustillo covers the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Policy for NPR. Austin Coker is a research assistant professor at Syracuse University. He's been tracking immigration data trends and writes about it on his.

his substack. And Aaron Reiklin Milneck is a lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. I think people should not be taking their eye off the immigration story because the nonsensical clown, Christy Noem and her strange sidekick Korolundowski, are out of the picture. At the heart of it is a policy of the administration to try to rid the country of people they think are lesser than it is racist. It is problematic for our economy. It is just plain cruel. And I think they're trying to hide it in the shadows now with these detention. centers. They shouldn't be allowed to do so. They have to show people what they're doing, which they're trying desperately not to do. And of course, it's becoming increasingly

unpopular with voters. And I think they'll see the impact of that in the midterms. We'll have to see. All right, let's get to my conversation with Jimena, Austin, and Aaron. This is a really important topic. So stick around. Mud, sand, snow, the track, different surfaces. Same truth. Every ground is our proving ground. Ready, set, forward. Support for this show comes from Odu.

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You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Jimena, Austin, and Aaron, thanks for coming on on. Hey there. Hi, Karen. Thanks for having me on, Kara. The immigrant detention system in the U.S. has never been a shiny example of respect for human rights. But since Trump took office last year, there have been a series of serious allegations of human rights violations.

Now, for each of you, what's been the most radical, change in how U.S. arrests and imprisoned immigrants in Trump's second term. Jimena, then Austin, then Aaron. Yeah, I think one of the things that makes this administration particularly unique is the mandatory detention policy that it very quickly put into effect. That means that if someone entered the country without legal authorization, they had to be in a detention center or doing some sort of alternative to detention program, like an ankle monitor, regardless of if they were trying to fight their case in immigration court or regardless of if they were already, you know, had filed for asylum or some other process. And so this is how we saw immigration detention get,

quote unquote, maxed out very quickly and early on last year. And now, obviously, we have 70,000 people in immigration detention. Many people that under past administrations might not have normally been there, even if they were fighting their deportation. So incarceration, immediate incarceration, no matter what. Yeah, and ICE likes to say that detention's not supposed to be punitive. You're supposed to be in there and you're supposed to be out. But we've seen outgoing Secretary Kristy Knoem and other members of the Trump administration almost say like they want this to be one of the things that gets people to leave and voluntarily depart and choose to exit. Okay, so that's a big difference. Austin?

Yeah, the biggest change we've seen is that it's not just that they're amplifying the normal process of arrest, detention, and deportation. is they're going down whole new, extra-constitutional and radical new ways of arresting, detaining and deporting people that contradict constitutional law and longstanding precedent. This means ICE is going into houses without a judicial or criminal warrant. It means they are not just using the normal detention system. They're using military bases. They're using Amazon warehouses to store people like boxes until they can get them on planes. So I think it's this whole new line of creative, extra legal, and frankly,

shocking sort of strategies that most Americans oppose. And that's different. It's a more radicalized version of it, or how would you describe? I would say radically aggressive in ways that neither Republicans nor Democrats have ever endorsed. It's really just outside the scope of what most people level-headed, you know, people within the administration and within Congress have supported in the past. Past. All right, Aaron. Beyond what we've already heard from Humana and Austin, the biggest change has been in the scale and speed in which the system has expanded. when Trump took office in January 2025, there were about 40,000 people in ICE detention. At its peak in January, 26, that had risen to 73,000 people in detention.

The system has never expanded this rapidly, and that came along with $45 billion provided by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That is about 13 years of ICE's annual budget all in one big pot of cash, and that has given them essentially unlimited funding. to get the system running. The $45 billion was just for ICE, correct? Yeah, that $45 billion was just for ICE detention. In fact, they got an additional $30 billion to hire new ICE officers to build out their deportation plane capacity for the first time ever. ICE now owns its own deportation jets.

And all of that has come together to allow the detention and deportation system to expand at a pace quicker than ever before in American history. Right. So the Department of Homeland Security is at a crossroads right now. Trump fired Secretary Christine Nome earlier this month. There's some new reporting on possible corruption around Corey Lewandowski, her unpaid top aide. And DHS is facing bipartisan pushback after ICE Asians killed two S citizens in Minnesota earlier this year, among other things. Trump picked Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen to replace Nome. He had his confirmation hearing on Wednesday where he presented a less aggressive vision of ICE under his leadership. It just moved out of committee. Realistically, how different is he from Nome in terms of immigration policies he'd like to pursue, especially around detention? And I will note, he has very little experience in this area. Right. And we've seen over the past year that he has been a very vocal supporter of the Trump administration's immigration agenda, you know, comb through his

social media profiles, and you will find him overwhelmingly posting and talking about the different initiatives that the administration was doing using the same talking points, some of which he did walk back during the hearing, you know, calling 37-year-old Alex Preti, who was shot by Border Patrol agents, is quote deranged. And then during the hearing saying, maybe I shouldn't have done that as secretary, I'm not going to be as quick to make such judgments. But, you know, at the end of the day, he still supports many of the policies that the administration is putting in place and their approach to immigration. So even if, you know, the tone seemed to be a little bit more scaled back, you have to remember that nothing in procedure,

nothing in goals has actually changed. And it's going to be Mullen's job. Yeah, nothing. So how do you interpret the tone shift? What do you shock it up to explicitly? Yeah, I mean, explicitly, I think that Mullen is going before his colleagues, some of which he obviously does not get along with Chairman Paul and him have very personal beefs in history. But we saw many of the comments that Noem make to simply not age well eventually. And she just did not defend the administration's policies well enough. And, you know, Christy Noem had this very public persona. She had ads on streaming services.

