Inside the ICE Detention Boom: Soaring Abuse Claims and Little Oversight

Summary

Podcast Summary: Inside the ICE Detention Boom—Soaring Abuse Claims and Little Oversight

On with Kara Swisher (Vox Media Podcast Network) | March 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this deeply reported episode, Kara Swisher brings together three leading experts—Ximena Bustillo (NPR immigration reporter), Austin Coker (Syracuse University researcher), and Aaron Reichland Milnek (lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council)—to dissect the radical expansion, worsening conditions, and collapsing oversight within the U.S. immigrant detention system under Trump’s second administration. With a focus on record deaths, mass warehousing, and unchecked authority, the panel examines the political and human dimensions behind America’s aggressive new campaign of mass detention and deportation.

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Radical Changes in U.S. Immigration Detention (04:37–08:18)

Key Points

• Mandatory Detention as the Norm:

  • Trump’s 2nd term began with an immediate, sweeping expansion of “mandatory detention,” affecting anyone without legal status—regardless of asylum status or court proceedings.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (04:58):
      "That means that if someone entered the country without legal authorization, they had to be in a detention center or doing some sort of alternative to detention program like an ankle monitor, regardless of if they were trying to fight their case..."

• Extra-legal Tactics:

  • The administration is taking unprecedented, extra-constitutional steps—raids without criminal warrants, use of non-traditional facilities (military bases, warehouses), and detaining people at a scale previously unseen.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (06:12):
      "...ICE is going into houses without a judicial or criminal warrant... they're using military bases. They're using Amazon warehouses to store people like boxes until they can get them on planes."

• Growth at Unprecedented Scale and Speed:

  • Detention population nearly doubled in one year (from 40,000 to over 73,000).
  • $45 billion allocated solely for ICE detention, with $30 billion more for officers and building out deportation plane capacity.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (07:11):
      "All of that has come together to allow the detention and deportation system to expand at a pace quicker than ever before in American history."

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Political Upheaval & Leadership Change (08:18–10:57)

Key Points

• Secretary Kristi Noem Fired:

  • Ousted less for policy failures, more for being an attention-seeking figurehead amid corruption rumors and deadly fallout (ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens). Oklahoma's Mark Wayne Mullen is poised to take over.

• Continuity in Policy, Change in Tone:

  • Mullen’s confirmation signals a shift in style (“less aggressive vision”), but not goals—he remains a faithful supporter of Trump’s hardline agenda, likely keeping policy static.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (09:01):
      "Nothing in procedure, nothing in goals has actually changed. And it's going to be Mullen's job."

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Deteriorating Conditions and the "Warehousing" Model (11:15–15:23)

Key Insights

• Escalation of Abuse and Impunity:

  • Under Trump’s 2nd term, abuse (medical neglect, racial harassment, forced signatures on removal orders) has sharply risen. Re-opened centers with known histories of violations.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (11:15):
      "But the scale of what we are seeing today... is worse than ever. And I hear that from everyone who works in the system..."

• Expanding with Amazon-style Warehouses:

  • Government is buying up commercial warehouses to convert into mammoth “regional processing centers” and “mega detention centers,” each projected to hold up to 10,000 people.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (13:05):
      "...literally buy up, empty, essentially, Amazon warehouses and fill it with people."

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Logistics of Rapid Expansion (20:32–22:21)

Operational Details

• Private Contractors and County Jail Network:

  • ICE leverages private companies (Geo Group, CoreCivic) and local/county jails to expand detention capacity from 115 to almost 250 facilities within a year.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (20:49):
      "They've been able to tap into the access that these private corporations have to quickly expand or reopen facilities..."

• Fragmented, Chaotic System:

  • Detainees are often shuffled far from their families; large and small facilities now dot the country, spreading chaos and hardship.

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Effects of Expansion—Overcrowding, Staffing Gaps, and Deaths (22:21–29:52)

Core Outcomes

• Human Toll of Overcrowding:

  • Rapid expansion has stretched staff and health care thin, leading to unsanitary conditions, spoiled food, infectious outbreaks (measles, COVID), and preventable deaths.

    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (23:02):
      "...Camp East Montana... when it opened up in August... there were 60 violations... due to the severe low staffing..."

    • Quote – Austin Coker (28:09):
      "What's unusual is that they are intentionally...avoiding staffing up and providing the services... My bigger problem is not that things have gone wrong. It's that when they've gone wrong, the administration has avoided any sense of accountability."

• Stories from Inside:

  • Detainees experience isolation, unreliable communication, legal confusion, poor food/water, and occupy an emotional limbo—some fighting, others losing hope.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (26:55):
      "...people sleeping on floors, about the food not being very good, about the bread being moldy, about there being questions about the drinking water..."

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Mega-Warehouse "Amazon Prime" System & Community Pushback (29:52–34:45)

Structural Transformation

• ICE's Mega-vision:

  • The agency wants to centralize into 16 regional hubs and 8 giant warehouses ("Amazon Prime, but with human beings")—each double the size of the largest U.S. federal prisons.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (30:18):
      "...eight mega detention centers...warehouses that hold anywhere from 7,500 to 10,000 people... disaster waiting to happen."

• Unexpected Bipartisan Resistance:

  • Community and even Republican local leaders push back due to logistical infeasibility, loss of tax base, and fundamental social strain on small towns.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (33:28):
      "Sometimes people just say, we don't want this in our town for any reason... Other times...the city has infrastructure [capacity] for..."

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Systemic Punishment and Deterrence as Policy (34:45–41:17)

Philosophical and Policy Shifts

• Detention as a Deterrent, Not Mere Processing:

  • The administration’s aim is to make the experience so punishing people will “voluntarily” self-deport rather than endure.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (35:00):
      "...the idea is that mass deportation requires mass detention...they are deeply interested in making this process as punitive as possible."

• Concentration Camp Analogy?

  • Guests debate the fit of the term, generally agreeing that conditions now resemble jails, but are uniquely punitive given their civil (non-criminal) status and intent.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (36:37):
      "...these are quite literally jails... in some cases, is this deliberate indifference, deliberate negligence, but that doesn't matter... that's what's happening to them."
    • Quote – Austin Coker (39:37):
      "...it's understandable...why people might go to particular points in history...the closest I can think of to what I'm seeing right now is this other period in history."

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Oversight Gutted and Judicial Rubber Stamping (43:06–48:54)

Oversight Structures Collapsing

• Agencies Hollowed Out:

  • Oversight agencies (Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, DHS Inspector General) were gutted or politicized, reducing accountability to near zero.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (43:33):
      "The Trump admin fired 90% of [the ombudsman] staff... ICE has an Office of Detention Inspections... accused of...rubber stamping inspections."

• Firing of Judges, Rise of “Deportation Judges”:

  • Nearly 100 immigration judges fired, replaced with “deportation judges” pushing denials; Board of Immigration Appeals pressured to speed and approve removals.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (46:24):
      "...the judge is gonna come into the case with... pressure to deport... training really leans into denying asylum protections..."

• Record Asylum Denial Rates:

  • Denial rates have skyrocketed from a historical 45–60% to over 80–85%.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (48:28):
      "...the monthly asylum denial rate has increased all the way up to well over 80, 85%. Normally... it's between 45 and 60%."

