The Trump administration has a $38 billion plan to convert commercial warehouses into massive detention centers for people facing deportation. Inside the Trump administration’s massive expansion of detention facilities around the country.

Guests

Douglas MacMillan, corporate accountability reporter at The Washington Post.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Also Featured

Mario Guevara, deported journalist.

Transcript

Part I       

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Mario Guevara had been in the United States for 21 years. He arrived in 2004, seeking asylum from El Salvador. Eight years later, Guevara’s asylum application was denied, but he found another legal pathway to stay. He obtained legal work authorization and a clear path to a green card, and over two decades, Guevara built a life in the United States.

He worked as a journalist, started a family, and made Georgia his home. Then on June 14th, 2025, Guevara was arrested while covering a No Kings protest outside of Atlanta.

(ARREST VIDEO PLAYS)

Guevara was live streaming the protest and documented the moment he was arrested by agents from the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office.

MARIO GUEVARA: Immigration know me very well in Atlanta. All the officer called me by my name when I was covering the raids.

This is why I believe it was something personal. Immigration, when they realized I was in the police custody, they immediately put me on hold because they want me out of the streets.

CHAKRABARTI:  Now, Guevara was arrested by the Sheriff’s office for alleged driving misdemeanors, but instead of going through due process for those lesser charges, he was quickly transferred to the Folkston ICE Processing Center, a federal immigration detention facility in Georgia, and one of the country’s largest.

GUEVARA: I never in my life was in jail, incarcerated until that moment and was something horrible for me to be treated like a criminal. They put me handcuffed in my feet, in my hand. They transport me for long time with no water, with no food, with no chance to go to restroom, six-hour drive.

Yeah, it’s something, was something horrible especially because I was not criminal. I’m not criminal, and they, I feel like a criminal.

CHAKRABARTI: Guevara was held at Folkston for more than 100 days. 70 of those days were in solitary confinement.

GUEVARA: When they put me inside the jail, they immediately put me in a solitary confinement, in a small cell, two by three meters.

They say, because my safety, they told me, you are a public figure, you need protection. I say, no, I need, I don’t need protection. But even that, they put me in a small cell, 22 hours inside the cell. I was sleeping with the light on all the time. They only allow me two hours to go out of that jail to see the sun.

They only allow me two hours to go out of that jail to see the sun.

Mario Guevara

And during that two hour, I had to take a shower. It’s something horrible. I was there in confinement for 70 days.

CHAKRABARTI: Guevara’s wife and three children were deeply concerned that he was being held in solitary for so long. His daughter, Katherine, says she feared it would break his spirit.

KATHERINE: I was very worried about his mental health. My dad is a very, he’s a very bright and social person. He thrives off of like social interactions and just being with people. And knowing that he was, they had him in solitary confinement. It was like the biggest worry for me, was just this is going to be torture for him.

CHAKRABARTI: Eventually Guevara was moved out of solitary and back into the general population at the detention center. He talked with other detainees about how they were arrested and treated. Many said they were taken from their homes or arrested on their way to work. And Guevara says he felt safer among the immigrants than he did at the county jail, but that staff at the ICE detention center treated him much worse.

GUEVARA: I believe the immigration jail and the county jail; they are totally different. The food maybe is different and the treatment is different. In the county, I think the sheriff has probably, they have some knowledge about how they treat the people. In the immigration jail, they have civilian taking care of the people. And the civilian, they normally don’t know how to trade the inmates. They believe we are criminals. I have some allegation with one of the custodian in Folkston, because he was jailing another inmate. He say, oh, move criminal. I tell, hey. Stop. Don’t talk to immigrant like that because we are not criminal.

We are honest people. We are here only for paper issues, not for commit crimes. That is the reality. In the county is different, but I think the sheriff has a different treatment to the people. And the civilian in the immigration jail, they don’t have the knowledge to treat the people.

CHAKRABARTI: Guevara says ICE officials tried to get him to sign a voluntary departure agreement, essentially pressuring him to self deport instead of fighting his deportation order in court, he refused to sign, but Guevara eventually lost his appeal, which was ordered, and he was ordered to be deported out of the United States.

