Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Questions are melting about what's happening inside Camp East Montana.
Speaker 2: Another person has died in immigration custody on the Fort
Speaker 2: Bliss Army base in Elpaso, Texas. It's the third death
Speaker 2: reported in just a month and a half at Camp
Speaker 2: East Montana. At Fort Bliss, which is the largest immigration
Speaker 2: detention facility in the US. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials
Speaker 2: said in a statement that Victor Manuel Diaz, an immigrant
Speaker 2: from Nicaragua, appears to have died by suicide.
Speaker 3: Advocates say the facility has proven to be inhumane and
Speaker 3: continue to call for it to be shut down. DHS
Speaker 3: has defended the facility, saying ICE makes everyone safety and
Speaker 3: health a top priority.
Speaker 2: Detention facilities like the one at Fort Bliss have been
Speaker 2: under scrutiny from human rights advocates as ICE detains record
Speaker 2: numbers of immigrants and ramps up enforcement tactics on the
Speaker 2: round in cities like Minneapolis.
Speaker 4: Anger and outrage in the streets of Minneapolis over the
Speaker 4: fatal shooting of a woman buying Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Speaker 2: But as ICE continues, making arrests across the US even larger,
Speaker 2: facilities could be on the way. The agency currently has
Speaker 2: more than seventy thousand people in immigration attention, according to
Speaker 2: CBS News, and to meet the Trump administration's goals of
Speaker 2: deporting a million people a year, ICE is now looking
Speaker 2: to another kind of facility, large converted warehouses.
Speaker 4: Under previous administrations, many of the people who have been arrested,
Speaker 4: who are being arrested were not typically targets of immigration
Speaker 4: enforcement activity, and so now that this administration has decided
Speaker 4: to cast such a wide net that has required all
Speaker 4: of this jail space, which is quite expensive.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg reporters Folla A. Kenneby and Sophie Alexander have been
Speaker 2: following ISI's plans to expand its detention capacity.
Speaker 5: These are the facilities talking about now, large empty warehouses
Speaker 5: that contractors are looking to turn into jails.
Speaker 2: It's a shift that's backed by a new influx of
Speaker 2: funding for ICE. The agency got forty five billion dollars
Speaker 2: for detention and President trump so called Big Beautiful Bill
Speaker 2: just last year. But the rapid expansion that ICE is
Speaker 2: proposing has raised questions about which companies will be awarded
Speaker 2: contracts to convert those facilities and how they will manage them.
Speaker 2: The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn't immediately respond
Speaker 2: to a request for comment.
Speaker 5: I mean, we're talking about detaining human beings in tents
Speaker 5: or in warehouses at a large scale. Again, like the
Speaker 5: sizes of these jails that they're proposing. In some of
Speaker 5: these warehouses, it's more beds than in entire county jail populations.
Speaker 5: So whenever you're doing something at this scale that's involving
Speaker 5: human beings, I think that there is a concern around safety.
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News Today. On the show, I talked to Bloomberg
Speaker 2: reporters Fola A. Kinneby and Sophie Alexander about ICE's push
Speaker 2: to expand its detention capacity, the lucrative government contracts that
Speaker 2: companies are vying for, and the mountain concerns around conditions
Speaker 2: for the people being detained in the streets of Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: Over the past few weeks, we've been seeing ICE's escalating
Speaker 2: arrest tactics on the ground, but you both have also
Speaker 2: been covering ICE's parallel efforts to open more detention facilities
Speaker 2: to meet the Trump administration's aggressive deportation goals. What has
Speaker 2: the administration been doing over the past year to expand
Speaker 2: its detention capacity?
Speaker 4: First of all, the administration has been trying to massively
Speaker 4: and in some ways it has massively expanded its ability
Speaker 4: to detain immigrants. The administration talk about plans to deport
Speaker 4: up to a million people a year, right, that's the
Speaker 4: goal at.
Speaker 2: The outset of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: At the outset of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: And to do that takes a lot of jail space,
Speaker 4: more jail space than ICE as an agency has ever had. Right,
Speaker 4: if you look back under Biden over his four year term,
Speaker 4: the immigration detention capacity never really exceeded or at his
Speaker 4: peak was thirty.
Speaker 1: Nine thousand people. Just over thirty nine thousand people.
Speaker 4: Almost immediately, the Trump administration, after taking office the second time,
Speaker 4: really pushed to massively expand its detention space. And so
Speaker 4: right now there are more than seventy thousand people in
Speaker 4: ICE custody.