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Transparency, Data, and Corruption (48:54–53:13)

Data Withholding and Contract Controversy

• Opaque Enforcement & Data Suppression:

  • Trump admin ceased publishing monthly enforcement data, replaced it with spin and unverifiable claims, making external scrutiny near-impossible.
    • Quote – Austin Coker (49:09):
      "The Trump administration... stopped publishing monthly enforcement data... started...rhetoric that is either unverifiable or verifiably...inaccurate."

• Contracting Scandals:

  • Billions in single-source, non-competitive contracts for warehouse detention centers, with many going to politically connected vendors, sparking rare complaints from private prison corporations themselves.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (50:39):
      "The single source contracting has allowed them to...pick and choose who gets these contracts...with less transparency..."

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The Political Future and Human Stakes (53:13–57:02)

The Road Ahead

• Democrats Poised to Challenge Funding:

  • With the 2026 midterms looming, Democrats may attempt to claw back ICE’s war chest; the expansion of detention is central to Trump’s goal of a million deportations a year.
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (56:18):
      "...the last time we made any changes to the immigration enforcement system was 30 years ago. So we are operating in a 20th century system in a 21st century world."

• Expanding Net of Vulnerability:

  • The crackdown now includes categories previously exempt—legal immigrants, visa overstays, people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and DACA recipients.
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (54:01):
      "...we're seeing more people in immigration detention that might normally not be there...They're moving forward on different people with different visas, visa overstays, on delegalizing people..."

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Stephen Miller’s Influence (57:02–62:32)

Systemic Direction Set from the Top

• Miller’s Role as Architect:
  • All guests agree Miller’s singular, racially charged vision drives policy, focusing on indiscriminate sweeps rather than targeted enforcement, pressing officials to “just go out there and get the illegal aliens.”
    • Quote – Aaron Reichland Milnek (58:20):
      "...Stephen Miller called together the heads of every 25 ICE field offices...and in his words, quote, 'just go out there and get the illegal aliens.'"
    • Quote – Austin Coker (59:16):
      "Stephen Miller is what happens when you give a monomaniacal narcissist access to a car with no brakes...his relentless pursuit of deporting every adult and child...is a big part of what's driving this."
    • Quote – Ximena Bustillo (60:24):
      "Stephen Miller is the one that's driving the ship...we don't really see that changing."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "ICE now owns its own deportation jets." (Aaron Reichland Milnek, 07:54)
• "ICE clearly thinks that by concentrating these warehouses...they can build what ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons called Amazon Prime—but with human beings." (Aaron Reichland Milnek, 30:18)
• "The best way to make sure that people give up...is to make it as painful and harmful as possible." (Austin Coker, 35:00)
• "If these guys are complaining [about corruption], you know something's afoot essentially." (Kara Swisher, 49:50)
• "His goal is a million deportations a year. I don't think they're gonna hit it, but they're going to try to spend every penny..." (Aaron Reichland Milnek, 57:02–57:28)

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Final Takeaways

• Unprecedented Expansion: Scale, speed, and severity of detention under Trump’s second term surpass anything in modern U.S. history.
• Blurred Oversight, Legal Process Hollowed Out: Agencies gutted, judges replaced, due process sidelined. Even public data is suppressed.
• Human Cost Acutely Rising: Abuses, deaths, and psychological hardship now endemic to the system—at least 40 detainee deaths since January 2025, with this year on track to be worse.
• Systemic Punishment as Deterrence: Policy design prioritizes making detention torturous to coerce self-deportation, not due process.
• Political Backlash Growing: Bipartisan and local resistance—spurred by corruption, logistical incapacity, and social strain.
• Miller’s Enduring Control: Stephen Miller’s ideology and operational micromanagement keep the focus on punitive, maximalist enforcement even as the public and politicians react.

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For Further Details:
Key segments include the radical policy changes (04:37–08:18), warehouse/mega-facility plan (29:52–34:45), community resistance and logistical issues (33:24–34:45), oversight and “deportation judges” (43:06–48:54), and the Miller segment (57:02–62:32).

Transcript

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

His goal is a million deportations a year. I don't think they're gonna hit it, but they're going to try to spend every penny of that funding that they can in order to reach that goal. And that means more people caught up in this rapid system, more people held in detention, more people subject to awful conditions, and more people who see what's happening and say, I can't take it anymore. I just want to give up. Even if I could have a chance to stay in this country, it'.

[Austin Coker]

It is all.

[Kara Swisher]

Hi, everyone from New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is ON with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. The Department of Homeland Security is in the middle of a major shakeup. President Trump fired Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, making it the first cabinet departure of the second term. Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen is expected to take over once he's confirmed. By all accounts, Noem's downfall had more to do with her attention seeking, and not because she failed to deliver on Trump's mass deportation agenda. Nor did it have anything to do with the horrifying allegations of human rights abuses at U.S. detention centers under her leadership. 2025 was the deadliest year to be in immigration custody in decades. This year is on track to be worse. We've got three experts here to talk about the U.S. detention system and how it's being radically reshaped by the Trump administration. Ximena Bustillo covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for npr. Austin Coker is a research assistant professor at Syracuse University. He's been tracking immigration data trends and writes about it on his substack. And Aaron Reichland Milnek is a lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. I think people should not be taking their eye off the immigration story because the nonsensical clown Kristi Noem and her strange sidekick Cora Lendowski are out of the picture. At the heart of it is a policy of the administration to try to rid the country of people they think are lesser than. It is racist. It is problematic for economy. It is just plain cruel. And I think they're trying to hide it in the shadows. Now with these detention centers, they shouldn't be allowed to do so. They have to show people what they're doing, which they're trying desperately not to do. And of course, it's becoming increasingly unpopular with voters. And I think they'll see the impact of that in the midterms, but we'll have to see. All right, let's get to my conversation with Ximena, Austin and Aaron. This is a really important topic, so stick around. Support for on with Kara Swisher comes from the 2027 Chevy Bolt. Oh, I love the Chevy Bolt. I have mine. How long is 25 minutes? The quick workout or a stop to the grocery store. It's all the amount of time it takes you to charge your Chevy Bolt. As I said, I drive the Chevy Bolt myself. An older version. And now the Bolt is back and better than ever. I may have to trade it in. You can charge from 10% to 80% in just 25 minutes. Public DC fast charging. That's about half the length of this very podcast. Explore Chevy's most affordable [e-mail] Bold actual charge times will vary. See owner's manual for details and limitations. Let me say again, I love my car. Never had a problem with it. Best car I've ever owned. Buy the Chevy Bolt. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business takes everything you've got. And a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other. And that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there's Odoo, the all in one fully integrated platform that actually might help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for [e-mail] that's o d o o.com

[Austin Coker]

Once Upon a Monday morning, Barb's day got busy without warning. A realtor in need of an open house. 50 of them and designed before 9. My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Aha. Barb made her move. She opened Canva and got in the groove. Bulk creating canva sheets.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Create 50 signs fit for suburban streets.

[Austin Coker]

Done in a click. All complete.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Sweet.