Now, while he doesn’t regret trying to do everything he could to stay in the U.S., Guevara’s time in that ICE detention facility has led him to advise other people differently. When faced with the choice of potentially dying in detention or accepting deportation, Guevara tells us he thinks people should leave.

GUEVARA: I think the best choice for them is to try to go out of the country as soon as possible, because you can die in jail. It’s unfair. Die in jail away from your family. I think it’s better to stay away in your country and not die in immigration jail. I was 112 days exactly in jail, ICE custody. I lost almost 30 pounds, 29 to be exactly.

If you have suffered some problem, try to send your voluntary departure and be out of the country as soon as possible because you can die inside the jail.

CHAKRABARTI: Guevara was deported back to El Salvador in October. You heard earlier from his daughter Katherine. She cannot visit her father because she’s a DACA recipient, and reentry to the country isn’t guaranteed.

That means that his whole family, his home, his dog, his entire life remains back in Georgia.

GUEVARA: Today is my five months after being deported. I was almost four months in jail. This means I have almost nine months away from my family, and this is the worst part of this, because I really miss my family. I really miss my dog, my home, my church, my friends, everything.

I really miss my life. I am here, when I lived in El Salvador, I was young, I was 25, 26 years old and I’m now almost 50. I think they changed my life radically and it’s something horrible. It’s something horrible for me.

I really miss my family. I really miss my dog, my home, my church, my friends, everything.

MARIO GUEVARA

KATHERINE: This is a very heartbreaking situation. I don’t even recognize America right now.

Like it’s just unbelievable everything that’s happening, the way that they’re going about things and just taking these people who are just honest, hardworking people, like it’s heartbreaking.

CHAKRABARTI: So you just heard from Mario Guevara and his daughter Katherine. Now, Mario is one of tens of thousands of people who are being swept up in immigration raids across the country.

There will be tens of thousands more, because the Trump administration is now ramping up a $38 billion plan to radically expand its detention facilities. The administration is buying industrial warehouses and turning them into warehouses for people facing deportation. Now, this story was first reported by Douglas MacMillan of the Washington Post, and Douglas MacMillan joins us now.

He’s the corporate accountability reporter at The Washington Post. Douglas, welcome to On Point.

DOUGLAS MACMILLAN: Hi Meghna. Thanks for having me. So we’re going to spend this whole hour talking about these warehouses that the federal government is seeking to buy up across the United States. But first, give us the lay of the land on the detention facilities as they are right now.

How many are there, how many people are in them, et cetera.

MACMILLAN: Yeah. So when this president was sworn in last year, this country already had the largest immigrant detention system in the world. However, President Trump set about on a goal to double detention capacity because he said that he was going to embark on a campaign to crack down on immigration, to arrest more people and deport more people from this country than ever before.

And so what we have seen over that time is a dramatic expansion already of the system that was the biggest in the world when he came into office at the time of the inauguration, there were about 35 to 40,000 people in detention already.

Averaging per day. Since then, we’ve seen that number roughly double. There’s close to 70,000 people per day in detention right now, and they are being held all over the country in more than 200 facilities. Many of these are small county jails that rent out bed space to ICE, for anywhere from a few handful to a 100, 200 people in these county jails.

Then the vast majority of people in immigrant detention are being held in privately owned detention centers that are primarily run by two companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic. These companies have existed in this country for decades. They have been operating private prisons for much of that time.

But over the past decade or so, as the government has actually moved away from using private prisons and relying on private firms to operate those, these companies have moved more towards operating ICE detention centers, and they’ve started to see this as a growth opportunity, they’ve been a big partner for the Trump administration.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We’ll talk a little bit later about how they even discuss their ICE contracts in their quarterly earnings calls. But Douglas, give us a picture of what the current detention facilities are like. Are they, we’ll get to the warehouses in a minute, but are the current ones purpose built for detention?

Are they other facilities that have been converted? What are they?

