Trump To Spend Remaining Federal Budget On ICE Concentration Camps
At $45 billion, it's more than double the amount USAID ever spent in any year.
We guess all you big-spending liberals who like the federal government to spend big will finally be happy to learn that after Elon Musk and his Artless DOGErs have gone on multiple unconstitutional firing sprees and illegal deletions of federal contracts, the Trump administration finally found something it wants to increase spending on: concentration camps to aid mass deportation!
OK, and military parades, too, but the piddling $100 million Donald wants to blow on wrecking DC’s streets is a pittance compared to the $45 billion the administration plans to spend on ramping up private prisons and concentration camps to hold all the people it wants to deport, whether they be undocumented immigrants, legal visitors, students, and residents whose visas or green cards have been arbitrarily revoked, or US citizens who “accidentally” get scooped up too, these things happen, too bad so sad.
The New York Times reports (gift link) that the new spending — which will need to be passed by Congress, not that Republicans are likely to be stingy about giving mass deportation all the money they can — was revealed in a Homeland Security request for proposals from private prison contractors last week. The big barrel of cash would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to order “new detention facilities, transportation, security guards, medical support and other administrative services worth as much as $45 billion over the next two years.”
The new spending would more than sextuple — and not in a fun way — the annual amount that ICE spent on all its detention operations in fiscal 2024, which was a measly $3.4 billion.
The additional funds would come as part of a huge increase for immigration spending that Republicans want to load into the Big Beautiful Stupid Tax Cuts For Rich Fuckwads II reconciliation bill Republicans are working on. That plan would blow around $175 billion over the next decade on Trump’s immigration plan, allowing ICE to more easily grab the $45 billion for concentration camps over the next two years. Trump’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, explained in February that mass deportation’s “success” will all depend on the money he can get for prison camps: “The more money we have, the more beds we can buy.” This really is about prison beds; the people going into them don’t especially matter as long as there’s a lot of them and they get shifted from those beds to being deported with as little time and due process as possible.
Not only would the Defense Department be encouraged to get in on the prison-camp game, the process for submitting bids and building new private prisons and camps would be streamlined, with a lot less oversight, as the Times explains, because when money changes hands more easily, things happen more quickly (including corruption, but golly we’re cynical):
Typically, detention contracts go through a lengthy process for each facility, and ICE specifies the type, size and location. (A request from February, for example, sought up to 950 beds in the Denver area.) But this latest request is what is known as a bulk or blanket purchase agreement. It essentially creates a Rolodex of every detention facility and all auxiliary services and then allows ICE to place individual orders as more funding comes through.
With lower standards and less oversight, shittier facilities and fewer protections for prisoner safety are already built into the plan, hooray! But don’t worry, the Times notes, because Homan already said he’d be fine with lower standards and fewer inspections, because the goal is big numbers, not treating people we want to deport as if they were human beings. As Great Leader says, they’re animals. And hey, we’re cutting back on inspections of animal processing facilities too, so it all evens out.
Facilities under the contract will not have to meet the standards for services and detainee care that ICE has typically set for large detention providers. Instead, they can operate under the less rigorous standards the agency uses for contracts with local jails and prisons. These facilities typically do not include comprehensive medical care, like access to mental health services, nor do they offer access to information about immigrants’ legal rights. […]
Even under existing standards, government inspections for years have found evidence of negligence at private detention facilities, including lack of access to medical care and unsanitary conditions, and problems that may have led to deaths of detainees.
Now, that may sound sad if you assume that immigrants and others caught up in the mass deportation dragnets are “people,” but if you look only at the raw numbers, the more immigrants who die when medical treatment is withheld or delayed, the lower the overall cost of the deportation program.
The government might have to do something to make sure their families can’t sue, just in case. For starters, Trump has already gutted the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which Congress created in 2019 to help prevent abuses of detained immigrants, so that ought to keep at least some information from getting out about mistreatment, sexual abuse, and deaths in ICE detention.
But now ICE won’t have to worry about too much oversight, since the contracts will shift responsibility for prisoner treatment and safety to the private contractors. Some bleeding heart “experts” think that’s a bad idea, like former Biden DHS official Deborah Fleischaker, who told The Times, “They’re going to end up paying more for oversight that is less independent and likely less efficient,” as if that weren’t the point.
Still private prison companies Like CoreCivic and Geo Group are bullish on the new opportunities, and they aren’t even bothered that the call for proposals had a rushed due date for bids of Monday, April 7, just three business days after the contracts were announced. The private prison contractors were already licking their chops in anticipation of the deals coming open, said Joe Gomes, a financial boffin with Noble Capital who covers the ignoble business of private immigration detention:
“It reinforces what the general consensus was, that the Trump administration policies here should be a significant boon for both CoreCivic and Geo at least in the short term as they continue to put more people under detention,” Mr. Gomes said.
And as long as somebody stands to make a few billion off cruelty, then that’s the American Way, isn’t it?
Maybe we can at least hope that DOGE will come along and decide to cut every penny of the spending for concentration camps, because no part of this fucking crew actually talks to the others.
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I couldn't even finish the article.
The funding for the death camps. Right out in the open.
Ah yes! I'm old enough to remember the "FEMA coffins" and "FEMA camps" weirdos like Alex Jones were frothing at their mouths at after hurricane Katrina.
Every fucking accusation is a confession, part eleventy-seven.