She really was putting herself out there in every way, shape, or form. Yeah. And so we'll see if Mullen takes that same approach. You know, does the communication on social media to the public look the same? Or do they take a difference? different tone, considering that midterms are upcoming, and many of these approaches are not very popular, and kind of keep to themselves on some of that messaging. To that point, recent polls have shown that voters have soured on Trump's handling of immigration

in recent months. It's why the administration was forced to pull back from its surge in Minneapolis. But what the administration does to immigrants in detention is often invisible to the public. Aaron, would you talk a little bit of if you're seeing anything different in terms of tweaking their approach to detention or not? I think detention has always been bad. You know, at the American Immigration Council here, I've been working on ICE detention issues for over a decade or roughly a decade. And the system has never been perfect. There have always been failures. I can go through leaf through complaint after complaint that we filed about inadequate medical care, verbal harassment, abuse occurring in detention centers. But the scale of what we are seeing today in detention is worse than ever. And I hear that from everyone who works. in the system, from lawyers who work in detention centers around the country. In part, because the message coming from on high, from Nome and others, was that people could get away with anything. There was always a level of impunity for violations of rights in detention centers. And notably,

the Biden administration became the first administration ever to shudder multiple ICE detention centers when they failed to meet standards. The Trump admin has reopened those detention centers, despite them clearly not making any significant changes, and the message seems to be, no matter what happens, so long as people are being pushed through the deportation system as fast as possible to hit these arrest and detention and deportation quotas, the administration is going to turn a blind eye. And on the ground, that means conditions for people are getting worse.

Abuse is up. People tell appalling stories about racial harassment, about being physically or verbally threatened to sign allegedly voluntary removal orders. And that is at a level we have never seen before. Never seen. Well, the administration has scaled back on very public immigration raids, like we saw in Minneapolis. It's expanding detention facilities. One of the ways it's doing that is by buying warehouses to convert into mass detention centers.

Austin, explain how that's supposed to work. Yeah, just to follow in what Aaron said as well, I just want to reiterate just detention conditions before we move into the warehousing because it lays a really important precedent. So we just had the second detained death in ICE custody this week announced yesterday. And we did. Individual died on Monday. That individual died inside of a detention facility that was precisely one of the facilities that Aaron mentioned was shut down during the Biden administration for failing to meet inspection standards. It was reopened this year with no evidence that the facility's

conditions and management had changed substantially in any way. And it's located in a hot spot of detention deaths in South Florida, which is seeing the high. number of detention deaths, all in places with overcrowding, poor nutrition, lack of access to medical care. So these really are the conditions that are being laid. And so when we move now into warehouses and we look at what the Trump administration is doing to rapidly scale up detention, we have to remember that this is not an agency or an administration that takes these concerns seriously.

And in fact, the administration continues to dismiss any concerns about detention deaths as claiming that this is the best medical care immigrants have ever received and framing their deaths as simply their own fault for being in the country in the first place. So the warehousing model is basically trying to solve a problem that Trump administration has. They know that they are probably going to lose some power in Congress in the midterms.

They are flushed with cash, as Aaron said, and they are trying to get their detention and deportation numbers up, which they've had a hard time doing. They've inflated their numbers artificially to sort of make it seem like a lot of people have left the country, and they're on track to deport over 400,000 this year.

So numbers are certainly going up. But it's difficult for them to do that without filling, you know, large facilities with people that they can, as Jimenez said, convince them to stop trying to seek asylum, convince them to stop trying to fight their deportation and just take the deportation. So the warehousing plan is their approach. It's a way for the government itself instead of contracting to literally buy up empty. essentially Amazon warehouses and fill it with people. Heman, you said 2025 was about laying the groundwork and building the infrastructure for this mass deportation agenda, and now we're in it. I'd like to expand on that a little. What are you likely to see this year that we didn't see in 2025?

Yeah, I mean, the money is such a big one. The administration got the money to do whatever it wanted to do, whatever it needed to do. We're already seeing that ICE is projected this year to have 16 new facilities to hold around 1,500 people each, and then six different new facilities that are larger to hold up to 10,000 people. And many of these are some of these warehouses that we're talking about that are slated to be reconverted. And so I think, you know, it goes back always to follow the money and kind of see where the contracts are already taken place. and they're not just going to buy these warehouses and facilities and not use them unless they're barred from doing that through lawsuits and maybe other things that could stop them. But that's where we see this going. You know, this is going to continue to expand.

It's going to continue to grow. We don't see the administration changing course on its agenda anytime soon. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Quince. A thoughtful wardrobe starts with quality. over quantity. That means collecting pieces that are well made, versatile, and throughout the years. That's exactly what Quince offers. Elevated fabrics, thoughtful design, and a price tag that actually makes sense. Quince makes the high-quality wardrobe staples that using premium fabrics like 100%

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The only way to get 20% off is to go to join deleteme.com slash Kara and enter the code Kara at checkout. That's join deleteme.com slash Kara code Kera. So right now, people are mainly being held in facilities by private contractors or being held in jails or prisons, and that's how the detention systems worked for the last few decades. Austin, how did the term administration manage to quickly expand these existing facilities in just a year? Let's talk about, like, the actual logistics of it. Sure. So using existing contracts and contracting mechanisms with local jails, county jails, as well as the contracts that they have with private contractors such as Geo Group and Core Civic, these kinds of. companies have a business model around having access to facilities. So they've been able to tap in

to the access that these private corporations have to quickly expand or reopen facilities, such as the Northeast state-level facility in Ohio, where I'm from, which was a detention center for several years. It was shut down and then, you know, quickly reopened at the start of the Trump administration. They are also able to contract with a lot of county jails. So I track this data on a biweekly basis. And, you know, we've seen the total facilities in the country go from about 115 to almost 250 since the start of the Trump administration. These are individual facilities. Yeah, that's right, individual facilities.

