As arrests of immigrants increase, the administration is scrambling to make sure it has the room to house its detainees and keep President Donald Trump’s promise to deport them.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, told NBC News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs 100,000 beds total, more than double what it has currently. Trump alluded to the need for more room when he ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday to prepare 30,000 beds at Guantánamo Bay for who he said would be detainees posing the greatest threat to Americans’ safety.
An immigration detention room is used to hold people until they are deported, and it “is really kind of a backbone of the mass deportation plan,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“That’s why we see [ICE] floating numbers. They talk about doubling the space to hold people in these ICE jails,” Franzblau said.
The Biden administration made an average of 282 immigration arrests per day in September 2024, the most recent ICE data available.
So far, using seven days of data, the Trump administration’s daily average is 791.
Homan said his instructions to officers and agents were “arrest as many as you can.”
The Trump administration launched its mass deportations operation despite ICE’s $230 million budget shortfall. The first bill Trump signed this term, the Laken Riley Act, requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested or face charges or who have been convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” But it didn’t include new money to detain those additional immigrants, which DHS said in December it would need.
As of January, ICE reported it had at least 106 facilities nationwide. Congress appropriated funding to detain an average of 41,500 people a day, at a cost of about $3.4 billion.
That was an increase over fiscal year 2023, when Congress provided funding to detain a daily average of 34,000 people, costing about $2.9 billion. The House is in the midst of trying to hammer out a budget bill that would include money for Trump and his immigration crackdown; congressional Republicans have put the price tag at about $100 billion.
The cost of each ICE detention bed is $57,378 per year, per bed, according to DHS data.
Daily detention numbers reached a height of 50,000 average daily population under the first Trump administration, but fell to about 20,000 when Covid hit.
A vast network
The thousands of immigrants taken into custody each year are often locked up in a vast network of facilities, some owned by the federal government and state or local governments but most contracted from private entities.
The American Civil Liberties Union discovered through open government requests that the Biden administration was seeking to expand detention space nationwide.
The Trump administration has already begun to supplement the space it’s using.
DHS is using facilities at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, for processing immigrants with criminal charges or convictions who were arrested in ICE operations in the state. The military made the space available, possibly to be used for a previously planned operation in Aurora.