[Austin Coker]

Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work. @canva.com it is on.

[Kara Swisher]

Jimena, Austin and Aaron, thanks for coming on. On.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Hey there.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Hi Kara.

[Austin Coker]

Thanks for having me on. Kara.

[Kara Swisher]

The IM the immigrant detention system in the US has never been a shining example of respect for human rights. But since Trump took office last year, there've been a series of serious allegations of human rights violations. Now, for each of you, what's been the most radical change in how US arrests and imprisons immigrants in Trump's second term? Jimena, then Austin, then Erin.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I think one of the things that makes this administration, particularly unique is the mandatory detention policy that it very quickly put into effect. That means that if someone entered the country without legal authorization, they had to be in a detention center or doing some sort of alternative to detention program like an ankle monitor, regardless of if they were trying to fight their case in immigration court or regardless of if they were already, you know, had filed for asylum or some other process. And so this is how we saw immigration detention get, quote, unquote, maxed out very quickly and early on last year. And now, Obviously, we have 70,000 people in immigration detention. Detention, many people that under past administrations might not have normally been there even if they were fighting their deportation.

[Kara Swisher]

So incarceration, immediate incarceration, no matter what.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah. And ICE likes to say that detention's not supposed to be punitive. You're supposed to be in there and you're supposed to be out. But we've seen outgoing Secretary Kristi Noem and other members of the Trump administration almost say, like, they want this to be one of the things that gets people to leave and voluntarily depart and choose to exit.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay, so that's a big difference, Austin.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah. The biggest change we've seen is that it's not just that they're amplifying the normal process of arrest, detention and deportation. It's they're going down whole new extra constitutional and radical new ways of arresting, detaining and deporting people that contradict constitutional law and longstanding precedent. This means ICE is going into houses without a judicial or criminal warrant. It means they are not just using the normal detention system, they're using military bases. They're using Amazon warehouses to store people like boxes until they can get them on planes. So I think it's this whole new line of creative, extra legal, and frankly, shocking sort of strategies that most Americans oppose.

[Kara Swisher]

And that's different is a more radicalized version of it, or how would you describe it?

[Austin Coker]

Yeah, I would say radically aggressive in ways that neither Republicans nor Democrats have ever endorsed. It's really just outside the scope of what most people level headed, people within the administration and within Congress have supported in the past passed.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

All right, Aaron, beyond what we've already heard from Ximena and Austin, the biggest change has been in the scale and speed in which the system has expanded. When Trump took office in January 2025, there were about 40,000 people in ICE detention. At its peak in January 2026, that had risen to 73,000 people in detention. The system has never expanded this rapidly. And that came along with $45 billion provided by Congress in the one big Beautiful Bill act that is of ICE's annual budget, all in one big pot of cash. And that has given them essentially unlimited funding to get the system running.

[Kara Swisher]

The 45 billion was just for ice, correct?

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Yeah, that 45 billion was just for ICE detention. In fact, they got an additional $30 billion to hire new ICE officers to build out their deportation plane capacity for the first time ever. ICE now owns its own deportation jets. And all of that has come together to allow the detention and deportation system to expand at a pace quicker than ever before in American history.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. So the Department of Homeland Security is at a crossroads right now. Trump fired Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month. There's some new reporting on possible corruption around Corey Lewandowski, her unpaid top aide. And DHS is facing bipartisan pushback after ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota earlier this year. Among other things, Jimena Trump picked Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen to replace Noem.

[Ximena Bustillo]

He.

[Kara Swisher]

He had his confirmation hearing on Wednesday where he presented a less aggressive vision of ICE under his leadership. He just moved out of committee. Realistically, how different is he from Nome in terms of immigration policies he'd like to pursue, especially around detention? I will note he has very little experience in this area.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Right. And we've seen over the past year that he has been a very vocal supporter of the Trump administration's immigration agenda. You know, comb through his social media profiles and you will find him overwhelmingly posting and talking about the different initiatives that the administration was doing, using the same talking points, some of which he did walk back during the hearing, calling 37 year old Alex Preddy, who was shot by Border Patrol agents, as, quote, deranged. And then during the hearing saying, maybe I shouldn't have done that. As secretary, I'm not gonna be as quick to make such judgments. But at the end of the day, he still supports many of the policies that the administration is putting in place and their approach to immigration. So even if the seem to be a little bit more scaled back, you have to remember that nothing in procedure, nothing in goals has actually changed. And it's going to be Mullen's job. Yeah, nothing.

[Kara Swisher]

So how do you interpret the tone ship? What do you chalk it up to? Explicitly?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, explicitly, I think that Mullen is going before his colleagues, some of which he obviously does not get along with. Chairman Paul and him have very personal beefs in history. But we saw many of the comments that Noam make just simply not age well eventually. And she just did not defend the administration's policies well enough. And Kristi Noem had this very public Persona. She had ads on streaming services. She really was putting herself out there.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I know.

[Ximena Bustillo]

In every way, shape, or form. Yeah. And so we'll see if Mullen takes that same approach. Does the communication on social media to the public look the same, or do they take a different tone, considering that midterms are upcoming and many of these approaches are not very popular and kind of keep to themselves on some of that messaging to that point?

[Kara Swisher]

Recent polls have shown that voters have soured on Trump's handling of immigration in recent months. It's why the administration was forced to pull back from its surge in Minneapolis. But what the administration does to immigrants in detention is often invisible to the public. Aaron, would you talk a little bit about if you're seeing anything different in terms of tweaking their approach to detention or not?

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

I think detention has always been bad. You know, at the American Immigration Council here, I've been working on ICE detention issues for over a decade, roughly a decade, and the system has never been perfect. There have always been failures. I can go and leaf through complaint after complaint that we filed about inadequate medical care, verbal harassment, abuse occurring in detention centers. But the scale of what we are seeing today in detention is worse than ever. And I hear that from everyone who works in the system, from lawyers who work in detention centers around the country, in part because the message coming from on high, from Nome and others, was that people could get away with anything. There was always a level of impunity for violations of rights in detention centers. And notably, the Biden administration became the first administration ever to shutter multiple ICE detention centers when they failed to meet standards. The Trump admin has reopened those detention centers despite them clearly not making any significant changes. And the message seems to be, no matter what happens, so long as people are being pushed through the deportation system as fast, fast as possible to hit these arrest and detention and deportation quotas, the administration is going to turn a blind eye. And on the ground, that means conditions for people are getting worse. Abuse is up. People tell appalling stories about racial harassment, about being physically or verbally threatened to sign allegedly voluntary removal orders. And that is at a level we have never seen before.