And there's obviously some very large facilities like the Family Detention Center in Dilley in South Texas, which can hold up to 2,200 people or the Stewart detention facility in Georgia, which also hold over 2,000 people. But there's a lot of jails across the country that are holding a dozen people, 50 people, 100 people at a time. And that's one way that in some region, like the Northern Great Plains states, like in Minneapolis, this is actually a big problem for people arrested in Minneapolis

and in Minnesota. There isn't a large detention center there, so people sort of get spread out into these rural county jails or they get shipped across the country, like to the tent facility in El Paso, which is able to hold, you know, almost 4,000 people. Right. So it's sort of chaotic in that regard.

Now, there's all these human rights abuses at these detention facilities, which is forever detention facilities, have had these complaints, deaths, unsanitary conditions, spoiled food, but also the spread of measles and COVID, which is really quite disturbing. People denied access then to necessary medical care lawyers. Erin, connect the dots here between the rapid expansion of detention and the humane conditions. Is it just chaos on purpose? What is the, I mean, obviously detention facilities have always had, I've read dozens and dozens of stories about prisons, et cetera. Talk a little bit about

the expansion and sort of what is very typical of detention facilities in our country, unfortunately. I think the most important bit of context is that there's a shortage nationwide of corrections officers and there's a shortage of prison health care providers. So when you are rapidly opening up these new detention centers, you know, you've added 30,000 more people a day on average being held in these detention centers over the course of a year, those are people that you needed to hire up. You needed to get staff to do that. And, when Camp East Montana, which is a tent camp, the Trump administration opened on Fort Bliss in El Paso, when it opened up in August of last year, there were 60 violations that were immediately filed against it by the Department of Homeland Security's own inspector general, in part due to the severe low staffing that they had. And that is a feature of a rapid expansion. You've got to hire up these staff really quickly in order to actually get them online, but the Trump administration is not waiting. They were literally building Camp East Montana as it opened.

In August, it was holding about 1,000, a month after that, 1,500, a month after that, 2000, because they were building the tents next to the ones they'd already started holding people in. And they didn't have enough staff. And that led to serious issues. And in fact, Camp East Montana is the place where we have seen the homicide of a man in January who was reportedly killed by prison staff during an incident. Now, ICE says that's not true, that he commuted. and did suicide. People who witnessed the event actually were rapidly deported from the country,

despite litigation holds from a judge saying, don't deport this person. He was a witness. One of them got deported anyway, and he reported back. He said, I saw what happened. The guards killed the guy, and it was nothing to do with. He was not suicide at all. And these are the situations that happen when you are rapidly hiring up. So I do think going back to again to the administration, not caring what happens and really just wanting to speed things up as quickly as they can. They have four years in office, and they want to use every minute of that to get their numbers up. Yeah, it recalls to mind putting Japanese Americans in horse facilities, if you remember, in San Francisco during World War II. So, Haman, you've talked to some of these people who've been held in these detention facilities.

Talk about what it's like there and what some of the stories that have stuck with you. Yeah, I mean, I've done. definitely spoken with folks in detention centers across the country. Many often call and talk about how they're kind of in this room the entire time. They maybe get an opportunity to call their wife or their husband, where they, you know, talk about daily lives, almost as if it was the conversation that they would have before going to bed at night. But instead, they take that as a time to do it instead. A lot of conversations about what are their red lines, how long do they wait? I've spoken with people who are stocked up with lawyers.

They have criminal lawyers. They have immigration lawyers. They have constitutional lawyers. They have, you know, teams of lawyers to try and fight their detentions through the various convoluted court systems, the immigration court systems, the district court systems. And then I've talked to people who don't have a lawyer and call me because someone else that was in detention called me at one point. And they think that maybe like I can help tell their stories.

And sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. You know, that's obviously a different side of it all. But, you know, ultimately, it's really variant. Some people are there very quickly. Others are removed very, very slowly. I spend a lot of time using the Isotany Locator as well to kind of track and see where people are getting moved to. And that, as we've seen over the last year, is not always the most accurate, up-to-date, speedy system. No, what is their state of mind in terms of the treatment?

and how they're feeling about what's happening there. Yeah, I mean, I think the people I talk to are obviously very self-selected. So it tends to be a very resilient group, you know, people who are actively fighting their cases or want to actively fight their case and see it all the way through even if it means that they're in detention for a year. But obviously, that is not everybody in detention. And when you have these overcrowded conditions, you hear about, you know, people sleeping on floors, about, you know, the food not being very good about like the bread. being moldy, about there being questions about the drinking water. And, you know, a lot of this has been well reported by my colleagues at NPR and other outlets as well. It's just, you know, these challenges, not just in detention, but when you have an overpopulated and overcrowded space.

