April 20, 2026

Robyn Stevens Brody/AP

Warehouses. A word usually reserved for industrial storage spaces is increasingly appearing in headlines about people, as the Trump administration advances its so-called “Detention Reengineering Initiative.” The vision? To rapidly build an industrial mass detention infrastructure that detains, processes, and deports immigrants as quickly and cheaply as possible. The administration is moving the plan at a breakneck pace intended to overwhelm resistance, yet communities have already stopped 13 warehouse purchases and policymakers and advocates have thwarted the administration’s efforts in states across the country. 

Let’s Back Up

Over the last several months, the Trump Administration has been scouting and acquiring massive vacant commercial warehouses and large industrial spaces, the types of places used for storing and distributing commercial goods like furniture and appliances, for the purpose of detaining and processing immigrants for deportations. Per Detention Watch Network and others, DHS and ICE plan to buy and convert approximately 23 warehouses that will each be expected to hold between 1,000 and 10,000 people.

How far have they gotten? As of April 16, ICE had purchased 10 warehouses, expanding detention capacity by 41,500 beds (just about halfway to their goal of 92,600 additional beds). For context: that's more than the roughly 40,000 people total held in immigration detention when Trump took office. This additional capacity comes on top of a 91% increase in ICE detention capacity, along with an over 75% increase in people detained from January 2025 to January 2026.

The bill? One billion dollars and counting, an enormous sum that barely dents the $45 billion dollars ICE has received from Congress *specifically for new detention centers* through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (as of February, we estimated that DHS still had roughly $150 billion in unspent money from that windfall). In fact, ICE has so much money that they are paying well above market value just to secure these deals. These astronomical sums are a stark reminder of the stakes of federal funding fights involving ICE.

This is a new play from a familiar playbook. Whether it's called a jail, prison, or detention center, it runs on similar logic, benefits many of the same political and financial interests, and has the same devastating consequences for communities. 

But this is not our first rodeo and the movement to end mass incarceration has given us decades of lessons on how to fight investments in and expansions of incarceration. So spend just a minute with us on just a few of the strategies that have and are working to resist new prisons, jails, and detention centers:

Prison and jail infrastructure, once built, often lives many lives. As the saying goes: if you build it, they’ll fill it. So-called "zombie prisons," closed after years of advocacy, are now being reopened to detain immigrants. A jail in Atlanta built in 1995 as a “pressure valve” to accommodate projected crime during the 1996 crime wave still operates today despite Atlanta City Council passing and the Mayor signing legislation authorizing its closure in 2019 and a population that got as low as 25 people in 2020. The fight to stop warehouses matters not only for the present, but for the future.

We can’t afford to scale up, export, or leave unchecked what we’ve already gotten wrong. We’ll be using this note to unpack the faulty thinking about crime, safety, and justice that underpins some of the most consequential discussions and decisions playing out in this American moment. You can find our previous notes here.