MACMILLAN: Yeah. Some of ’em are purpose built for detention. Some of them are converted from former private prisons. But a lot of these places, if you go inside, they look like prisons. I think that there’s a kind of a mystique and a mystery about what ICE detention centers are, partly because people can’t go inside them.

They’re black boxes. They’re not open to journalists like myself. They’re not open to the public. And so most people have not seen inside of them. They generally look like prisons. People are living in, living on cots and cells with other people. They have a toilet in their room.

They have very limited ability to move around. Some of them, as your guest earlier was, have been placed in segregated housing units. So these are essentially, look like prisons on the inside.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Tell us more about the broad strokes of this plan. It’s $38 billion at least, that Congress had already appropriated for ICE. And they want to buy warehouses. How large, where are they? How many?

MACMILLAN: Yeah, so Congress gave them this money, and the administration has been talking about wanting to improve the efficiency of the detention system in order to speed up deportations.

So currently they’re essentially shuttling people around to wherever there’s an empty bed. The administration officials have talked about, what if the system could be more efficient and move in their own words, they’ve said, they’ve compared this to more like an Amazon type logistics network.

They want to move people around efficiently. Like Amazon moves packages is something that the current ICE acting director actually has said. So with this in mind, they are buying these large industrial warehouses, some of them with up to a million square feet. And they’re planning kind of a system, a hub and spoke model around the country.

They want to move people around efficiently. Like Amazon moves packages is something that the current ICE acting director actually has said.

Douglas MacMillan

So the vision, the idea was to have eight of the very large scale, they call them mega detention centers that will hold up to 7,500 to 10,000 people at a time which is a scale that we have never seen in modern history. And these centers will be fed by a number of smaller, about 16 smaller regional processing centers that haul between 500 to 1,500 people.

So the idea is to book people into the smaller processing centers for a few days and then send them up to the larger mega detention centers where they’ll be held for a few weeks as they wait deportation.

CHAKRABARTI: And of these mega facilities, how many does the plan predict or project?

MACMILLAN: Up to eight.

CHAKRABARTI: Up to eight.

MACMILLAN: And the currently, they say they’ve already been buying these warehouses. They bought at least 10 warehouses and they bought at least two of the ones that we think will be the mega detention centers.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then overall, the other centers it’s some, it’s more than 24 total. I need the right number.

MACMILLAN: Overall, they projected around 23 or 24. And so 16 smaller ones and about eight larger ones.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then this would expand the bed capacity for ICE. Presuming that there are actually beds in there.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, they have said that the system overall, when they’re done with it, by the end of this year they project it to be around 96,000 capacity for around 96,000 people at a time.

Currently, they have between 60,000 and 70,000 people in the system, so it will increase the capacity overall. A big question remains whether or not they plan to continue operating all of the existing detention centers or whether they actually want to close some of those. They’ve indicated that potentially they want to close some of the existing detention centers but that’s something that ICE generally does not do.

So it would be surprising if they start closing the centers.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I would just want to also make it clear to listeners that we reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment. And also, we had a list of specific questions regarding this plan for the purchasing of warehouses and how DHS would go about ensuring that the warehouses are indeed run in a humane way, which the Department of Homeland Security has said that it would do in previous statements.

Before I bring in another voice here, can you tell me a little bit about what DHS has told the Washington Post about how they plan on doubling their capacity in these industrial warehouses, which were not actually constructed, they’re not purpose built for people. So how does DHS say they’re going to create humane facilities?

MACMILLAN: These are essentially vacant shells of buildings. There are four walls, a ceiling and a slab of concrete. And they’re built for holding packages and fulfillment centers, companies like Amazon.

So they have a lot of work cut out for them in terms of retrofitting these, they’ve said that, so they’ve actually started over the weekend. They awarded the first contracts to private firms that are going to come in and retrofit these facilities. They’ve said that the firms are going to spend up to upwards of $150 million and spend for periods of several weeks to several months, potentially renovating these facilities, adding things like housing units, medical areas dining areas, cafeterias, recreational areas, law libraries, all the things that the federal detention standards require ICE to have in all their holding facilities, they’re going to have to put in these buildings.

