I’m on the ground in Hagerstown, Maryland, today with The Real News Network, where we came to look at what ICE is calling its detention reengineering program, the administration’s plan to convert former industrial warehouses into massive immigration detention facilities capable of holding thousands of people at a time.
The Hagerstown facility is one of the first in this planned national network. ICE purchased the building as part of a broader effort to build a hub-and-spoke detention system modeled explicitly on Amazon’s supply chain. At least eight buildings have already been acquired across the country, with a total projected price tag reportedly in the tens of billions of dollars. Whether this particular facility actually moves forward is still an open question. Bureaucratic hurdles remain but the government has already spent over $100M on the facility and I believe around $30M on a design contract.
The scale of what’s being planned here is hard to grasp until you’re standing next to it. It’s really massive. Communities near these facilities have raised concerns about infrastructure, emergency services, and what it means to have a federal detention facility of this size drop into their backyards. Some deals around the country have already fallen apart under local pressure.
To learn more about the detention reengineering program for a while now, listen to my recent conversation with Washington Post reporter Doug MacMillan, whose reporting has been essential to understanding both the scale and the conditions inside these facilities. Being here in person today was a chance to see what all of this actually looks like on the ground.