So more than 40 people have died in ICE detention since Trump took office. In fact, last year was the deadliest on record in decades. 2026 is on track to be worse. Austin, you wrote that these deaths are becoming, quote, a predict. normalized part of ICE operations while Congress and most of America in public appears unaware or indifferent or both. What's leading to so many of these deaths besides just chaos, it feels like, in some way, and not caring about it, obviously. Yeah, I think it goes back to the fundamentals that Aaron was touching on. These are not facilities that are prepared to handle this number of people. And in any population, not just immigrant population, if you suddenly start

detaining 3,000 American citizens inside of a facility, some number would have a variety of mental and physical needs that would have to be met, right? So it's not unusual that this would happen. What's unusual is that they are intentionally avoiding, you know, staffing up and providing the services and the infrastructure that they need. I think the second order problem is, okay, if you're expanding a system this quickly, there's likely to be mistakes along the way. So how do you respond when things go wrong? This administration has you know, claim that American citizens are terrorists after they've been killed by ICE.

They've dismissed detained deaths as essentially being immigrants' own fault, not theirs. So I think the bigger problem isn't just that things have gone wrong. It's that when they've gone wrong, the administration has avoided any sense of accountability. And we're not seeing Congress changing that either. Right, and the American people aren't seeing it

the way they did, say, in Minneapolis. So you said a lot of these deaths are also preventable. How so? So research on detained deaths shows that about 95% are preventable. When you do a deeper dive, you know, in cases, let's just take, for instance, there have been three, sadly, suicides in detention so far this year. Suicides are preventable deaths within detention centers.

There are standards about how to monitor and make sure that people are not able, you know, to harm themselves in that way. If you don't have staff and oversight and a commitment to following through with those policies, things like this are inclined to happen. Yeah, inevitable. Aaron, that kind of leads us to the warehouses. The government has spent close to a billion dollars buying up close to a dozen around the country. The goal is to be able to hold 100,000 people at any given time. These warehouses are not built to hold people. They're built to store things, Amazon or whoever.

Talk about what happens in that system and a warehouse system. You've said they fundamentally reshape immigration detention. Just explain that. Yeah, so the American immigration detention system really slow. emerged over about 30, 40 years, as Congress gradually expanded the system with a little bit more funding every year. And that means that the system we have today is, as Austin described, a patchwork of large facilities, medium-sized facilities, and small county jails where people are held everywhere from a few dozen people in some facilities to 500 and others to over 2,000

and a handful of facilities. So ICE is saying we now have enough money, $45 billion, that we can redo the system from scratch. But actually thinking through how to build a modern, efficient prison system is what they want to build, usually takes more than four years, but they only have four years to do it. And so they seized upon the cheapest, even though it's enormously expensive,

method of doing that, which is buying these commercial warehouses and sites around the country. And they want to have 16, what they call regional processing centers, where people are taken after they are arrested and held for a few, days while ICE figures out what to do next, and then eight mega detention centers. These are going to be warehouses that hold anywhere from 7,500 to 10,000 people. And ICE clearly thinks that by concentrating these warehouses, a small number of them at key locations around the country, they can

build what ICE acting director Todd Lyons called Amazon Prime but with human beings. The problem is, of course, this is not something ICE has any experience in. The largest federal prison holds only 4,600 people. So we're talking about some facilities that could be double the size of the largest federal prison in an agency that only runs its own handful of detention centers, mostly which were built in the 1980s or 1990s. So this would exacerbate current problems. Exactly. These problems are already in existence in the private detention centers. And ICE is now saying, we want to own these facilities larger than anything we've ever run before, larger than the largest federal prison larger than the largest state prison in the country, and we want to build eight of

them. And that is a disaster waiting to happen. So, Jimenez, we're seeing opposition, obviously, these mass detention warehouses, even in Republican districts. It's sort of interesting to watch it play out. How does that complicate the push to open them quickly? I see them ending up empty at some point, presumably. So what are the main concerns? And how does that complicate this issue? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that could block some of these warehouses from opening or coming online, depending on where they are. And that's not counting other initiatives and kind of pop-ups that the administration might decide to open up. We have seen some successful Republican pushback, particularly in the South and in a few other states where whether it's local leadership or senators saying we don't want this in our community. So there's definitely been a paper trail. of this kind of resistance happening bipartisanly, locally and nationally.

What is the principal objections of people in local districts, including Republicans? Yeah, I think that's the tough part is it very much varies. Sometimes people just say we don't want this in our town for any reason,

whether it's we don't want these people in our town. You know, that can easily be a reason. Other times it's just an acknowledgement that the community cannot sustain this. You know, in some of these places, you know, even some of these smaller facilities would double the size of a town.

