Cashed-up ICE eyes detention ‘tent jails’

With an overnight tripling of its annual budget and intensifying pressure to increase deportations, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is racing to expand its detention spaces.

An aerial view of a migrant detention centre, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, is seen located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida. Picture: AFP

With an overnight tripling of its annual budget and intensifying pressure to increase deportations, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is racing to expand its detention space with temporary tentlike structures, despite safety warnings.

Trump administration officials have identified limited detention space as one of the major chokepoints preventing them from stepping up deportations as quickly as Donald Trump has promised.

They hope a new $US45bn ($68.9bn) for detention through the end of his term will help them get to 100,000 beds by the end of the year, up from roughly 40,000 when Mr Trump took office.

ICE’s plan was laid out in several internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and described by administration officials familiar with the effort.

The infusion of cash came as part of the Republican tax-and-spending package passed by congress this month. Congress gave ICE $US74bn to spend by 2029, more than tripling its current $US8.7bn annual budget and making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.

So far, the plans have given priority to erecting thousands of tents, or “hardened soft-sided facilities”, as quickly as possible to expand detention capacity quickly at US military bases and adjoining bricks-and-mortar ICE jails, the documents show.

Officials said they prefer this approach for now because it allows them to create large numbers of new beds concentrated in a few locations, rather than finding smaller numbers of jail cells scattered around the country.

The heavy reliance on temporary facilities has already created some internal tensions, as some administration officials and outside Republican allies warn that detaining immigrants long-term in flimsy structures could prove disastrous, particularly in locations prone to flooding or hurricanes.

Administration officials have also been lobbying Republican states to create more detention space. Florida became the first of what officials said could be several states to create a state-operated immigrant detention centre, with a tent camp on an abandoned airstrip in the Everglades it is calling Alligator Alcatraz.

ICE’s highest priorities are nine new projects that would add more than 9000 detention beds, the documents show.

The first of the priorities listed in the documents is a 5000-bed tent city at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, which the government previously awarded and rescinded. It was awarded this past week to a different company, and the plans indicate ICE hopes to have it operational by August.

Other priorities include adding beds at the Hudson Correctional Facility in Colorado; Camp Atterbury in Indiana, and; Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey.

Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including Secretary Kristi Noem and her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, have expressed a preference for detention centres run by Republican states and local governments rather than private prison companies, according to people familiar with their thinking.

Some in the detention industry said the strategy would place states, not the federal government, at fault if quickly opened facilities have problems.

Eunice Cho, an American Civil Liberties Union staff lawyer specialising in detention, said the government seems more interested in building tent cities than in using existing prisons and jail sites, “in an environment where the spectacle is part of the point”.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott in February offered ICE the use of two jails, with a total of 4000 beds, which the state used to house immigrants arrested under its Operation Lone Star program.

While the administration has not taken Texas up on that offer, the internal ICE documents show plans for tent camps across Texas, in El Paso, Port Isabel, Prairieland, Dilley and Hutto.