And remember, these are factory, these are warehouses, these are fulfillment centers. So they have large bay doors all around. Some of them have dozens of doors around side of them.

So in order to secure these facilities, they’re going to have to probably brick up all of those doors. So just a kind of a visual of how these buildings were, but not really suited to this purpose. They’re going to have a lot of, spend a lot of time really renovating them, retrofitting them in order to be able to house that many humans in a secure and safe way.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Douglas MacMillan is with us. He’s the Corporate Accountability Reporter at the Washington Post. I’d like to bring in Aaron Reichlin-Melnick into the conversation now. He’s a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Aaron, welcome to the show.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Hi, Meghna. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: How would you describe the current conditions in the extant ICE detention facilities?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: There have been problems with the current ICE detention system for decades. Many of these facilities are operated by private prison companies that cut costs in order to increase their profits. And as you already heard from Mario Guevara, conditions in these detention centers in places like Folkston are at oftentimes worse than at county jails or even federal prisons.

This is because ICE detention operates with fewer oversight bodies than a lot of existing jails and prisons around the country. We at the American Immigration Council have filed complaints about the medical care of people in detention centers for many years. Very seriously inadequate medical conditions.

Access to counsel can be difficult, and as you heard from Doug, people are flown around the country, which means that they are sometimes very far away from their lawyers, from their resources and from their families, and that pushes people to simply give up their case even if they have viable options for remaining in this country.

CHAKRABARTI: How long on average, are people being held in the centers right now? Because as you pointed out, Mario was there for more than 100 days, 70 of those days in solitary confinement.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: So ICE publishes figures on the average length of stay. The average time that a person who is held in ICE detention is kept in a detention center, and as of today, that average is around 48 days.

But that figure is a little deceptive because there’s really two populations. There’s the people who take Mario’s advice and give up quickly rather than stay in jail, because of either they don’t have any options to remain, or simply they can’t take being incarcerated. And then there are people who stay and fight their cases.

And on average, a detained immigration case takes months. If you win or lose at the lower level and there is appeal in front of the Board of Immigration Appeals, you’ll be detained for even further. So some people are held in these detention centers for six months. Some people are held for over a year, and a smaller portion, much smaller portion is held for a matter of years.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. The next question I have is actually for both of you, but Douglas, let me start here with you. This would be, if these warehouses do come to fruition, it would be the largest immigration detention system the United States has had in the nation’s history. Did I recall you saying that earlier?

MACMILLAN: In modern history.

CHAKRABARTI: In modern history.

MACMILLAN: There’s comparisons and if you want a closest comparison, you have to look back to the Japanese internment effort.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more about why you say that.

MACMILLAN: This country has not detained immigrants at a scale of more than 50,000 people a day since back when the Japanese internment effort.

So if that’s the closest comparison and the current system under ICE, which was only created a little more than 20 years ago, the wake of 9/11. There have not been people detained at these numbers.

CHAKRABARTI: So Aaron, what does that tell you? That we haven’t seen these numbers since the second World War for an internment system, by the way, which the United States later on under duress apologized for, due to its immorality and illegality.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, I want to build on that because the other comparisons are to the federal prison system or state prisons, and right now the largest federal prison in the country is Fort Dix, and that only holds at maximum capacity 4,600 people.

Similarly, the current largest jail in the country is Rikers Island in New York City, and that is currently holding only about 7,000 people. So if even a single one of these detention centers, these mega detention camps that they’re planning for 7,500 to 10,000 people comes online, that single facility would be the largest jail or prison in the country, and they want to operate eight of these.

Beyond Japanese internment, the only other comparison that I’ve been able to think of is the mass detention of Cuban and Haitian migrants at Guantanamo Bay in the early 1990s when people were being interdicted at sea and kept in tent camps on the runway at Guantanamo Bay. We have never had a detention system other than that, where people were held at this scale, and to throw up these warehouses in a matter of months with no competitive bidding process and very little oversight, risks disasters happening because this is brand new for the federal government.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So the bidding and oversight issue is really important and we’re going to come back to that in a minute, but let me present what the government’s case might be or they have hinted to in various statements over the past couple of weeks, and one of them is as Douglas described.