Speaker 1: That's a record.
Speaker 2: And in order to house all those people, what did
Speaker 2: the administration have to go from detaining maybe forty thousand
Speaker 2: people to over seventy thousand people.
Speaker 5: First, they into these sort of methods that they had
Speaker 5: been used to working with private prison companies to look
Speaker 5: for unused jail space to find more beds for immigrants
Speaker 5: who have been detained. But after that that's.
Speaker 1: Just not enough.
Speaker 5: They're really desperate for more space. They claim that they
Speaker 5: need one hundred thousand beds to be able to meet
Speaker 5: their goals of detaining a million people a year, and
Speaker 5: so they had to pivot and look for other ways
Speaker 5: to build more detention, which is why they started using
Speaker 5: soft sided facilities or tents, and they started looking to
Speaker 5: build more tent camps.
Speaker 2: What have the conditions been like in these more temporary
Speaker 2: facilities that ICE has been erecting over the past year.
Speaker 4: There's been wide reporting about how horrific the conditions are.
Speaker 1: In some of these facilities.
Speaker 4: And when the conditions are poor, and when the conditions
Speaker 4: are bad and they're jail like, people will give up
Speaker 4: their cases.
Speaker 1: People ask to be deported.
Speaker 4: And we've seen cases like this where people give up
Speaker 4: their case and say, well, I don't want to fight
Speaker 4: the government anymore, because again, these cases can take years
Speaker 4: and you don't want to spend years in some of
Speaker 4: these facilities.
Speaker 1: And again, in.
Speaker 4: Order for the adminstration to achieve its goals of mass deportation,
Speaker 4: to do a million deportations a year. They actually have
Speaker 4: to be quite efficient, right, Like they have to be
Speaker 4: getting people out of facilities quickly. I talked to one
Speaker 4: person who used to work in this world who said,
Speaker 4: you would have to be getting people out in under
Speaker 4: a month. You'd have to be moving people through the
Speaker 4: system and deporting them. That's quite hard to do. And
Speaker 4: as far as I'm aware that the administration has not
Speaker 4: achieved that in mass.
Speaker 2: Well, Trump's so called Big Beautiful Bill, which you signed
Speaker 2: into law last year, allocated a lot more money to
Speaker 2: ICE's detention expansion, right, forty five billion dollars. How has
Speaker 2: that changed the agency's strategy and change the kinds of
Speaker 2: facilities they're looking to invest in.
Speaker 5: I mean, forty five billion dollars is so much money,
Speaker 5: and we should just say that we have not seen
Speaker 5: that money spent because it is not easy to contract
Speaker 5: out with the government. It's not easy to build new
Speaker 5: jails quickly, and so I think the pivot to tents
Speaker 5: was supposed to be in an effort for speed. It
Speaker 5: was to try to build more jail space quickly. And
Speaker 5: you actually saw references to soft sided facilities for immigration
Speaker 5: detention in Project twenty twenty five. So this was part
Speaker 5: of the initial plan. I think what you saw with
Speaker 5: the Everglades facility in Florida that's referred to as Alligator Alcatraz,
Speaker 5: and then later with the facility at Fort Bliss, these
Speaker 5: things are just not meant to be turned into jails.
Speaker 5: It costs so much money to erect these things in
Speaker 5: the first place, let alone to detain thousands of people
Speaker 5: in them. Not to mentioned, the conditions inside these facilities
Speaker 5: are abysmal, according to reports from human rights groups and
Speaker 5: other news outlets. But it seems like because of all
Speaker 5: of that, because they haven't been able to contract out
Speaker 5: for enough bed spaces in these tent facilities, that's why
Speaker 5: they're turning their attention to warehouses.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn't respond to
Speaker 2: questions about conditions and immigration detention facilities or their plans
Speaker 2: to expand you alluded to this already, Sophie, but full
Speaker 2: we're seeing ICE pivot from erecting these temporary structures to
Speaker 2: converting existing structures into detention facilities. They're looking at warehouses. Now,
Speaker 2: why what is behind that shift? Is it the new money,
Speaker 2: is it the lack of space?
Speaker 1: I think it's a combination of these things. Right.
Speaker 4: They're looking for sort of hard sided facilities, right, like
Speaker 4: there's not enough empty jails out there, And I mean,
Speaker 4: I think it also points to the massive amount of
Speaker 4: money that the agency has at its disposal.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: I mean that it can even carry out a plan
Speaker 4: like this is proof that it has a lot of
Speaker 4: money to use. And I want to note as well
Speaker 4: that this is not the first time a plan like
Speaker 4: this has been proposed. Years ago under Trump one, according
Speaker 4: to some of our reporting, a plan like this was
Speaker 4: proposed and folks in the agency looked at the plan
Speaker 4: and decided that it wasn't practical or safe to hold
Speaker 4: this many people in facilities like this, and so the.