And that is just not something that the city has infrastructure for. And so there is a reliance on like logistical challenges and where that could land. And so those are some of the more pragmatic arguments against these like larger facilities. Austin? I mean, there's two specific concerns that we've seen come up, especially here in Western Maryland,

but also in Social Circle, Georgia and elsewhere. The first thing is these facilities are not capable, sorry, the local municipalities are not capable of providing water, wastewater, drinking water to these facilities. It would absolutely overburdened. They literally don't have the water to send to the facilities. And the second thing is that often gets overlooked is once the federal government buys up one of these properties, Kera,

that property goes off the local tax rolls. So it's taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of communities that means less money going to the school into the infrastructure it so desperately needs. Right. And also, one of the things that's interesting about the administration likes to brag about how it effectively shut down the southern border and ended asylum, how quickly the deporting people, it seems counterintuitive that DHS needs more space to hold more people. How were those related? Yeah, that's right. So I think there's, you know, there's two things here. One is there's an attitude

within this administration within ICE that the only way to deport people is detain them until you can get them on a plane. There's no data to support that, but that's the belief. So the idea is that mass deportation requires mass detention to make it work. But I think more importantly and more underneath of all of that is they are deeply interested in making this process as punitive as possible. Because the truth is there's lots of legal, lawful pathways that Congress created to ensure due process and make sure that humanitarian migrants have access to at least a review in front of a judge or an asylum officer. and the best way to make sure that this process goes faster instead of slower, the best way to make sure that people give up on their basic rights is to make it as painful and harmful as possible.

And I can tell you talking to families, Kara, that there are U.S.s and spouses of undocumented immigrants who are saying, I don't want my husband in one of these facilities. It's better that we leave the country so we can stay together because there's no way I'm going to let my husband go through this process or wife. I personally know half a dozen people who have done that. They're leaving. They're just leaving. Aaron, people have been comparing the Trump administration's detention process to concentration camps.

It immediately obviously evokes the idea of Nazi Germany. There have been lots of concentration camps, but that's the top memory of people. It's an extreme example. Talk about the use of the term concentration camp. Is that fair? Is detention center? I mean, a lot does swing on words in many ways. For me, these are jails. They're prisons. The warehouses are a new thing.

Those, you know, we haven't seen those before. But in many senses, these are quite literally jails. We see one of the largest new detention centers that's opened under the Trump administration last year is the California City Detention Center, which is a private prison that was previously used by the state of California as a long-term prison.

When California moved away from using private prisons, the facility was shuttered for several years. And then when ICE came into the office, they just reopened it, slapped a new coat of paint on it, and started hiring it out to ice. So I think that getting mixed up in the terminology here is not as helpful as looking at what is actually going on in these facilities. And one great example of, you know, how conditions have gotten worse, we featured, we recently published a big report on ICE detention in Trump's first year in office. And we highlighted the story of a woman who had spent a time in federal prison for illegal reentry. which is a federal crime.

And she said her time in federal prison, she was treated better than when she was sent to an ICE detention center. And as much as, you know, you can say in some cases, is this deliberate, is this deliberate indifference, deliberate negligence. But that doesn't matter to some extent. For these people, that's what's happening to them. And they're having to make decisions about their cases.

Right. And I think one key distinction when we talk about things like internment and others is that the goal of the U.S. government is deportation. As Austin said, the Trump administration believes deeply that in order to deport people, you must detain them. And I agree, the data does not support that. But in their view, it would be the easiest if people were in detention for 24 hours

and then signed a paper saying that they could get out and leave and free up that bed for someone else to come in. People are held in these detention centers for long periods of time, but the government doesn't want that. they would prefer that people just give up and stop fighting. Right. How do you other two think of the word concentration camp, Jimenez, and then Austin?

Yeah, I mean, I agree with Erin in terms of, you know, these are very much more like prison and in jail kind of structures. I think when it gets into the question of prolonged detention and what is actually the point of immigration detention, you know, that's definitely worth exploring. again, as I mentioned earlier, acting ICE director Todd Lyons underscores that immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive. And I think that that's important to remember. Someone being put in immigration detention is not supposed to be a punishment. They're not necessarily there because, you know, it's logistical. It's a process. It is the stopping point before they're put on a plane or somewhere else. And so I think that's where we have to see, like, how is this administration using immigration detention? And is it moving from, you know, being not punitive to being punitive?

Austin? Yeah, I have a slightly different perspective on this as a political geographer who's looked at the spatial practices of power and control from states across, you know, our modern history. And I think one of the things that happens when when American citizens see, you know, a fellow citizens shot in the street who are then called terrorists, when they see the language, the xenophobic rhetoric, the really brutality, the dehumanity. The dehumanizing. language coming out of the administration, as well as record numbers of deaths in detention, the fact that this is civil and not criminal, the fact that most people don't even have a criminal record. You know, it's normal for people to grasp at the nearest approximate analogy that comes

to mind. And so it's understandable, I think, why people might go to particular points in history and in memory and say, hey, the closest I can think of to what I'm seeing right now is this other period in history. I think to your point, Kara, even when we think about concentration camps, it's better to actually step back and say, you know, across the world, right now and in the last hundred years, there's a lot of examples of the way that different governments have, typically authoritarian governments, by the way, have exploited this artificial distinction between civil and criminal, have used these kinds of mechanisms, whether it's warehouses or camps. It didn't start even in Germany. I mean, it happened in South Africa. It happened with indigenous people in this continent.

It's happened in Australia with, you know, offshoring to islands, essentially, you know, warehouses on islands off the coast of Australia. So I completely agree that I do not think that empirically these are concentration camps in the way that we typically understand that term, as you said. But I understand why people might grasp at analogies. We'll be back in a minute. Mud, sand, snow, the track. Places where excuses. don't work, where capability is something you prove one race at a time. Off-road racing, Formula One, different worlds that pose the same question.

