Shining a Light on Trump’s Mass Immigrant Detention Plan

FEATURING STACY SUH - The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda requires the funneling hundreds of billions of tax dollars into recruiting new ICE agents. It also requires the ramping up of a vast network of detention centers–in other words, prisons–to house people caught up in immigration enforcement. 

It’s not just the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” center in Florida. A former World War II Japanese internment camp at Fort Bliss in Texas is being built up to imprison 5,000 people–at a cost of $1.2 billion of tax payer funds. 

Now, the Detention Watch Network has compiled data to create a map of new and existing detention centers around the United States, hoping to shine a light on this vast architecture of incarceration. 

Stacy Suh is the program director at Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States. They are also a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national organization working to end the criminalization of domestic and sexual violence survivors, and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the vast network of detention centers in the US and how people are fighting back.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I want to start with just talking about language. We say “detention,” we say these “centers” but really they are simply prisons, right? This isn't just a detention network. It is a network of chambers of incarceration, spaces that are used to imprison, confine people, right? 

Stacy Suh: Yes, absolutely. So, the immigration detention system, it is a wide network of facilities across the country using county jails state and federal prisons, as well as military bases now to really rip immigrants, away from their loved ones, away from community while they are navigating their immigration case.