Speaker 1: Plan is scrapped.
Speaker 2: So one of the distinctions you're drawing between sort of
Speaker 2: the old approach and the new approach is soft versus hard.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering if you could draw out the difference a
Speaker 2: little bit more between like a temporary ten structure or
Speaker 2: even using existing local jails and using warehouses as detention facilities.
Speaker 2: What is the material difference there.
Speaker 5: I think the idea with the soft side of facil
Speaker 5: was we want to do this quickly, and you really
Speaker 5: could see that from the fact that they were tapping
Speaker 5: all of these tent companies that usually build base camps
Speaker 5: for oil companies or they respond after natural disasters like hurricanes.
Speaker 5: They're the ones who are building these great tent cities
Speaker 5: where you know, there's all these emergency services, rescue services,
Speaker 5: things like that that are set up. And from the
Speaker 5: very beginning, the people that we spoke with, who you know,
Speaker 5: have been looking at immigration detention for a very long time,
Speaker 5: I had a lot of concerns about whether tents could
Speaker 5: ever meet immigration detention standards that are nationally set. And
Speaker 5: I think that the administration is learning that this plan
Speaker 5: isn't working out as it had hoped because, for example,
Speaker 5: the facility at Fort Bliss, the initial plan was for
Speaker 5: that to be a five thousand bed facility. As far
Speaker 5: as we know, they haven't built that out yet to
Speaker 5: that extent, I think at this point there are as
Speaker 5: many as three thousand people who are detained in the
Speaker 5: facility right now, and again over the past month and
Speaker 5: a half you've seen three people die there. So I
Speaker 5: think that the pivot to hard sided facilities with the
Speaker 5: idea around warehouses is well, this is an actual building.
Speaker 5: At least that's got to be better. But I think
Speaker 5: that similar concerns arise when you have what was essentially
Speaker 5: an empty shell of a building that was not built
Speaker 5: to hold people, let alone thousands of people.
Speaker 4: A traditional jail facility is purpose created, right, It's created
Speaker 4: to detain people. It has the beds, it has the showers,
Speaker 4: it has the lock up, it has the health areas,
Speaker 4: it has all of these saintans built in. It's not
Speaker 4: clear to us, and I think some of the folks
Speaker 4: we've talked to as well, it's not clear to them
Speaker 4: either what or how they're going to convert these what
Speaker 4: is essentially blank shell into a geospace.
Speaker 2: So just how does ICE plan to get warehouse detention
Speaker 2: facilities up and running, and what kind of hurdles could
Speaker 2: the agency's proposal face that's coming up. ICE has aggressive
Speaker 2: deportation targets. The Trump administration has set a goal of
Speaker 2: one million deportations a year. To hit that target, the
Speaker 2: agency says it needs more space to house the people
Speaker 2: it detains. And I've been talking to Bloomberg reporters Sophie
Speaker 2: Alexander and Fulla Achinnoby about ICE's plans for a new
Speaker 2: kind of detention facility, huge converted warehouses, what kind of
Speaker 2: contractors might be submitting these proposals to convert warehouses into
Speaker 2: ice facilities.
Speaker 4: You know, as soon as the Reconciliation build passed and
Speaker 4: ice was given all these funds, there's been like a
Speaker 4: feeding frenzy and a level of excitement in these industries
Speaker 4: about the potential windfall, right, like the potential to make
Speaker 4: a lot of money. And so we're seeing defense companies
Speaker 4: orient themselves around this. We're seeing tent companies and companies
Speaker 4: that provide these like oil and emergency service base camps.
Speaker 4: We're seeing traditional private prison operators, We're seeing.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of new companies.
Speaker 4: We're we're seeing new companies that are being purpose built
Speaker 4: just to try to go for this work. And so
Speaker 4: it's a wide ranger folks who are reaching for this.
Speaker 5: And to put into the context, like the amount of
Speaker 5: money that is on the table here is more than
Speaker 5: many of these companies have ever seen in you know,
Speaker 5: their years of contracting with the government. So it really
Speaker 5: is the fullest point a feeding frenzy. It is just
Speaker 5: peopot are drawn to this.