This would allow more efficient processing of detainees with the hope for end goal. That time and detention would go down and either deportations would happen more quickly, or cases would be cleared, so that overall, wouldn’t that be better, Aaron? For the people who get arrested by ICE?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: I do think it’s important to acknowledge that the current detention system, which has been growing since the 1980s and really since the 1990s is a patchwork. It was not intelligently designed as it were. It has slowly grown over the last 45 years as Congress gradually increased the budget for immigration detention. And so there is some value in saying, what if we custom design this system from scratch?

The biggest problem with that is that they’re intending to do this in a matter of less than a year with funding that has suddenly been provided for them and which runs out in 2029. So they are urgently trying to build a parallel detention system in a totally unprecedented fashion here and doing it through, not by the construction of custom-built facilities, but by the purchase of these commercial warehouses, which are manifestly incompatible with human habitation at the moment.

And they claim that they can retrofit them, but we have already seen previous efforts to build detention centers in the short-term Camp East Montana, a tent camp built on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas is currently ICE’s largest detention center, and that was constructed starting in August of last year.

Camp East Montana has already seen three deaths. It is infamous to those who have been inside the facility. They have said it’s one of the worst detention center that they have ever seen, and that was in similar facility, built so rapidly that it was unable to be constructed anywhere near the level of standards required.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Douglas, you had started describing what it would take to convert one of these facilities into a habitable and humane detention facility. I’d like to go into that a little bit more, because imagining one of these warehouses. For example, some of them are, they’re built to hold stuff, not people.

And at the best of times, there could maybe be when they were industrial warehouses, maybe a couple of hundred folks working in a place that’s a million square feet. So it even comes down to things like plumbing and sewage. Do they have plans on — go ahead. Like how do they up upgrade that?

MACMILLAN: Yeah. Constructing the interior I think is going to be fine. I think they’ll find firms who are going to be able to do that. I think the real challenge with this is going to be the resources and the infrastructure that are necessary to make a scale of this size actually work. You just hinted at a couple of them.

A lot of the places where they’re planning to cite these are in smaller towns, areas that are not built to support large populations and many thousands of people. I went and spent time in Social Circle, Georgia. It’s a small town, about 45 minutes east of Atlanta. And there, there’s one of the mega detention centers is planned for this town. It’s a town of 4,000 people, and yet the facility that they’re building there is projected to hold upwards of 8,500 people. So the local people there, many of them who voted for President Trump are up in arms about this. And they’re saying, our water system, our sewage system.

Our emergency services, our police, our ambulances are going to be completely overwhelmed by this. And it doesn’t work. On paper, it doesn’t work. So how are you going to make this work? Another really big question, and I think perhaps that the biggest challenge with these facilities is going to be finding enough people to work at them.

Currently, in the existing detention centers, there’s already a big problem with being able to find enough labor to do things like have enough guards to keep a place secure, have enough doctors and nurses and medical staff to keep people getting the medical treatment that they need and that they’re required to provide under law.

And so now we’re talking about doubling, tripling, quadrupling the size of these facilities without a clear, the government has narrowly not afford a clear plan of how they’re going to adequately staff these facilities. Some of which are in places where there’s already a pretty thin labor pool.

CHAKRABARTI: So we’ve been focusing on the capital costs of turning an industrial warehouse into a people warehouse. Okay. So plumbing, water interior construction, heat, medical facilities, you know, what have you. But the money also is set to run out in a couple of years, you said. And if these detention facilities get stood up and stay open, there must be huge ongoing operating costs as well that will come with this.

So does Congress just intend to keep funding them year after year, Douglas?

MACMILLAN: they have a pretty big starting budget. Congress allocated $45 billion last year for detention. And that’s, to put that in perspective, that’s more than the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations spent on detention in all of that time combined.

