THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL COSTS RACK UP AS IMMIGRATION DETENTION EXPANDS
When President Trump returned to office on a promise of a historic "mass deportation" of people living in the country illegally, he quickly laid the groundwork for locking more of them up while they awaited the outcome of their cases. One year later, the costs of those detentions are coming into focus.
The price tag to expand the detention system in dollars is $45 billion, pushed through last summer as part of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The money, to be spent over four years, is meant to increase the number of detention beds administered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. At last count, in February, ICE was holding 68,000 people, up from 40,000 at the start of Trump's second term. The administration has a goal of reaching a total capacity of 100,000 beds, and it's launched a controversial effort to convert warehouses into holding facilities and aggressively expand detention capacity.
The cost to individuals' liberty is also increasing. The average "in custody length of stay" — which measures how long current detainees have been locked up — has reached 73.6 days. That's almost a week longer than it was when Trump was sworn in.
"You're explicitly hearing and seeing the government using it as punitive and as a deterrent," says Javier Hidalgo, a legal director at RAICES, an advocacy group in San Antonio. It offers legal aid to migrants held at the ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas.
Hidalgo says detention appears to have become a way to pressure people to give up fighting deportation …