[Kara Swisher]

Never seen. Well, the administration has scaled back on very public immigration raids like we saw in Minneapolis. It's expanding to Texas facilities. One of the ways it's doing that is by buying warehouses to convert into mass detention centers. Austin, explain how that's supposed to work.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah. Just to follow What Aaron said as well, I just want to reiterate just detention conditions before we move into the warehousing, because it lays a really important precedent. So we just had the second detained death in ICE custody this week announced yesterday. Individual died. On Monday, that individual died inside of a detention facility that was precisely one of the facilities that Aaron mentioned was shut down during the Biden administration for failing to meet inspection standards. It was reopened this year with no evidence that the facility's conditions and management had changed substantially in any way. And it's located in a hotspot of detention deaths in South Florida, which has seen the highest number of detention deaths, all in places with overcrowding, poor nutrition, lack of access to medical care. So these really are the conditions that are being laid. And so when we move now into warehouses and we look at what the Trump administration is doing to rapidly scale up detention, we have to remember that this is not an agency or an administration that takes these concerns seriously. And, in fact, the administration continues to dismiss any concerns about detention deaths as claiming that this is the best medical care immigrants have ever received and framing their deaths as simply their own fault for being in the country in the first place. So the warehousing model is basically trying to solve a problem the Trump administration has. They know that they are probably going to lose some power in Congress in the midterms. They are flush with cash, as Aaron said, and they are trying to get their detention and deportation numbers up, which they've had a hard time doing. They've inflated their numbers artificially to sort of make it seem like a lot of people have left the country, and they're on track to deport over 400,000 this year. So numbers are certainly going up, but it's difficult for them to do that without filling large facilities with people that they can, as Ximena said, convince them to stop trying to seek asylum, convince them to stop trying to fight their deportation and just take the deportation. So the warehousing plan is their approach. It's a way for the government itself, instead of contracting, to literally buy up, empty, essentially, Amazon warehouses and fill it with people.

[Kara Swisher]

Ximena, you said 2025 was about laying the groundwork and building the infrastructure for this mass deportation agenda, and now we're in it. I'd like to expand on that a little bit. What are you likely to see this year that we didn't see in 2025?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, the money is such a big one. The administration got the money to do whatever it wanted to do whatever it needed to do. We're already seeing that ICE is projected this year to 16 new facilities to hold around 1500 people each, and then six different new facilities that are larger to hold up to 10,000 people. And many of these are some of these warehouses that we're talking about that are slated to be reconverted. And so I think, you know, it goes back always to follow the money and kind of see where the contracts are already taken place. And they're not just going to buy these warehouses and facilities and not use them unless they're barred from doing that through lawsuits and maybe other things that could stop them. But that's where we see this going. You know, this is going to continue to expand. It's going to continue to grow. We don't see the administration changing course on its agenda anytime soon.

[Kara Swisher]

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[Ximena Bustillo]

so

[Kara Swisher]

right now people are mainly being held in facilities by private contractors or being held in jails or prisons. And that's how the detention system's worked for the last few decades. Austin, how did the Trump administration manage to quickly expand these existing facilities in just a year? Let's talk about, like, the actual logistics of it.

[Austin Coker]

Sure. So using existing contracts and contracting mechanisms with local, local jails, county jails, as well as the contracts that they have with private contractors such as Geo Group and CoreCivic, these companies have a business model around having access to facilities. So they've been able to tap into the access that these private corporations have to quickly expand or reopen facilities such as the northeast state level facility in Ohio where I'm from, which was a detention center for several years. It was shut down and then quickly reopened at the start of the Trump administration. They are also able to contract with a lot of county. So I track this data on a bi weekly basis and we've seen the total facilities in the country go from about 115 to almost 250 since the start of the Trump administration.

[Kara Swisher]

These are individual facilities.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah, that's right, individual facilities. And there's obviously some very large facilities like the family detention center in Dilley in South Texas, which can hold up to 2,200 people, or the Stewart detention facility in Georgia, which also hold over 2,000 people. But there's a lot of jails across the country that are holding a dozen people, 50 people, 100 people at a time. And that's one way that in some regions, like the northern Great Plains states, like in Minneapolis, this is actually a big problem for people arrested in Minneapolis. And then Minnesota, there isn't a large detention center there. So people sort of get spread out into these rural county jails or they get shipped across the country, like to the tent facility in El Paso, which is able to hold almost 4,000 people.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. So it's sort of chaotic in that regard. Now there's all these human rights abuses at these detention facilities, which is forever. Detention facilities have had these complaints. Deaths, unsanitary conditions, spoiled food, but also the spread of measles and Covid, which is really quite disturbing. People denied access then to necessary medical care. Lawyers Erin, connect the dots here between the rapid expansion of detention and the humane conditions. Is it just chaos us on purpose? What is the I mean, obviously detention facilities have always had. I've read dozens and dozens of stories about prisons, et cetera. Talk a little bit about the expansion and Sort of what is very typical of detention facilities in our country.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Unfortunately, I think the most important bit of context is that there's a shortage nationwide of corrections officers, and there's a shortage of prison health care providers. So when you are rapidly opening up these new detention centers, you know, we've added 30,000 more people a day on average, being held in these detention centers over the course of a year. Those are people that you needed to hire up. You needed to get staff to do that. And when Camp East Montana, which is a tent camp the Trump administration opened on Fort Bliss in El Paso, when it opened up in August of last year, there were 60 violations that were immediately filed against it by the Department of Homeland Security's own inspector general, in part due to the severe low staffing that they had. And that is a feature of a rapid expansion. You've got to hire up these staff really quickly in order to actually get them online. But the Trump administration is not waiting. They were literally building Camp East Montana as it opened in August. It was holding about a thousand a month after that, 1500amonth after that, 2000, because they were building the tents next to the ones they'd already started holding people in, and they didn't have enough space staff. And that led to serious issues. And in fact, Camp East Montana is the place where we have seen the homicide of a man in January who was reportedly killed by prison staff during an incident. Now, ICE says that's not true, that he committed suicide. People who witnessed the event actually were rapidly deported from the country, despite litigation holds from a judge saying, don't deport this person. He was a witness. One of them got deported anyway. And he reported back. He said, I saw what happened. The guards killed the guy, and it was nothing to do with. He was not suicide at all. And these are the situations that happen when you are rapidly hiring up. So I do think going back again to the administration, not caring what happens and really just wanting to speed things up as quickly as they can. They have four years in office, and they want to use every minute of that to get their numbers up.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, it recalls to mind putting Japanese Americans in horse facilities, if you remember, in San Francisco during World War II. So, Ximena, you've talked to some of these people who've been held in these detention facilities, talk about what it's like there and what some of the stories that have stuck with you.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely spoken with folks in detention centers across the country. Many often call and talk about how they're Kind of in this room the entire time. They maybe get an opportunity to call their wife or their husband where they, you know, talk about daily lives almost as if it was the conversation that they would have before going to bed at night. But instead they take that as a time to do it instead. A lot of conversations about what are their red lines, how long do they wait. I've spoken with people who are stocked up with lawyers. They have criminal lawyers, they have immigration lawyers, they have constitutional lawyers, they have teams of lawyers to try and fight their detentions through the various convoluted court systems, the immigration court systems, the district court systems. And then I've talked to people who don't have a lawyer and call me because someone else that was in detention called me at one point and they think that maybe like I can help tell their stories. And sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. You know, that's obviously a different side of it all. But, you know, ultimately it's really variant. Some people are there very quickly, others are removed very, very slowly. I spent a lot of time using the ICE detainee locator as well to kind of track and see where people are getting moved to. And that, as we've seen over the last year, is not always the most accurate, up to date speedy system. No.