Congress allocated $45 billion last year for detention. … That’s more than the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations spent on detention.

Douglas MacMillan

So it’s a historic sum that they have at their disposal. It is going to fund these places for at least the next few years. Just this past weekend actually, ICE awarded its first contracts to companies that will come in and build and operate the facilities. And that’s going to be like anywhere from $100 to $700 million per facility just for the first three years. So it’s a significant chunk of money. And when you multiply that by 23 different facilities, this is going to be a lot of money. And yeah, going forward, beyond three years, there’s a big question of whether the plan to continue this effort or not.

What happens to these buildings?

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Aaron, the two companies that were mentioned earlier and I want to hear from both of you on this, but one of them is CoreCivic, and the other one is the Geo Group. Can you tell us, Aaron, first of all, a little bit about the Geo Group?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: The Geo Group is one of the nation’s largest private prison operators.

Second just in comparison with CoreCivic as well, there’s a number of other smaller companies that ICE uses, including management and training company for private detention centers. But CoreCivic and Geo have the lion’s share of the facilities that operate ICE’s detention network.

CHAKRABARTI: And what exactly are they doing?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: In a lot of cases they own the facilities and they operate the facilities and they contract out for ICE. Sometimes they subcontract for private health care, but generally speaking, these facilities are essentially renting out their beds to detain immigrants, and they control virtually everything that happens inside the facility.

ICE has a presence there. In some cases, there are also detained immigration courts where people are taken for court hearings inside these buildings. But for all intents and purposes, the day-to-day operation of the facilities is run entirely by these private prison companies with the federal government having very little direct role.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And is there a business relationship or even like an interpersonal relationship in terms of people knowing each other between Geo Group and the government agencies handing out these immigration detention contracts?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Absolutely. There is a revolving door between the two industries. Right now, one of the people in charge of ICE’s Detention Procurement is the former Geo Group executive who ran the company’s immigration portfolio for years.

People who work at ICE often leave and then go to work for one of these private prison companies, so there is a very close relationship between the two.

CHAKRABARTI: I do want to say that this is the same type of revolving door that we see across different services and agencies between the government and the private sector.

And one of the common explanations for it is it’s a certain subset of expertise that formal former agency officials have that allows them to be very effective in the private sector and vice versa. So while it may not feel very good, there’s also maybe a reason for the revolving door that also applies to immigration detention.

Aaron, your thoughts.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: I think that’s fair. Of course, it is a specialized skill. It’s notable, however, because of how few companies there are that do this work. Therefore, you know, when you are looking at who’s competing, it’s only a couple of big firms and then a few smaller companies. And those big firms have very close ties to senior leadership at ICE.

And especially when we’re talking about building a brand-new model for detention, something outside of the standard. Those connections may play a big role. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that the person who’s running ICE’s detention acquisitions right now, you said he was formerly of the Geo Group.

But sometimes the ties are too close that there’s an ethical consideration that can block people from serving back in an administration. Did that not happen here?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: In fact, there was a rule that said that this person should not have any role involving Geo contracts, but the Trump administration granted an ethics waiver, allowing that executive to essentially hand out contracts to his own company if he wanted to.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Douglas, let me turn back to you. So same kind of questions about CoreCivic.

MACMILLAN: CoreCivic has actually also been very public. Because they have to be in terms of their earnings calls, for example, where they’ve talked about very frequently in the past year about how revenues have essentially almost doubled because of this massive expansion of immigration detention in this country. So tell us more about CoreCivic and their role here. CoreCivic, both companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, were riding high on President Trump’s reelection.

If you look at their stock charts, they soared after that election night victory. And there’s been a lot of enthusiasm that this would be a transformative moment for CoreCivic and Geo Group. And in the first few months of the administration, that panned out. They were getting new contracts. The Trump administration awarded them hundreds of million dollars to reopen former private prisons.

Some of the times they’ve had these empty, kind of mothballed private prisons just on their books attracting no revenue. They’ve now turned some of those into active ICE detention centers. So this administration has given them a huge new opportunity and a window to expand their business.