Speaker 2: I want to talk more about the way the administration
Speaker 2: is going to secure these contracts and choose who does
Speaker 2: this building. What stood out to you about the way
Speaker 2: the government is running this process.
Speaker 5: So the administration started by trying to run these contracts
Speaker 5: through ICE because they are essentially they're going to be
Speaker 5: ICE detention facilities, but that got stalled. So then later
Speaker 5: in the year, later last year, the administration started going
Speaker 5: through a process with the Department of Defense something called WEXMAC,
Speaker 5: which is this typical Defense Department contracting vehicle that they
Speaker 5: use for all sorts of things all around the world.
Speaker 5: And because it's run through the Department of Defense, there
Speaker 5: is more of a delay in what information is shared,
Speaker 5: so it's harder to know what is happening real time
Speaker 5: the contracting process and who is a winning what when,
Speaker 5: which means you know who is going to be building
Speaker 5: out these facilities.
Speaker 2: And where have we been seeing any pushback to the
Speaker 2: administration's efforts on the ground in Minneapolis after the killing
Speaker 2: of Renee Good. We're seeing polling shifts slightly, seeing people
Speaker 2: questioning the extent of ISIS tactics. What kind of pushback
Speaker 2: is the administration getting, if any, on this expansion plan with.
Speaker 4: A facility like for Bliss. It's on an army base.
Speaker 4: It's sort of sequestered from like people's day to day lives.
Speaker 4: I think with this latest proposal for these sites, these
Speaker 4: warehouse sites, which seem to include locations across the country
Speaker 4: that are much closer to towns, to population centers, to
Speaker 4: I think people's everyday lives, we've already started to see pushback.
Speaker 4: The Washington Post reported some of the proposed locations, and
Speaker 4: folks in those towns have already said, well, we don't, don't,
Speaker 4: we don't want to see it right again. You know,
Speaker 4: the Ford Bliss facility is the largest immigration detention facility
Speaker 4: in the US. There's on a daily basis, like an
Speaker 4: average of twenty nine hundred people there. What's being proposed
Speaker 4: with these warehouse facilities. We're talking about five, six, seven,
Speaker 4: eight and nine thousand person facilities.
Speaker 5: It's interesting to see the list of municipalities where ICE
Speaker 5: is considering these warehouse facilities. But you talk to people
Speaker 5: in these towns, and it doesn't matter what their politics are.
Speaker 5: They do not want a jail a twenty minute walk
Speaker 5: from the school. They do not feel like they have
Speaker 5: the sewage capacity or like the water resources to be
Speaker 5: able to send to an eight thousand, five hundred bed
Speaker 5: detention facility. So you've already been seeing protests in some
Speaker 5: of these towns against the proposed detention facility, and these
Speaker 5: are again, these are just proposals. There's no ground that's
Speaker 5: been broken yet. We're only aware of one facility that's
Speaker 5: officially been purchased by ICE. But even still, people do
Speaker 5: not want these in their town's ideology.
Speaker 2: Aside as we think through the implications of ICE's rapid
Speaker 2: detention expansion, I want to bring the conversation back to
Speaker 2: Fort Bliss, Sophie. You've alluded to some of the questions
Speaker 2: and the concerns about the conditions there. Over the weekend,
Speaker 2: another death was reported at the facility. What does this
Speaker 2: tell you about the risks of ICE's rapid expansion and
Speaker 2: what we might see next.
Speaker 5: We are seeing this administration with a goal of deporting
Speaker 5: a million people a year and building out one hundred
Speaker 5: thousand beds. There's just so much urgency in this that
Speaker 5: I think there are questions around the safety and how
Speaker 5: much attention is being paid to these things like the
Speaker 5: national immigration detention standards.
Speaker 4: I've covered deal in prison conditions in the criminal legal contexts,
Speaker 4: and I think what you find is that as these
Speaker 4: facilities become larger and larger, and as you deal with
Speaker 4: issues with crowding, safety becomes a serious challenge. And so
Speaker 4: as the administration pushes for larger and larger facilities, it
Speaker 4: just sort of follows that. Safety incidents sort of follow that, right,
Speaker 4: And Bliss is the largest immigration detention facility in the US,
Speaker 4: and still the administration has not been able to expand
Speaker 4: it to the capacity that was originally proposed five thousand beds.
Speaker 4: I think it's extremely challenging to open facilities that are
Speaker 4: just large and to run them, to run them well,
Speaker 4: and to run them safely.
Speaker 2: This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
Speaker 2: To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access
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