[Kara Swisher]

What is their state of mind in terms of the treatment and how they're feeling about what's happening there?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, I think the people I talk to are obviously very self selected. So it tends to be a very resilient group. You know, people who are actively fighting their cases or want to actively fight their case and see it all the way through, even if it means that they're in detention for a year. But obviously that is not everybody in detention. And when you have these overcrowded conditions, you hear about people sleeping on floors, about the food not being very good, about the bread being moldy, about there being questions about the drinking water. And a lot of this has been well reported by my colleagues at NPR and other outlets as well. It's just these challenges, not just in detention, but when you have an overpopulated and overcrowded space.

[Kara Swisher]

So more than 40 people have died in ICE detention since Trump took office. In fact, last year was the deadliest on record in decades. 2026 is on track to be worse. Austin, you wrote that these deaths are becoming, quote, a predictable normalized part of ICE operations, while Congress and most of America and public appears unaware or indifferent or both. What's leading to so many of these deaths? Besides just chaos, it feels like in some way, and not caring about it, obviously.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah. I think it goes back to the fundamentals that Erin was touching on. These are not facilities that are prepared to handle this number of people. And in any population, not just immigrant population, if you suddenly started detaining 3,000American citizens inside of a facility, some number would have a variety of mental and physical needs that would have to be met. Right. So it's not unusual that this would happen. What's unusual is that they are intentionally avoidable, avoiding staffing up and providing the services and the infrastructure that they need. I think the second order problem is, okay, if you're expanding a system this quickly, there's likely to be mistakes along the way. So how do you respond when things go wrong? This administration has claimed that American citizens are terrorists after they've been killed by ice. They've dismissed detained deaths as essentially being immigrants own fault, not theirs. So I think the bigger problem is that just that things have gone wrong. It's that when they've gone wrong, the administration has avoided any sense of accountability. And we're not seeing Congress changing that either.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. And the American people aren't seeing it the way they did, say in Minneapolis. So you said a lot of these deaths are also preventable. How so?

[Austin Coker]

So research on detained deaths shows that about 95% are preventable. When you do a deeper dive in cases, let's just take for instance, there have been three, sadly, suicides in detention so far this year. Suicides are preventable death. Within detention centers, there are standards about how to monitor and make sure that people are not able to harm themselves in that way. If you don't have staff and oversight and a commitment to following through with those policies, things like this are inclined to happen.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, inevitable, Aaron. That kind of leads us to the warehouses. The government has spent close to a billion dollars buying up close to a dozen around the country. The goal is to be able to hold 100,000 people at any given time. These were warehouses are not built to hold people. They're built to store things. Amazon or whoever, talk about what happens in that system. In a warehouse system, you've said they fundamentally reshape immigration detention. Just explain that.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Yeah. So the American immigration detention system really slowly emerged over about 30, 40 years as Congress gradually expanded the system with a little bit more funding every year. And that means that the system we have to today is, as Austin described, a patchwork of large facilities, medium sized facilities, and small county jails where people are held everywhere from a few Dozen people in some facilities to 500 in others, to over 2,000 in a handful of facilities. So ICE is saying we now have enough money, $45 billion, that we can redo the system from scratch. But actually thinking through how to build a modern authority, efficient prison system is what they want to build usually takes more than four years, but they only have four years to do it. And so they seized upon the cheapest, even though it's enormously expensive method of doing that, which is buying these commercial warehouses and sites around the country. And they want to have 16, what they call regional processing centers, where people are taken after they are arrested and held for a few days while ICE figures out what to do next. And then eight mega detention centers, these are going to be warehouses that hold anywhere from 7,500 to 10,000 people. And ICE clearly thinks that by concentrating these warehouses, a small number of them at key locations around the country, they can build what ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons called Amazon Prime. But with human beings, the problem is, of course, this is not something ICE has any experience in. The largest federal prison holds only 4,600 people. So we're talking about some facilities that could be double the size of the largest federal prison and an agency that only runs its own handful of detention centers, mostly which were built in the 1980s or 1990s.

[Kara Swisher]

So this would exacerbate current problems.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Exactly. These problems are already in existence in the private detention centers. And ICE is now saying, we want to own these facilities larger than anything we've ever run before, larger than the largest federal prison, larger than the largest state prison in the country. And we want to build eight of them. And that is a disaster waiting to happen.

[Kara Swisher]

So, Ximena, we're seeing opposition, obviously, these mass detention warehouses, even in Republican districts. It's sort of interesting to watch it play out. How does that complicate the push to open them quickly? I see them ending up empty at some point, presumably. So what are the main concerns and how does that complicate this issue?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that could block some of these warehouses from opening or coming online, depending on where they are. And that's not counting other initiatives and kind of pop ups that the administration might decide to open up. We have seen some successful Republican pushback, particularly in the south and in a few other states where whether it's local leadership or senators saying, we don't want this in our community. So there's definitely been a paper trail of this kind of resistance happening bipartisanly locally. And nationally, I think what is the

[Kara Swisher]

principal objections of people in local districts, including Republicans?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I think that's the tough part is it very much varies. Sometimes people just say, we don't want this in our town for any reason. Whether it's, we don't want these people in our town, you know, that can easily be a reason. Other times, it's just an acknowledgement that the community cannot sustain this. You know, in some of these places, you know, even some of these smaller facilities would double the size of a town. And that is just not something that the city has infrastructure for. And so there is a reliance on, like, logistical challenges and where that could land. And so those are some of the more pragmatic arguments against these, like, larger facilities.

[Kara Swisher]

Austin.

[Austin Coker]

I mean, there's two specific concerns that we've seen come up, especially here in Western Maryland, but also in Social Circle, Georgia and elsewhere. The first thing is these facilities are not capable. Sorry, the local municipalities are not capable of providing water, wastewater, drinking water to these facilities. It would absolutely overburden. They literally don't have the water to send to the facilities. And the second thing is that often gets overlooked is once the federal government buys up one of these properties, Kara, that property goes off the local tax rolls. So it's taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of communities. That means less money going to the school and to the infrastructure it so desperately needs.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. And also, one of the things that's interesting that the administration likes to brag about how it effectively shut down the southern border and ended asylum and how quickly they're deporting people. It seems counterintuitive that DHS needs more space to hold more people. How are those related?

[Austin Coker]

Yeah, that's right. So I think there's, you know, there's two things here. One is there's an attitude within this administration, within ice, that the only way to deport people is detain them until you can get them on a plane. There's no data to support that, but that's the belief. So the idea is that mass deportation requires mass detention to make it work. But I think more importantly and more underneath of all of that is they are deeply interested in making this process as punitive as possible. Because the truth is, there's lots of legal, lawful pathways that Congress created to ensure due process and make sure that humanitarian migrants have access to at least a review in front of a judge or an asylum officer. And the best way to make sure that this process goes faster instead of slower. The best way to make sure that people give up on their basic rights is to make it as painful and harmful as possible. And I can tell you, talking to families, Kara, that there are USS and spouses of undocumented immigrants who are saying, I don't want my husband in one of these facilities. It's better that we leave the country so we can stay together. Because there's no way I'm gonna let my husband go through this process or wife.

