President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility in Ochopee, Florida, on July 1, 2025.
The massive piece of legislation to which President Donald Trump has just attached his legacy allocates $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement over the next four years—including $45 billion to expand the detention of immigrants to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. It will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the federal prison system, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.
What will that mean, practically speaking? I turned to former officials who have run large prison systems, as well as attorneys who specialize in immigrant detention, to understand the logistical concerns with expanding a detention system so quickly.
Hugh Hurwitz was acting director of the Bureau of Prisons during part of Trump’s first term, managing 122 facilities and some 170,000 incarcerated people nationwide.
Martin Horn was secretary of corrections for Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and commissioner of New York City’s corrections department in the 2000s.
Eunice Hyunhye Cho is an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute, wrote a book about the private prison companies that incarcerate immigrants.
In separate interviews—excerpts of which have been edited for length and clarity—they dove into how this $45 billion spend could, as Eisen put it, “drastically change the landscape of immigration enforcement and detention in this country.” On the size of the allocation
Cho: “It’s enormous. Currently, ICE spends around $3.4 to $3.9 billion a year on immigration detention.”
Hurwitz: “Forty-five billion dollars is an astronomical amount of money—the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has an $8 billion annual budget. The money for ICE is available through September 2029, so Congress doesn’t expect Homeland Security to spend it in one year.”
Cho: “Even if you average it out over the years—and that may not be right, they may spend it very quickly—$45 billion is at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention.”
Eisen: “It will drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”
On the number of potential detainees
Hurwitz: “ICE wants to increase their capacity from about 41,000 people a day to 100,000—that’s pretty significant. To put it in comparison, BOP’s population today is about 155,000. And ICE doesn’t have 122 prisons like BOP has.”
Cho: “This is an extraordinary number of people. ICE is rounding up people through home raids, workplace raids, court check-ins, courthouse arrests, arrests near schools, places of worship. The other thing is that ICE is refusing to release people from detention who have traditionally been released, people who may be eligible for bond and parole, people who are very medically vulnerable, and even people who have won their cases.”
On where the money might end up
Hurwitz: “Remember, ICE doesn’t own prisons. So my guess is the immediate effort will be in contracting with private prison companies or states and localities that have capacity to hold these people.”
Cho: “They have also discussed new ways of detention, including temporary tent detention sites, so some of the money may go to logistics corporations and toward sites like Alligator Alcatraz, an example of how they may contract with a state. And there’s Guantanamo—ICE is supposed to be reimbursing the Department of Defense for use of those facilities—as well as flights. They may choose to build their own facilities, but it takes time to do that, so to extend the number of detention beds quickly, they’ll probably go with preexisting facilities or temporary facilities.”
On staffing challenges
Horn: “How do you recruit enough staff to supervise that number of individuals? How quickly can you onboard them and train them? Staffing is absolutely critical—custodial staff, but also medical staff. And if you look at these very rural locations, typically there are not a large number of trained medical professionals, so you’re going to have to get people to relocate. Are there places for them to live? How long is the commute going to be?”
Hurwitz: “All correctional facilities nowadays are having difficulty hiring staff. The private prisons and states and localities, they’re all looking for the same candidates, right? Most places have increased the salaries and created other incentives to recruit people, but it’s still difficult to find good candidates.”
On medical concerns
Hurwitz: “In the BOP, we have sentenced inmates who have been in the system a while. Because we had them for a long time, we knew what their medical conditions were, so we could send them to the appropriate places. ICE has a challenge, because these people aren’t going to be there that long, so they don’t know their medical history, they just don’t have the depth of information that you have with sentenced inmates. And that makes everything more risky.”
Cho: “Immigration detention facilities were terrible places to be even before the Trump administration. We have documented conditions of abuse, medical neglect, preventable deaths, sexual assault, use of force, force-feeding on hunger strikers. There have been suicides. You have people who are placed in brutal conditions of confinement, who had mental health treatment outside, but once they come in they’re either cut off from their medication or placed in solitary confinement, which can further exacerbate mental health distress. We’ve been tracking cases where people who are life dependent on insulin are not receiving it.”
On Alligator Alcatraz
Horn: “The pictures that I saw of the Florida facility show a large open space separated by chain link fence with bunk beds. We don’t know how many showers, how many toilets, how many wash basins they’re providing.”
Hurwitz: “That was built by the state of Florida. I’ve never been in an ICE detention facility, so I don’t really know what an ICE detention facility looks like. That’s not how we would run a Bureau of Prisons facility.”