However, in the past few months, there has been growing concern among investors and management of these companies that the Trump administration pivot to these warehouses and to new forms of detention may be leaving these companies on the sidelines. And we’re seeing that in their stock prices have been going down and we’re seeing that just most recently.

And I said that the contracts that were awarded in the past few days, the first companies that are going to run these warehouses were not CoreCivic or Geo Group. They were smaller companies with less experience or sometimes no experience doing immigrant detention. So it’s kind of interesting moment that these companies, they are having the highest revenue, record revenue of their existence.

However, there’s concern that maybe they’re going to miss out on the next wave of this business.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell us more about KVG that I mentioned earlier, that your reporting just out now about them having won one of the recent contracts? Yeah, Because they’re one of the ones that have no experience in detention.

MACMILLAN: Yeah. They are experienced federal contractor. They’ve done defense contracts since they’re founded in 2013. It’s a firm based in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by a former, a Marine. And they are now going to be overseeing the warehouse that’s being built into a detention center near Hagerstown, Maryland.

And what’s significant about this one was we think it’s going to be one of the first, or maybe the first projects to turn this warehouse into detention center. And we think it’s also going to be the most rapid timeline. So people at DHS are saying that they still want this detention center to be built in April, by April, and to begin accepting detainees shortly after that.

CHAKRABARTI: By April, meaning next month.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, within a month. It’s a rapid timeline. We’ve heard, interestingly, we’ve heard people in the industry, including folks from Geo Group and CoreCivic express concern about the timeline and the size of these facilities. So when you hear like the companies with the most experience saying, Hey, wait a second, there’s some problems with this plan.

That should set off some alarm bells. But what the Trump administration has done is they’ve plowed forward with this. They’ve awarded first contracts to companies with no experience or little experience doing this. And they’ll have to see how that plays out.

CHAKRABARTI: And they have to, they’ve been contracted to create facilities, functioning facilities that can hold thousands of people that as you report some of them may be, have an equal capacity to a Las Vegas resort. Wow. Okay. It is quite something to listen to. Some of these investor calls, these quarterly earning calls.

And you had talked about investors at CoreCivic actually being quite worried that maybe they’re the heart of their business is being taken away from them by these other smaller or newer contractors. And in one of the earnings calls that I listened to over the weekend, there are people asking, are we still on track as a country to have 100,000 beds available?

Because our revenue projections are based on us having a piece of that. It’s all quite, it’s something to listen to when you consider what they’re actually talking about.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, I’ve been a business reporter for 20 years and I’m used to hearing these earnings calls where people are essentially talking about widgets in one way or another.

Here they’re talking about beds as if they’re widgets, but really when you think about what they’re talking about, it’s human lives, and in some cases, they’re talking about humans who are suffering and humans who are facing one of the most pivotal and hard moments of their lives. And here we have businesses.

The government has created a system that fosters, nurtures businesses that kind of feed and profit off of those human lives. In some cases, those humans who are suffering and experiencing one of the hardest moments of their lives. And I think also what’s really important to remember in this conversation is that immigrant detention is not meant to be punitive.

The government has created a system that fosters, nurtures businesses that kind of feed and profit off of those human lives.

Douglas MacMillan

And you can even see this on ICE’s own website. They say this, that immigrant detention is civil detention. And it is not meant to be a punishment for anything, because it’s supposed to be where people are held temporarily while their immigration cases are being processed, or while they’re waiting to be deported.

And so when you’re talking about potentially conditions that are worse than prisons, where people have been convicted of crimes and are serving a sentence for crimes. When you’re in a ICE detention facility, and potentially, you have worse conditions than that.

There’s some questions about what’s going on with the system.

CHAKRABARTI: And we’re also not just talking about adults, right? Families and children as well are going through this system. I want to reiterate that we did, we at On Point reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to gather comment from the agency about this new warehouse system.

And we did also send them a specific list of questions regarding conditions and humanitarian conditions and whether or not they would have some kind of oversight system or accountability system to be sure that the promises, as Douglas just mentioned, in terms of the conditions that would be in these detention facilities would be met.