What are you made of? Every ground is our proving ground. Ready, set, Ford. When Westcham first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere. and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s,

one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at Westjet.com slash 30 years. Hi, everyone, it's Kara Swisher. I'm excited to put something new on your radar from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It's called Project Swagger with the one and only Robin Arzon, and it's all about helping you trust yourself, level up your mindset, and actually make the change. you've been thinking about. Robin is Peloton's vice president of fitness programming and head instructor. She's also a 27-time marathon and ultra-marathon runner, founder of Swigers Society Media Company, and a two-time New York Times best-selling author. In under 30 minutes, Robin shares the rituals, routines, and mental shifts that fuel her hustle and show you how to apply

them in your own life. In the very first episode, she opens up about the moment that forced you to transform her inner voice and the strategies that helped her become what she calls a self-talk ninja. You can find Project Swagger with Robin Arzon on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday. While DHS expands its detention capability, it's getting harder to know what's going on inside of them. The Trump administration gutted some of the agencies that were supposed to provide oversight for these facilities like the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

We've also seen DHS try to block members of Congress from showing up unannounced at ICE detention centers of the judge recently. The NHS can't do that. Aaron, who's overseeing detention centers now and who's able to investigate complaints coming out of them? There's actually three independent bodies that are supposed to do this oversight. One of them is the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. This is a relatively new office created a few years ago. And the Trump admin fired 90% of its staff. The other is DHS's Office of Inspector General, who is run by someone who is widely perceived to be an ally of the Trump administration, who is appointed as the Inspector General in Trump's first term. And the other is ICE itself. Ice has an office of detention inspections that occurs inside of its Office of Professional Responsibilities, and that office has been accused of essentially rubber stamping inspections. There's, you know, they outsource it to a private company that effectively never finds any serious.

violations. So in many cases, they are either policing themselves or not really doing any kind of policing internally. And then, of course, externally, there are lawyers who go into these facilities. There are members of Congress who have been fighting hard in court just to go and exercise their right to do inspections. And so you do get some view. And the people themselves, as Jimenez said at the start, you know, people are calling her. People are able to talk to reporters from the inside and say what happens. And we've even seen some videos. smuggled out of a few ice facilities showing terrible overcrowding. So it's not like there is no view. That happened in the first term of the Trump. Remember, the pictures were really quite

problematic for the Trump administration. And crucially, those pictures were of border facilities, crowded people at the borders. My organization, we actually sued over that during the Obama administration. Overcrowding in those border facilities got worse. And then inside iced attention, we had never seen situations like that. And now we have, we have seen in ice holding facilities in Baltimore, in Florida, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, people crowded into small holding cells, 30 people in a room with a maximum capacity of 10 people, not getting enough food, not getting enough water, and smuggling out cell phone videos saying, these conditions are horrifying, people are going to die.

And in fact, there have been some instances where people caught diseases, in these crowded conditions, and then were hospitalized afterwards, just because it was so unsanitary. So, from what we can see, the system has gotten worse, but what we know is that we don't have enough visibility in this system, and accountability has been disappearing on a daily basis. So Jimenez, you've written about how the Trump administration fired nearly 100 immigration judges last year and says it hopes to replace them with, quote, deportation judges. These hearings are one of the few opportunities for immigrants to have publicly plead their case and say what's happening, the immigration court effectively turns into a rubber stamp for

removals. How would that cloud our understanding who's being, they're not getting due process, basically, correct? I mean, at a very minimum, it gives the perception that the judge is going to come into the case with already the sense of deport or not, and with the pressure to deport. And, you know, I'm hearing that as these new judges are being onboarded, the training really leans into denying asylum protections and denying additional protections from being deported, because of course, asylum isn't the only way, the only thing that you can argue in immigration court. But I think a lot of people don't realize that immigration courts, we call them courts, you know, for all intents and purposes they are, but they're administrative courts. They're under the Justice

Department. The boss of all these judges is ultimately Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and then above her the president. And so, you know, to what extent can they're actually be an independent court system. You know, that's been up for debate for a very long time, but we're really seeing this administration utilize that to remove the people that it didn't want for whatever reason and then bring on a slate of candidates that at the very least has a very similar background. Many of them overwhelmingly worked for immigration and customs enforcement. And so we are seeing that sudden shift and change. And, you know, it will, it will. It will. might affect what those ultimate statistics look like.

They're there just to sign the papers, right, and to get them out. They're just sort of rubber stamping, as I know. And there's a lot of pressure on them. We've seen the Board of Immigration Appeals and other parts of the Justice Department issue memos saying that judges are not doing enough, that they're not moving fast enough. And so, you know, there's no judgment cast on someone that comes in from the agency to work as an immigration judge, but then they're faced with a pressure to move quickly. quickly, quickly, quickly. And that is going to lead to mistakes. And I think that's something,

I believe Austin said earlier, but when you're moving mass volume at mass speed in a system that's already prone to mistakes, those mistakes just seem more likely. Okay, Austin? Yeah, of course. Just want to say empirically, what we've seen is that the monthly asylum denial rate has increased all the way up to well over 80, 85%. Normally, just for context, it's between 45 and 60%. We've never in the history of immigration courts, seeing asylum denial rates this high. And this is just those that actually make it to their hearing. It doesn't even include people who are prevented from ever filing asylum claim in the first place. So we're seeing it in the data. Right. That's a huge, Jim. That's an enormous jump. Now, you were quoted in AP story about how reliable vetted immigration data is becoming a lot

harder to get in general. Talk about that, because that's critical. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know. Right. That's the whole point. That's right. I think the most significant example I point to is the fact that, you know, on day one, the Trump administration stopped publishing monthly enforcement data that came out of what was called the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, a really incredible agency, very innovative that published data for everyone. I mean, it's not a political story or a partisan story. It's, look, here's the data of what's going on with immigration enforcement. They stopped releasing that data. And what they started doing is bundling, you know, data talking points in a bunch of rhetoric that is either unverifiable

or verifiably inaccurate, such as claiming that everyone they're going after and arresting and detaining are people with criminal records, which is just demonstrably untrue. And when you think about what they're doing, one of the things that's interesting in the speed of what they're doing is you're starting to see sort of corruption questions happening.