[Kara Swisher]

I personally now know a half a dozen people who have done that. They're leav. They're just leaving. Aaron, People have been comparing the Trump administration's detention process to concentration camps. It immediately obviously evokes the idea of Nazi Germany. There have been lots of concentration camps, but that's the top memory of people. It's an extreme example. Talk about the use of the term concentration camp. Is that fair? Is there is detention center? I mean, a lot does swing on words in many ways, for me, these

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

are jails, they're prisons. The warehouses are a new thing. Those, you know, we haven't seen those before, but in many senses, these are quite literally jails. We see one of the largest new detention centers that's opened under the Trump administration last year was the California City Detention center, which is a private prison that was previously used by the state of California as a long term prison. When California moved away from using private prisons, the facility was shuttered for several years. And then when ICE came into the office, they just reopened it, slapped a new coat of paint on it, and started hiring it out to ice. So I think that getting mixed up in the terminology here is not as helpful as looking at what is actually going on in these facilities. And one great example of how conditions have gotten worse, we featured, we recently published a big report on ICE detention in Trump's first year in office. And we highlighted the story of a woman who had spent a time in federal prison for illegal reentry, which is a federal crime. And she said her time in federal prison she was treated better than when she was sent to an ICE detention center. And as much as you can say in some cases, is this deliberate, is this deliberate indifference, deliberate negligence, but that doesn't matter to some extent for these people. That's what's happening to them. And they're having to make decisions about their cases. And I think one key distinction when we talk about things like internment and others is that the goal of the US Government is deportation. As Austin said, the Trump administration believes deeply that in order to deport people, you must detain them. And I agree. The data does not support that. But in their view, it would be the easiest if people were in detention for 24 hours and then signed a paper saying that they could get out and leave and free up that bed for someone else to come in. People are held in these detention centers for long periods of time, but the government doesn't want that. They would prefer that people just give up and stop fighting.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. How do other two think of the word concentration camp? Jimenet and then AUSTIN yeah, I mean,

[Ximena Bustillo]

I agree with Erin in terms of. These are very much more like prison in jail kind of structures. I think when it gets into the question of prolonged detention and what is actually the point of immigration detention, that's definitely worth exploring. Again, as I mentioned earlier, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons underscores that immigration detention is not supposed to be pun. And I think that that's important to remember. Someone being put in immigration detention is not supposed to be a punishment. They're not necessarily there because it's logistical.

[Kara Swisher]

It's supposed to be.

[Ximena Bustillo]

It's logistical. It is a process. It is the stopping point before they're put on a plane or somewhere else. And so I think that's where we have to see how is this administration using immigration detention, and is it moving from being not punitive to being punitive?

[Austin Coker]

Austin yeah, I have a slightly different perspective on this As a political geographer who's looked at the spatial practices of power and control from states across our modern history. And I think one of the things that happens when American citizens see fellow citizens shot in the street, who are then called terrorists, when they see the language, the xenophobic rhetoric, the really brutality, the dehumanizing language coming out of the administration as well, as well as record numbers of deaths in detention. The fact that this is civil and not criminal, the fact that most people don't even have a criminal record, it's normal for people to grasp at the nearest approximate analogy that comes to mind. And so it's understandable, I think, why people might go to particular points in history and in memory and say, hey, the closest I can think of to what I'm seeing right now is this other period in history. I think, to your point, Kara, even when we think about concentration camps, it's better to actually step back and say, across the world right now and in the last hundred years. There's a lot of examples of the way that different governments have, typically authoritarian governments, by the way, have exploited this artificial distinction between civil and criminal, have used these kinds of mechanisms, whether it's warehouses or camps. It didn't start even in Germany. I mean, it happened in South Africa. It happened with indigenous people in this continent. It's happened in Australia, with offshoring to islands, essentially warehouses on islands off the coast of Australia. So I completely agree that I do not think that empirically these are concentration camps in the way that we typically understand that term, as you said. But I understand why people might grasp at analogies.

[Kara Swisher]

We'll be back in a minute.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here.

[Austin Coker]

Multi vehicle discount, Safe driver discount, New vehicle discount, Storage discount?

[Kara Swisher]

How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodiscounts restrictions apply. Hi everyone, it's Kara Swisher. I'm excited to put something new on your radar from the Vox Media Podcast network. It's called Project Swagger with the one and only Robin Arzon, and it's all about helping you trust yourself, level up your mindset, and actually make the changes you've been thinking about. Robin is Peloton's Vice President of Fitness programming and head instructor. She's also a 27 time marathon and ultramarathon runner, founder of Swagger Society media company, and a two time New York Times best selling author. In under 30 minutes, Robyn shares the rituals, routines and and mental shifts that fuel her hustle and show you how to apply them in your own life. In the very first episode, she opens up about the moment that forced her to transform her inner voice and the strategies that helped her become what she calls a self talk ninja. You can find Project Swagger with Robin Arzon on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Hi, I'm Brene Brown.

[Austin Coker]

And I'm Adam Grant and we're here

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

to invite you to the Curiosity, a

[Austin Coker]

podcast that's a place for listening, wondering,

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun.

[Austin Coker]

We rarely agree, but we almost never disagree. And we're always learning.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

[Kara Swisher]

While DHS expands its detention capability, it's getting harder to know what's going on inside of them. But the Trump administration gutted some of the agencies that were supposed to provide oversight for these facilities, like the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. We've also seen DHS try to block members of Congress from showing up unannounced at ICE detention centers. Or the judge recently ruled DHS can't do that. Erin, who's overseeing detention centers now and who's able to investigate complaints coming out of them?

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

There's actually three independent bodies that are supposed to do this oversight. One of them is the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. This is a relatively new office created a few years ago and the Trump admin fired 90% of of its staff. The other is DHS's Office of Inspector General, who is run by someone who is widely perceived to be an ally of the Trump administration, who was appointed as the Inspector General in Trump's first term. And the other is ICE itself. ICE has an Office of Detention Inspections that occurs inside of its Office of Professional Responsibilities. And that office has been accused of essentially rubber stamping inspections. They outsource it to a private company that effectively never finds any serious violations. In many cases, they are either policing themselves or not really doing any kind of policing internally. And then of course, externally, there are lawyers who go into these facilities. There are members of Congress who have been fighting hard in court just to go and exercise their right to do inspections. And so you do get some view. And the people themselves, as Ximena said at the start, people are calling her. People are able to talk to reporters from the inside and say what happens. And we've even seen some videos smuggled out of a few ICE facilities showing terrible over. So it's not like there is no

[Kara Swisher]

view that happened in the first term of the Trump Remember, the pictures were really quite problematic for the Trump administration.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

And crucially, those pictures were of border facilities, crowded people at the border. My organization, we actually sued over that during the Obama administration, overcrowding in those border facilities got worse. And then inside ICE detention, we had never seen situations like that. And now we have. We have seen in ICE holding facilities in Baltimore, Baltimore, in Florida, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, people crowded into small holding cells, 30 people in a room with a maximum capacity of 10 people not getting enough food, not getting enough water, and smuggling out cell phone videos saying these conditions are horrifying, people are going to die. And in fact, there have been some instances where people caught diseases in these crowded conditions and then were hospitalized after afterwards just because it was so unsanitary. So we are seeing from what we can see, the system has gotten worse. But what we know is that we don't have enough visibility in this system and accountability has been disappearing on a daily basis.

