Temporary. The word implies tents. It implies transition. It implies a brief stop on the way to somewhere else. But concrete is not temporary. Steel is not temporary. A forty-five billion dollar budget is not temporary.
The government is building permanent facilities for what they call “temporary” deportation holdings. The question is why. The answer is in the money.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress in July 2025 allocated $45 billion for new detention centers, including facilities specifically designed to hold families. This represents a 265 percent increase to ICE’s detention budget. By the end of 2026, ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion on detention operations. That is not the budget of a system designed to process people quickly and humanely. That is the budget of a system designed to warehouse human beings for the long term.
The plans call for eight “mega-centers” capable of holding 7,000 to 10,000 people each. These are not processing facilities designed for rapid turnover. These are massive institutions, remote, isolated, and built to last. ICE documents state that detainees would spend an average of 60 days in these facilities before being deported. That is not temporary. That is a sentence.
By November 2025, ICE was using 104 more facilities than at the start of the year, a 91 percent increase. The number of people in detention rose nearly 75 percent in 2025, reaching a modern record of over 66,000 people. The stated goal is to reach 92,600 beds by the end of 2026. This approaches the capacity of the entire federal prison system for a population that is predominantly non-criminal.
The data exposes the lie. As of November 2025, for every one person released from ICE detention, 14.3 people were deported directly from custody. That ratio was 1.6 in December 2024. The goal is not to process people fairly. The goal is to pressure people into giving up their rights and accepting deportation without due process. The system is designed to break people, not to evaluate their claims.
The expansion has been accompanied by the near-elimination of transparency. Deaths in ICE detention in 2025 were the highest ever recorded, more than the last four years combined. These are not statistics. They are human beings dying in custody, often from preventable causes, in remote facilities far from medical care or legal help. Thousands more are being held in hastily-constructed tent camps where temperatures soar and freeze, where basic sanitation is an afterthought, and where the cruelty is the point.
Follow the money. Private prison companies operate on a simple model. They get paid per head per night. They do not profit from efficiency. They profit from detention. When the government builds permanent mega-centers, it is signing a long-term contract with these corporations. It is guaranteeing a revenue stream for decades. The lobbyists for these companies write the laws that fill the beds. The politicians who approve the budgets take the donations. The system is not designed to solve a problem. It is designed to sustain an industry.
The documents explicitly state that the objective is to secure services for the “design, renovation, and operation of ICE-owned permanent structures.” They are not renting temporary space. They are building facilities that they will own and operate indefinitely.
The lie is in the language. “Temporary” is what they tell the public to make the medicine go down. “Processing” is what they call imprisonment. “Deportation centers” is what they call prisons. The truth is in the concrete. Permanent facilities are built for permanent use. And once the capacity exists to detain one group, the definition of who belongs in that group can expand. The machinery does not discriminate. It is built to process human beings, and once it is built, it must be fed. The question is not why they are building permanent facilities for temporary holdings. The question is who they plan to put in them next…
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ICE documents state that detainees would spend an average of 60 days in these facilities before being deported. That is not temporary. That is a sentence.
It’s temporary, and I’m surprised it’s not longer than that. Probably takes awhile to determine where they’re from, how to return them, etc. There’s something like 11 million (or more) of them.
Trump certainly doesn’t want to keep them in the country (even in “facilities”).
Though perhaps the bigger impact relates to deterrence.