DHS did not respond to our request. So Aaron, let me turn to you. These are a black box already, as Douglas has said. Have you been able to find any information about whether there’s some kind of reporting system beyond former detainees telling people after they get out what it was like regarding conditions in these facilities?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: So the main way that we find out about conditions right now is through the people themselves. They do have access to the outside world. They will have access in some cases to phones, although ICE and the detention centers often limit that access to short periods of time. As well as their lawyers who can go visit people at the detention center, talk to them and hear what’s going on.

One of the other external accesses, ways to have oversight into the system is congressional visits. By law, members of Congress have a right to conduct surprise inspections of any ICE detention center. But crucially, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to limit that right. Demanding that members of Congress give up to seven days of warning ahead of time.

Even though the intent of the law was to allow people to go in there and see what the system looks like before ICE has a chance to clean it up. But the problem as well is internal oversight. When Trump took office, there were two big bodies that had a job of overseeing the Immigration Detention Center and looking at civil rights abuses. There was the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and a relatively new office called the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman.

Those two offices have been gutted by the Trump administration with the Immigration Detention Ombudsman seeing 90% of their staff fired and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties seeing 85% of their staff fired. And tellingly, the Trump administration offered as their reasons for gutting these civil rights bodies, that oversight would slow down mass deportation. And that’s the thing that should set everyone’s alarm bells ringing. The idea that you have to eliminate oversight bodies, because it might slow down mass deportations is almost an admission that you are going to be doing things that violate people’s civil rights.

And you don’t want to have those pesky overseers standing in the road and saying, hang on, you have to follow the rules. Of course there are ways to find out what’s happening in here. You heard from Mario himself, and you will hear from other people after they have gotten out, some while they are in there.

But any effective accountability and oversight is going to be difficult under this administration.

Any effective accountability and oversight is going to be difficult under this administration.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

CHAKRABARTI: Is it at all possible that an international organization would want would come into the United States and provide that kind of oversight? It’s done in reverse in other countries.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: That’s true.

But in the United States, the federal government wants nothing to do with that. At times people bring complaints to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The United States usually shows up to those hearings. Sometimes they don’t even show up. However, those have very little effective power.

The federal courts may provide a role here and is in fact the law that people held in immigration detention cannot be held in conditions worse than those who are in pretrial conditions. As Douglas said, people who are held in immigration detention are not being punished, so they cannot be subject to conditions of confinement that are worse than that given to people who are being punished.

And so federal courts will have the ability to step in and say, you have to follow the basic rules. You must provide medical care. You must provide basic access to hygiene and sanitation, and where those standards are not being met, people will bring lawsuits.

CHAKRABARTI: But as you just said, short of rigorous oversight coming from the federal government itself. As of now, we won’t be able to determine whether those standards are being met beyond reports that we get from people who are being detained.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: It is going to require a massive public oversight project to find out these conditions and document them.

And there are groups around the country that are prepping to do that.

CHAKRABARTI: So Douglas, we only have about a minute left and this is at least a $38 billion plan. And with that much money at stake, there have to be, and I know there are actually communities out there that would welcome the investment in their communities, if they have a warehouse.

You talked about ones that don’t want the warehouses being converted to detention centers in their locations. But there are others who are looking at the prospect of not just direct jobs there, but probably even other sort of subcontracting income.

MACMILLAN: Potentially, but even places that are embracing of President Trump’s immigration agenda, we’ve seen come out really full force and full-throated, saying that these projects don’t make sense for their areas.

Yes, the administration and DHS have put out some projections around economic impact. And they’re saying that yes, there will be construction firms hired. Yes, there will be some new jobs. Yes, there will be a net positive, but I haven’t run these numbers by an economic analyst yet. I have some big questions about whether that’s, whether that will come to fruition. And really how long are these jobs going to last?

How long is this whole project going to actually have that impact? If it’s just going to be there for two or three years, is it really worth the cost? And the drain on the local infrastructure that these projects are going to have?

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.