Cho: “I haven’t seen it. I don’t think many people have. There are some very clear issues—tent facilities in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the swamp. Heat concerns, whether or not it’s actually safe during hurricane season, inclement weather. They were already reporting flooding on the first day.”
Eisen: “They are talking about alligators and pythons guarding the perimeter of the facility. The cruelty and inhumanity here is pretty unprecedented.”
On local, state, and federal prisons taking immigrants
Eisen: “It is very common to find detention bed space in county jails and state prisons, and less common in the federal system, though it did happen in Trump 1.0. Conditions depend on the facility; some have air conditioning and enough space, and in some the infrastructure is much worse. These are immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime for the most part, or have not been accused of committing a crime. Correctional officers are trained for a certain population, whereas ICE detention officers are trained for a different population.”
Cho: “Jails or prisons may not have been set up to ensure that people can call immigration attorneys, or that people who speak different languages can access medical care. We were talking to folks in Alaska, and there were stories of people who had missed their immigration proceedings or their bond hearings because the facility just wasn’t set up to make sure they would be there.”
Hurwitz: “Obviously, [holding immigrant detainees] is not what BOP is designed to do, but BOP and ICE did sign an intergovernmental agreement, and BOP housed a small number of detainees for ICE at five, six facilities—maybe it’s more now. I think BOP generally tried to separate them—they were kept in separate housing units or separate wings away from the general population. When I was director, [operating to house immigrant detainees] certainly wasn’t our preferred method, because it was different than how we do things. And when you’re running a prison, you don’t like to do things differently.”
On private prison companies taking immigrants
Cho: “Private prison companies have been chomping at the bit for this reconciliation package to pass. They very early on recognized what an economic boon this would be.”
Eisen: “Ninety percent of people in immigrant detention facilities are in private facilities, and we have seen companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group already profit from the president’s immigration agenda. There’s the potential reactivation of a detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas; we’ve seen the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas reopen; the reopening of Delaney Hall, owned by GEO Group in Newark. What’s also really important to note is that these companies own transportation subsidiaries to transport people across the country, and those will be expanded as well.”
Hurwitz: “When BOP worked with private prisons, we were putting criminal aliens in those private facilities and didn’t require them to run programming—they were going to be deported after their release, so there was no reason for BOP to invest in programming—but yet, all of the contractors ran programming. And why did they do that? An idle population is more apt to get into fights. So they put in the programs on their own.”
On oversight
Eisen: “This new money comes at a time when the administration is rolling back attempts to oversee what’s happening. You’ve seen members of Congress attempting to visit detention facilities, and ICE issued guidance in June asking for 72 hours’ notice for a visit, even though federal law authorizes members of Congress to visit any detention facility at any time unannounced.”
Cho: “The Trump administration basically defunded the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which were both responsible for investigating abuses in immigration detention facilities. [Facing blowback, the administration backpedaled, but advocates doubt its commitment to those missions.] And ICE has weakened standards for facilities that are going to be combined ICE detention plus criminal detention. Things as basic as not allowing legal groups to provide legal orientation, not specifying the number of telephones that must be provided, not specifying in their medical care guidelines that prescription medication must be provided to detainees. Standards have become so weak as to render them practically meaningless.”
Eisen: “In 2024, right before Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General issued a report after inspecting ICE detention facilities. They observed mold, rust, peeling paint in showers, bathrooms with clogged or inoperable toilets, broken sinks, water leaks, people not seeing doctors as often as they were supposed to. I bring all this up because those were the conditions when there was more significant oversight. So one can only imagine what’s going to happen with less oversight.”
On what won’t get funding—and what will
Cho: “It’s important to note what the $45 billion is being taken away from. There’s $11 billion being cut from Pell Grants, $20 billion being cut from Medicaid for the provision of nursing home staff. I am reading proposals for increased detention centers in places that were formerly nursing homes—that is one of the starkest manifestations of what this is going to look like, what this budget bill is doing in terms of the fabric of our communities.”
Hurwitz: “I believe the ‘big, beautiful bill’ had another $5 billion for BOP, so from a BOP perspective, the amount of money is pretty good.”
On the speed of the expansion
Hurwitz: “They’re on a pretty aggressive track, from what you hear from the president, but I have no reason to think that it can or can’t be done. I don’t have enough information.”
Horn: “Anything having to do with detention that you do in a hurry is generally not a good idea. That’s been my experience.”