[Kara Swisher]

So Jimenez, you've written about how the Trump administration fired nearly 100 immigration judges last year and says it hopes to Replace them with quotes. Deportation judges. These hearings are one of the few opportunities for immigrants to have publicly plead their case and say, what's happening? The immigration court of effectively turns into a rubber stamp for removals. How would that cloud our understanding who's being. They're not getting due process, basically. Correct.

[Ximena Bustillo]

I mean, at a very minimum, it gives the perception that the judge is gonna come into the case with already the sense of deport or not and with the pressure to deport. And, you know, I'm hearing that as these new judges are being onboarded, the training really leans into denying asylum protections and denying additional protections from being deported. Cause of course, asylum isn't the only way, only thing that you can argue in immigration court. But I think a lot of people don't realize that immigration courts, we call them courts, for all intents and purposes, they are, but they're administrative courts. They're under the Justice Department. The boss of all these judges is ultimately Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, and then above her, the president. And so to what extent can there actually be an independent court system? That's been up for debate for a very long time, but we're really seeing this administration utilize that to remove the people that it didn't want for whatever reason, and then bring on a slate of candidates that at the very least has a very similar background. Many of them overwhelmingly worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And so we are seeing that sudden shift and change. And, you know, it might affect what those ultimate statistics are there just like

[Kara Swisher]

to sign the papers. Right. And to get them out. They're just sort of rubber stamping, as I know.

[Ximena Bustillo]

And there's a lot of pressure on the Board of Immigration Appeals and other parts of the Justice Department issue memos saying that judges are not doing enough, that they're not moving fast enough. And so, you know, there's no judgment cast on someone that comes in from the agency to work as an immigration judge. But then they're faced with a pressure to move quickly, quickly, quickly. And that is going to lead to mistakes. And I think that's something I believe Austan said earlier. But when you're moving mass violence volume at mass speed in a system that's already prone to mistakes, those mistakes just seem more likely.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay, Austin.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah, of course. Just want to say empirically, what we've seen is that the monthly asylum denial rate has increased all the way up to well over 80, 85%. Normally, just for context, it's between 45 and 60%. We've never in the history of immigration Courts seen asylum denial rates this high, and this is just those that actually, actually make it to their hearing. It doesn't even include people who are prevented from ever filing asylum claim in the first place. So we're seeing it in the data.

[Kara Swisher]

Right? That's a huge jump. That's an enormous jump. Now, you were quoted in AP's story about how reliable vetted immigration data is becoming a lot harder to get in general, talk about that, because that's critical. If we don't know what we don't know, we don't know. Right? That's the whole point.

[Austin Coker]

That's right. I think the most significant example I can point to is the fact that on day one, the Trump administration, administration stopped publishing monthly enforcement data that came out of what was called the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, a really incredible agency, very innovative, that published data for everyone. I mean, it's not a political story or a partisan story. It's, look, here's the data for what's going on with immigration enforcement. They stop releasing that data and what they started doing is bundling data talking points in a bunch of rhetoric that is either unverifiable or verifiably in a inaccurate, such as claiming that everyone they're going after and arresting and detaining are people with criminal records, which is just demonstrably untrue.

[Kara Swisher]

And when you think about what they're doing, one of the things that's interesting in the speed of what they're doing is you're starting to see sort of corruption questions happening. And obviously today NBC reported that Corey Lewandowski, one of the private prison people, are complaining about shakedowns, which is unusual. I mean, if these guys are complaining, you know, something's afoot essentially. Anybody have a comment on that?

[Ximena Bustillo]

This is.

[Kara Swisher]

What is the sort of implications of the GNOME residency in this job? Very performative, obviously corrupt versus now. What do they have to change? Because that is, I'm hearing from a lot of Republicans, the wasted money, the corruption, the self dealing and this. Obviously someone's got it out for Corey Lewandowski and deserving. So anybody talk about this?

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Yeah. One thing that we've seen the administration use is single source contracts. And the single source contracting has allowed them to essentially pick and choose who gets these contracts. This is sped up with the warehouses. They actually did an incredibly unusual process to integrate DHS's detention needs into a Navy procurement system, which lets them bypass normal federal contracting rules requiring competitive bidding. As a result, they have been spending this money more quickly than ever with less transparency and who is getting these contracts? In many cases, it's politically connected providers, some of whom have no experience in the field whatsoever, even at times above the big private prison giants.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah. And we're seeing that with how much they're spending on the warehouses, Kara. I mean, a lot of these warehouses were finding the. The most recent evaluation is a fractional number of what the government has actually paid for it. And when some folks.

[Kara Swisher]

They're overpaying. They're overpaying.

[Austin Coker]

They're dramatically overpaying.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. The Republicans are even complaining about it. So what happens if they don't open Ximena? They just sit there. What occurs?

[Ximena Bustillo]

I guess so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it sort of depends on what the contracts outlay there might be. Depending on how they're written, they might revert back. I honestly haven't parsed through the various contracts, but yeah, I mean, for the most part, they're probably in government contract until they're either used or they're not. I don't know if Erin or Austin has insight into specific facilities.

[Kara Swisher]

Will corruption be a big problem here in stopping it? Because certainly this reporting suddenly is gaining some steam. And I assume it's a way to kick them on their way out or set them up for prosecution later. But does that have a big. Because you're seeing a number of these stories come out now rather significantly.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah. I mean, I think the contracting at DHS writ large just across components like not just immigration, but also females. The plan, the planes, the Coast Guard. Like, there's just so many different components of DHS where contracting has come into question. And, you know, Senator Mullen was asked about that during his confirmation hearing, and he seemed open to actually rolling back the internal policy that the secretary has to sign everything above a certain amount, which was not only putting a lot on gnome's discretion, but also backlogging a lot of approvals or denials that could have come out of the agency. And so I think contracting kind of the individual, like who signs it, who approves it, that definitely seems to be a bit influx at the department.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, it really is. When the prison guys are complaining, there's a real problem because they're so corrupt. Last question. DHS is racing. Speaking of money to spend $200 billion it got from Congress, this number is staggering. In the one big beautiful bill act ahead of the midterms, the expectations that Democrats will try to claw back some of that money if they win back the House or put more limits on it, for sure. The detention system is already Stretched. But expanding will be key to meeting Trump's goal to deport a million people a year. What will that mean for migrants who bear the brunt of that pressure campaign to expand, especially if they're stopped in this case. What happens next? Because it looks like it's gonna be a big old stop sign. Ximena, then Austin, then Erin, please finish up. Where do you imagine this going, going forward?

