cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43230217
Feb. 13, 2026
President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda has supercharged opposition in cities where he has deployed federal agents to conduct raids, and communities in states including New York and Missouri are already working to block the next step the Department of Homeland Security plans to take in its push for mass deportations: acquiring massive warehouses across the country to use as immigrant detention centers.
US immigration and Customs Enforcement documents that were provided to Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire—one of the states where ICE aims to acquire a building and retrofit it to house at least 1,000 people at a time—show that the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion on its mass detention plan.
The DNC helped lay the foundations of those camps.
None of these new camps were ever on the Democrats agenda. The US obviously has always had a for-profit prison problem and detention centers like these have always been used as a staging area for immigration enforcement. But Democrats have never had a plan to round up millions of immigrants and place them in camps.
This is 100% a Trump administration policy.
Sure Jan
I think you’re confusing processing facilities with detention facilities. The Biden administration expanded the capacity for immigrants to enter the US legally. The numbers of people applying for assylum at the border has been increasing for years, even before Trump’s first term. You need the capacity to process those claims, otherwise migrants wind up in overcrowded and underfunded conditions, or they need to simply wait outside the border with no assistance at all, leading many to try and cross the border illegally. They not only had plans to create these processing facilities inside the US to help move people through the process faster, they had already opened processing facilities in several other countries across Central America, where immigrants could begin the process before even reaching the border.
The Trump administration effectively cancelled all those programs, and reversed course on processing immigration and assylum claims, and is solely focused on deportation and detantion. They have also tripled the number of proposed facilities with that goal in mind. That means that instead of using those facilities to try and fast-track entry into the country…they are using them to capture and detain immigrants that are already in the country for the purpose of removing them.
Comparing these two completely opposite policy agendas as if they are the same, is a false equivalence. Not just regarding their intent, but also their scale…they are incomparable.