By Betsey Piette
February 13, 2026

With an average of over 2 million people imprisoned at any time, the United States has notoriously had the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world over a long period. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, around $182 billion is spent annually to cage around 1% of the U.S. population 18 and older.

Now, fueled by racism and corporate greed, the rapid expansion of detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025 has led to a surge in detainees, 40% of whom are people with no criminal records.

According to ICE data, some 69,000 people were in ICE detention on Jan. 7, 2026, up from 38,000 in early January 2025, before Donald Trump took office. (USA Today, Jan. 14)

In January 2025 there were 107 detention centers holding immigrants. Today that number has nearly doubled to 212 and climbing as Trump threatens to build more. The administration recently proposed buying and converting 23 large warehouses into detention centers that could each hold tens of thousands of people. At some proposed sites, the encaged population would surpass that of nearby local communities.

There is no lack of funds. Trump’s “Big Beautiful (bad) Bill” gave ICE an additional $45 billion to build new detention centers through 2029 — a budget 62% larger than the entire federal prison system.

A report by the American Immigration Council estimates that this funding would allow ICE to cage up to 135,000 people at any time — comparable to the U.S. internment of Japanese, German and Italian people during World War II.

Prison-industrial complex

Profiting from the incarceration of workers has been a long-standing practice in the U.S. The term “prison-industrial complex” was coined to describe the web of federal and state prisons, local jails plus corporations like Aramark, Smart Communications, Securus Technologies, TextBehind, Wellpath, YesCare and others that are paid billions of dollars to deliver food, mail service and health care to prisoners. In most cases, services are substandard or worse.

When Trump first took office in 2016, the profits of Core Civic and Geo Group, corporations paid to provide beds for immigrants detained by ICE, skyrocketed. Trump made targeting immigrants a key point in his platform during his 2024 campaign. Shortly after taking office in 2025, he hired David Venturella, who had spent over a decade at GEO Group and was paid over $6 million to oversee their immigrant detention operations.

Under Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Venturella oversees the same ICE division responsible for detention contracts that he previously expanded for GEO Group shareholders. (Consortium News, Jan. 27)

Core Civic, one of the largest private prison operators in the United States, has gained significant financial benefits from the increased immigration detention and enforcement policies during the second Trump administration. Following Trump’s election, the company’s stock price soared by nearly 29%.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Core Civic and GEO Group, along with their subsidiaries and executives, donated nearly $2.8 million to Trump’s 2024 election campaign and inaugural fund. Just Security reports that these investments are paying off, with revenues already reported as “soaring” under Trump’s second term. (Sept. 24, 2025)

With the billions of dollars in federal spending intended to double detention capacity to 100,000 beds, there is no end in sight for these private contractors. To reach this goal, ICE must target immigrants with or without criminal records and kidnap children as well as their parents, as is increasingly the case.

As the brutality of ICE and DHS agents is caught on videos and reports of inhumane and intolerable conditions within detention facilities make the news, there is widespread and growing opposition to Trump’s detention agenda.

The kidnapping of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis and his detention along with his father at Dilley detention center in Texas sparked a rebellion by immigrant children being held at the facility. In 2025, over 37 immigrants died in detention centers due to the lack of adequate health care, inadequate food, the lack of clean water and poor ventilation and heating. There are growing reports of measles spreading through centers like Dilley and others.

These conditions are the result of the capitalist system putting corporate profits ahead of human lives, whether within the already existing U.S. carceral system or the expanding ICE detention centers. We say: Tear down the prison walls and abolish ICE!