The federal government is quietly transforming the geography of immigration detention in America. Under the second Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has accelerated plans to convert commercial warehouses, defunct industrial sites, and shuttered private prisons into a sprawling new network of detention centers — a build-out that could reshape how and where the United States holds noncitizens for years to come.
Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU reveal that ICE has at least seven new detention facilities under active consideration across the country. These are not small county jail contracts or temporary overflow arrangements. These are purpose-built or purpose-converted mega-facilities, designed to warehouse hundreds of detainees at a time in regions that often lack the legal infrastructure — immigration attorneys, nonprofit aid organizations, federal courthouses — to support due process.
The Warehouse Model
The strategy is straightforward and deeply cynical: acquire or lease large commercial spaces in rural or semi-industrial areas where land is cheap, opposition is minimal, and detainees are effectively invisible. Converting a warehouse into a detention center is faster and cheaper than building from scratch, and it sidesteps much of the zoning and environmental review that new construction would trigger.
The private prison industry is a willing partner. CoreCivic and GEO Group — the two publicly traded giants that dominate for-profit detention — have seen their stock prices surge since the current administration took office. Both companies operate existing ICE facilities and are positioned to manage the new ones. Wall Street has noticed: GEO Group’s share price has nearly doubled in the past 18 months, and CoreCivic is not far behind.
Arizona: A Case Study in Resurrection
Nowhere is the expansion more visible than in Arizona. ICE is reopening the Marana facility outside Tucson — a former private prison that had been mothballed — as a 513-bed immigration detention center. The site, surrounded by desert and far from Tucson’s legal aid offices, is a textbook example of the isolation strategy. Detainees held at Marana will face significant barriers to accessing counsel, attending hearings, and communicating with family. You can browse Arizona facilities in our directory to understand the scope of the state’s detention infrastructure.
The Marana reopening is not an anomaly. It is a template. Across the Sun Belt and into the rural Midwest, ICE is scouting properties that fit the same profile: large footprint, low acquisition cost, minimal community resistance.
Pushback Is Growing — But Slowly
Not every community is rolling over. In Washington County, Maryland, a state lawmaker has mounted a public campaign against ICE vehicles arriving at a local detention site, arguing that the facility was never intended to serve as a federal immigration hub. The conflict in Maryland underscores a tension that will only intensify as ICE expands: local governments that signed contracts for modest jail-bed rentals are now finding themselves hosting full-scale federal detention operations. For a broader look at what is at stake in the state, see our guide to Maryland correctional facilities.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, a federal judge has ruled that hundreds of individuals are being unlawfully detained at an ICE facility — a decision that could force the agency to release detainees or transfer them to facilities with adequate legal access. The ruling is one of the first major judicial checks on the current detention expansion, and it signals that the courts may not rubber-stamp every warehouse conversion ICE pushes through. Our directory of Michigan detention centers tracks the facilities involved.
The Numbers Tell the Story
ICE’s detained population has been climbing steadily since January 2025. The agency now holds more than 45,000 people on any given day — a figure that exceeds the peak of the first Trump administration and is approaching the all-time record. The seven new facilities under consideration would add thousands more beds, pushing the system toward a capacity it has never maintained for any sustained period.
Each bed costs taxpayers between $140 and $300 per day, depending on the facility type and operator. At the high end, a single 500-bed facility costs the federal government more than $54 million per year. Multiply that across seven new sites and the math gets staggering — and that is before accounting for medical care, transportation, legal proceedings, and the inevitable lawsuits.
What Comes Next
The warehouse detention model is not just an immigration story. It is a real estate story, a Wall Street story, and a civil rights story. The companies building these facilities are making long-term bets that mass detention will remain politically viable for decades. The communities absorbing them are making calculations about jobs and tax revenue that may not pan out. And the people inside them — many of whom have not been convicted of any crime — are bearing the human cost of a system designed for volume, not justice.
This is the new architecture of American immigration enforcement: fast, cheap, remote, and growing.