And obviously today, NBC reported that Corey Mundowski, one of the private prison people are complaining about shakedowns, which is, I mean, if these guys are complaining, you know something's afoot, essentially. Anybody have a comment on that this is, what is the sort of implications of the gnome residency

in this job, very performative, obviously corrupt, versus now? What do they have to change? Because that is, I'm hearing from a lot of Republicans, the wasted money, the corruption, the self-dealing, and this, obviously someone's got it out

for Corey Liamowski and deservedly so. Anybody talk about this? Yeah, one thing that we've seen, the administration uses single-source contracts. And the single-source contracting has allowed them to essentially pick and choose who gets these contracts. This is sped up with the warehouses. They actually did an incredibly unusual process to integrate DHS's detention needs into a Navy

procurement system which lets them bypass normal federal contracting rules requiring competitive bidding. As a result, they have been spending this money more quickly than ever with less transparency, and who is getting these contracts, in many cases, it's politically connected providers, some of whom have no experience in the field whatsoever, even at times above the big private prison giants. Yeah, and we're seeing that with how much they're spending on the warehouses, Kara.

I mean, a lot of these warehouses were finding that the most recent evaluation is a fractional number of what the government has actually paid for it. Right. Meaning they're overpaying. They're overpaying. They're dramatically overpaying. Yeah, the Republicans are even complaining about it. So what happens if they don't open, Jimena? They just sit there? What occurs?

I guess so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it sort of depends on what the contracts outlay. There might be, depending on how they're written, they might revert back. I honestly haven't parsed through the various contracts. But, yeah, I mean, for the most part, they're probably in government contract until they're either used or they're not. I don't know if Aaron or Austin has insight into specific facilities. Will corruption be a big problem here in stopping it?

Because certainly this reporting suddenly is gaining some steam. And I assume it's a way to kick them on their way out or set them up for prosecution later. But does that have a big impact? Because you're seeing a number of these stories come out now rather significant. Yeah. I mean, I think the contracting at DHS writ large just across components, like not just immigration, but also FEMA, the planes, the Coast Guard. Like there's just so many different components of DHS where contracting has come into question. And, you know, Senator Mullen was asked about that during his confirmation hearing.

And he seemed open to actually rolling back the internal policy that the secretary has to sign everything above a certain amount, which was not only putting a lot on Nome's discretion, but also backlogging a lot of approvals or denials that could have come out of the agency. And so I think contracting kind of the individual, like who signs it, who approves it, and that definitely seems to be a bit in flux at the department. Yeah, it really is when the prison guys are complaining, you know, there's a real problem because they're so corrupt. Last question, DHS is racing, speaking of money, to spend $200 billion it got from Congress. This number is staggering in the one big beautiful bill act ahead of the midterms. The expectations that Democrats will try to claw back some of that money if they win back the house

or put more limits on it, for sure. The detention system is already stretched, but expanding will be key to meeting Trump's goal to deport a million people a year. What will that mean for migrants who bear the brunt of that pressure campaign to expand quickly, especially if they're stopped in this case?

What happens next, because it looks like it's going to be a big old stop sign? Jimena, then Austin, then Aaron, please finish up. Where do you imagine this going forward? Yeah, I mean, I think the expansion is in full swing, and we'll have to see how this new leadership prioritizes, whether it's prioritizing rapid removals versus detentions versus arrests. Those are all also completely different parts of that system.

But in terms of people who might get caught in the crosshairs, we really have seen this Trump administration not just limit illegal migration, but also legal migration into the United States. And I think that's kind of the continued focus on next phase. again, we're seeing more people in immigration detention that might normally not be there, not just because of the mandatory detention policy, but also because they are moving forward on different people with different visas, visa overstays, on— Delegalizing people.

Delegalizing individuals. We're seeing the pullback of TPS, which makes, you know, many, thousands of more people more vulnerable to arrest and detention. We're seeing deferred action for childhood arrivals get caught up. in this as well. And so, you know, I think that really expands the scope of who is going to be impacted if they're allowed to do that. Austin? Yeah, so my biggest concern about what's coming next is we're at a moment where enough Americans are paying attention to the immigration system and there is now bipartisan frustration with how things are going. I would like to hope that that could

push us towards actually making some much needed systemic changes to what our legal system looks like, to what the institutions look like, who are enforcing the law. But my big concern is that some of these, the worst parts, the worst excesses of this system might get clawed back, let's say, five or ten percent, and then everything sort of falls out of visibility, and all of the parts that have been broken for decades under Republicans and Democrats is going to keep functioning still at a punitive and dangerous level, but it won't get the attention that it really needs to implement real changes. So my hope—

