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.
40 Billion? That’s what he gave to his pal down south to make Argentina great again. Is 40 billion his new “two weeks”?
Part of my job includes sitting in on meetings of land use boards, and the number of applications for warehouses, starting back around 2020, was astonishing. And yeah, we saw a major uptick in online sales and so it was an obvious reaction to that, but the conspiracy theorist inside me is bristling thinking that somehow this was all part of some CIA plot to have these places set up and ready to go.
Even during the pendency of some of these hearings, folks would bring out statistics from updated treatises suggesting warehouse propagation was oversaturated and that it didn’t make sense to keep building them, but keep building they did. That’s the part that really tips my tinfoil hat.
Ummm there’s not that many illegal migrants in the US. Citizens are going there before the next set of elections. Democratic ones and Black, Queer, Trans and Brown people. The US wants this and is allowing it to take place.
Calling them concentration camps doesn’t change the fact that they are detention centers. Something that both parties are in support of. All of a sudden, now that someone else is in control, everyone’s concerned about the humane conditions of detention centers? All throughout Obama and Trump and Biden, and now Trump again, the humane conditions in detention centers are horrific.
Removed by mod
Concentration camps that liberals have helped fund and build. Concentration camps that liberals will go back to ignoring the moment they are back in power. November before Biden left office he requested the construction of 42k more concentration camp beds. Liberals are so fucking desperate to go back to brunch.
You are a shining example of why we call you BlueMAGA and say scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds
I think you’re missing the part where they are massively expanding the number of these facilities. This goes way beyond the kind of “common use” that “both sides” have used.
This is literally how things started in Nazi Germany. First, they needed somewhere to put the “undesirables” while they awaited deportation. But when they couldn’t convince other countries to take them in such huge numbers, they just put them to work instead. And by the end of the war, the “final solution” they came up with for what to do with them, was just to start exterminating them, en masse.
What they called these camps changed over time. First they were just detainment camps…then they were work camps…then they became concentration camps, once they began shutting down the smaller ones, and shipped everyone to the largest camps for disposal.
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.
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.