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, I think the expansion is in full swing, and we'll have to see how this new leadership prioritizes whether it's prioritizing rapid removals versus detentions versus arrests. Those are all also completely different parts of that system. But in terms of might get caught in the crosshairs. We really have seen this Trump administration not just limit illegal migration, but also legal migration into the United States. And I think that's kind of the continued focus on next phase. Again, we're seeing more people in immigration detention that might normally not be there, not just because of the mandatory detention policy, but also because they are moving forward on different people with different visas, visa overstays, on delegalizing people, delegalizing individuals. The pullback of tps, which makes many thousands of more people more vulnerable to arrest and detention. We're seeing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals get caught up in this as well. And so I think that really expands the scope of who is going to

[Kara Swisher]

be impacted if they're allowed to do that. Austin?

[Austin Coker]

Yeah. So my biggest concern about what's coming next is we are at a moment where enough Americans are paying attention to the immigration system and there is now bipartisan frustration with how things are going. I would like to hope that that could push us towards actually making some much needed systemic changes to what our legal system looks like, to what the institutions look like who are enforcing the law. But my big concern is that some of these, the worst parts, the worst excesses of this system might get clawed back, let's say 5 or 10%. And then everything sort of falls out of the visibility. And all of the parts that have been broken for decades under Republicans and Democrats is going to keep functioning still at a punitive and dangerous level, but it won't get the attention that it really needs to implement real changes. So my hope, if the money is there, if the money is there. And so I just really want to see more people, more Americans, not just pay attention, but actually say, look, we really need Republicans and Democrats to come together and decide on, on some ways to fix this, at least fix parts of it.

[Kara Swisher]

Probably unlikely in the next three years.

[Austin Coker]

It's very challenging. Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

Finish up, Baron.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Yeah. I just want to say amen to what Austin just said. The last time we made any major changes to our legal immigration system was 35 years ago. And the last time we made any changes to the immigration enforcement system was 30 years ago. So we are operating in a 20th century system in a 21st century world. And the cracks have been showing for many years and everything the Trump administration done has just made that, that worse. So the admin has three and a half years now, or a little bit more than three years in order to finish their mass deportation campaign. They won't be able to. They're not going to deport everybody. But it's very clear that Stephen Miller is still in charge and wants to push for the highest numbers they possibly can. Yes.

[Kara Swisher]

We haven't mentioned him. Yeah, we haven't mentioned Voldemort yet, but go ahead, go right ahead.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

And his goal is a million deportations a year. I don't think they're gonna hit it, but they're going to try to spend every penny of that funding that they can in order to reach that goal. And that means more people caugh up in this rapid system, more people held in detention, more people subject to awful conditions, and more people who see what's happening and say, I can't take it anymore. I just want to give up. Even if I could have a chance to stay in this country because I don't want to spend another day in this hellhole.

[Kara Swisher]

Right. So how close do you think he will get to that? Hitting that number?

[Austin Coker]

I don't think he'll get there.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Yeah. Right now he's at about 400 to 500,000 people we think have been probably deported since he took office. Of those, some were migrants who had crossed the border before he even entered. That's not even half of what they wanna get for their million a year. By the time he leaves office, there will still be millions and millions of undocumented immigrants here. And that's why Congress really has to step in and do something something about this.

[Kara Swisher]

I actually have one last question. We haven't mentioned Stephen Miller, who's at the center of all this. It's easy to focus on Kristi Noem because she's such a performative clown. And Corey Lewandowski, who's of kind, clearly corrupt to the core. I'd love each of you to finish up by reflecting on Stephen Miller because I think a lot of the focus obviously is on Trump. Why don't you start Aaron, and then Austin and then Ximena.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Stephen Miller's impact can be felt the biggest by Los Angeles. The raid's Gregory Vivino. And we know this because in late May, Stephen Miller called together the heads of every 25 ICE field offices to a meeting in Washington, D.C. and berated them and said, stop focusing on public safety threats. Are slower, more targeted enforcement. I want you out there at Home Depot at 7:11, just. And in his words, quote, just go out there and get the illegal aliens. So that is the indiscriminate nature of the Miller enforcement. It is. It doesn't matter who we target. It doesn't matter how long they've been in the country. It doesn't matter. They have family here, they have jobs. They've never committed a crime. In his view, if they're undocumented, round them up, throw them in detention, get them out of the country. Who cares? And that is the legacy of this administration because he has been the one in control of immigration policy from day one.

[Kara Swisher]

Go ahead, Austin.

[Austin Coker]

Yeah, I mean, Stephen Miller is what happens when you give a monomaniacal narcissist access to a car with no brakes on it and you fill the car with gas and let them drive. This was a system that was broken when the Trump administration came in, before Stephen Miller stepped into the institutions that, that he now runs. But his understanding of the institutions, his relentless pursuit of deporting every adult and child and pregnant woman and disabled person in the country without any remorse or without any pause to either the law or the reactions from the American public, is a big part of what's driving this. And ironically, it's potentially so damaging to the Trump administration and the Republican Party itself, that has the potential to simply backfire entirely because we're seeing so many people, including Republicans, push back on this just over the top rhetoric and over the top enforcement. So he absolutely has been at the wheel. But we have to remember that this is what happens when Congress builds a broken car and hands it off to people in the White House.

[Kara Swisher]

Ultimately, Jimenez.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that Stephen Miller is the one that's driving the ship on a lot of these fronts. Right? Everything from the reduction in the federal workforce that resulted in the depleting of staff in these civil rights offices and these oversight offices at dhs, some of his broader thinking on why a mass deportation plan needs to happen to begin with. And so we don't see that, again, kind of thinking about moving forward. We don't really see that changing he continues to have a very clear pulse and influence on the staffing, on the direction of the policy. And these were questions that senators were asking Kristi Noem when she was first being confirmed is, you know, who is actually going to be setting the priorities, the rules, the regulations and moving the pieces. And so we'll have to see, you know, what that dynamic looks like with Mullen, but it will likely be fairly in line with the administration and their goals.

[Kara Swisher]

Is his influence waning, do you think? At some point? If they lose in the midterm, you

[Ximena Bustillo]

know, for now I don't really see that necessarily happening. I think it depends on how this upcoming few months go for them. This was a really rough start to the year for dhs. You know, one thing I do often point out is that, you know, we do talk a lot about Kristi Noem, but Stephen Miller also called Alex Preddy a domestic terrorist as well and other members of the of the Trump administration did. And the heat really came on Noem. And even though she acted the way that she had been, didn't really change her behavior. The administration saw that as the opportunity to a swap, at least in that component. And so I think that's indicative that, you know, there aren't necessarily major changes or reworks happening in other places of the administration. And as long as the more, you know, I don't want to say consumer faces facing, but voter facing side of the communication is more on lock and more controlled, I think that that has more to do with it than, you know, who's in the Oval Office having these conversations.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, it's still Stephen Miller. He will go down in history, I think, in a way that is not what he thinks it's going to be. Anyway, I really appreciate it. Ximena, Austin and Aaron, thank you so much for your time.

[Ximena Bustillo]

Thank you.

[Aaron Reichland Milnek]

Thank you for having us.

[Austin Coker]

Thanks, Kara.

[Kara Swisher]

Today's show was produced by Christian Castro, Roselle, Michelle Aloy, Kathryn Milsop, Megan Burney and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media, is executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Trackademics. Go Wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast network and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.