Because the money is there. if the money is there. And so I just really want to see more people, more Americans, not just pay attention, but actually say, look, we really need Republicans and Democrats to come together and decide on some ways to fix this, at least fix parts of it. Probably unlikely in the next three years. It's very challenging, yeah. Finish up, Aaron. Yeah, I just want to say amen to what Austin just said. The last time we made any major changes to our legal immigration system was 35 years ago. The last time we made any changes to the immigration enforcement system was 30 years ago. So we are operating in a 20th century system in a 21st century world, and the cracks have been

showing for many years. And everything that Trump administration done has just made that worse. So the admin has three and a half years now, a little bit more, there are three years in order to finish their mass deportation campaign. They won't be able to. They're not going to deport everybody. But it's very clear that Stephen Miller is still in charge and wants to push for the highest numbers they possibly can. Yes, we haven't mentioned him. Yeah. We haven't mentioned Voldemort yet, but go ahead. Go right ahead. And his goal is a million deportations a year. I don't think they're going to hit it, but they're going to try to spend every penny of that funding that they can in order to reach that goal. And that means more people caught up in this rapid system, more people held in detention,

more people subject to awful conditions, and more people who see what's happening and say, I can't take it anymore. I just want to give up, even if I could have a chance to stay in this country because I don't want to spend another day in this hellhole. Right. So how close do you think he will get to that, hitting that number? I don't think he'll get there. Yeah. Right now, he's at about 400 to 500,000 people. We think they've been probably deported since he took office. Of those, some were migrants who had crossed the border before he even entered. You know, that's not even half of what they want to get for their million a year. By the time he leaves office, there will still be millions and millions of undocumented immigrants here. And that's why Congress really

has to step in and do something. Something about this. I actually have one last question. We haven't mentioned Stephen Miller, who's at the center of all this. It's easy to focus on Chrissy Nome because she's such a performative clown and Corey Lewandowski,

who's clearly corrupt to the core. I'd love each of you to finish up by reflecting on Stephen Miller because I think a lot of the focus, obviously, is on Trump. Why don't you start Aaron, and then Austin and then Jimena? Stephen Miller's impact can be felt

the biggest by Los Angeles, the raids, Gregory Vovina. And we know this because in late May, Stephen Miller called together the heads of every 25 ice field offices to a meeting in Washington, D.C., and berated them and said, stop focusing on public safety threats or slower, more targeted enforcement. I want you out there at Home Depot at 7-11, just, and in his words, quote, just go out there and get the illegal aliens. So that is the indiscriminate nature of the Miller enforcement. It is, it doesn't matter who we target. It doesn't matter how long they've been. in the country. It doesn't matter. They have family here. They have jobs. They've never committed a crime. In his view, if they're undocumented, round them up, throw them in detention, get him out of the country. Who cares? And that is the legacy of this administration, because he has been the one in control of immigration policy from day one. Go ahead. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, Stephen Miller is what happens when you give a monomaniacal narcissist access to a car with no brakes on it. And you

fill the car with gas and let them drive. This was a system that was broken when the Trump administration came in before Stephen Miller stepped into the institutions that he now runs. But his understanding of the institutions, his relentless pursuit of deporting every adult and child and pregnant woman and disabled person in the country without any remorse or without any pause to either the law or the reactions from the American public is a big part of what's driving this. And ironically, it's potentially so damaging to the Trump administration and the Republican Party itself that has the potential to simply backfire entirely because we're seeing so many people, including Republicans, push back on this just over the top rhetoric and over the top enforcement.

So he absolutely has been, you know, at the wheel. But we just, we have to remember that, you know, this is what happens when Congress builds a broken car and hands it off to people in the White House. Mm-hmm. Ultimately, Jimenez. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that Stephen Miller is the one that's driving the ship on a lot of these fronts, right? Everything from the reduction in the federal workforce that resulted in the depleting of staff in these civil rights offices and these oversight offices at DHS. You know, some of his broader thinking on why a mass deportation plan needs to happen to begin with. And so we don't see that, again, kind of thinking about moving forward.

We don't really see that changing. he continues to have a very clear pulse and influence on the staffing on the direction of the policy. And, you know, these were questions that senators were asking Christy Noem when she was first being confirmed as, you know, who is actually going to be setting the priorities, the rules, the regulations, and moving the pieces. And so we'll have to see, you know, what that dynamic looks like with Mullen, but it will likely be fairly in line with the administration and their goals. Is his influence waning, do you think, at some point, if they lose in the midterm? You know, for now I don't really see that necessarily happening. I think it depends on how this upcoming few months go for them. This was a really rough start to the year for DHS.

You know, one thing I do often point out is that, you know, we do talk a lot about Kristyneum, but Stephen Miller also called Alex Prattie, a domestic terrorist as well. and other members of the Trump administration did. And the heat really came on Nome. And even though she acted the way that she had been, didn't really change her behavior, the administration saw that as the opportunity to make a swap, at least in that component.

And so I think that's indicative that, you know, there aren't necessarily major changes or reworks happening in other places of the administration. And as long as the more, you know, I don't want to say consumer facing, but voter facing side. of the communication is more on luck and more controlled, I think that that has more to do with it than, you know,

who's in the Oval Office having these conversations. Yeah, it's still Stephen Miller. He will go down in history, I think, in a way that is not what he thinks it's going to be. Anyway, I really appreciate it, Jimena, Austin, and Aaron. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks, Kara.

Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Ossel, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Bernie, and Kaelin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Aruta and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go wherever you listen to a podcast, search for On with Keroswisher, and hit follow.

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