This story is part of “Trump Two: Six Months In,” our series taking stock of the administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and criminal justice.
Over the last six months, Rodney Taylor has watched the Trump administration’s explosion in immigration enforcement from a detention cell in rural Georgia.
Taylor, a 47-year-old who had both of his legs amputated as a child, came to the United States from Liberia when he was 2 years old for medical care. In January, he was arrested and detained at Stewart Detention Center, where he has witnessed the facility become more crowded, and conditions get worse. Without enough beds, he said, men slept in common areas. Without access to enough toilets, he said they defecated in the showers. He says he has lost weight, because he can’t get enough nutritious food.
In a statement, Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private company that runs Stewart, denied that detainees had to defecate in showers and said they are provided with three nutritious meals a day.
Across the country, civil rights attorneys and detained immigrants report similarly dire conditions, as the number of people in immigrant detention has skyrocketed since President Donald Trump took office, reaching a historic high point. Statistics released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in late July showed the agency holding nearly 57,000 people, a 45% increase since Trump’s inauguration.
This rapid growth means the Trump administration must quickly find places to put people. The U.S. has a gargantuan network of prisons and jails, and in the last six months, that infrastructure, built for the criminal system, has been redeployed to accomplish Trump’s immigration goals.
In some cases, that has meant repurposing empty beds or reopening facilities that were shuttered during recent criminal justice reforms. And now the administration plans to make the detention infrastructure even bigger. In July, Trump signed into law his tax cut and policy bill, or what he dubbed his “big beautiful bill,” which allocated an additional $45 billion for immigration detention centers. If spent evenly until the funds expire in about four years, this would add more than twice what ICE spends on detention each year, all but guaranteeing detention capacity will continue to grow.
Source: How Trump Used the Criminal System to Massively Expand Immigration Detention
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