Chris Oliphant
Posted June 3, 2026
THIS ARTICLE TAKES a look at striking features of the immigration system historically with a view towards its latest phase during Trump’s second presidential administration, and how we might respond by building rapid response networks rooted in local community.
The article begins with a “Historical Background” section. If you’d like to read that later, you can skip to Part II, “A Lower Public Profile?”
I. Historical Background
The grim continuity of Trump’s immigration enforcement plans has been most apparent to those directly caught in the dragnet. But the “enforcement crisis” at the Mexico border is nothing new for U.S. political discourse. In fact it extends to, at least, the end of the exploitative Bracero Program and the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, at the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement.
The advancement of civil rights opened up immigration from non-European countries at the same time it introduced quotas for migrants from the Western Hemisphere. Barry Goldwater’s loss in the 1964 election provided a sense of relief at having escaped the deterioration of law and order his presidency was intended to bring about.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, however, carried through on Goldwater’s focus on crime, ushering in a new era of law enforcement. After Hart-Cellar passed, immigration-related apprehensions skyrocketed from 44,000 in 1964 to over a million in 1977 and the US-Mexico border would become a veritable political theatre.
Preference categories in Hart-Cellar determined that people required certain skills or education in order to be allowed to immigrate, implying a group of people deemed “unfit” for migration, undesirable because they have been criminalized or perceived as unproductive, including those with disabilities or illness and the working class and poor.
A heightened focus on crime in the 1960s pitted communities against each other, creating the conditions for Richard Nixon in 1968 to employ the “southern strategy,” a project to use post-civil rights tensions to call for war-on-drugs and tough-on-crime policies.
In 1969, Nixon would implement Operation Intercept, mandating border agents to stop and search all northbound vehicles from Mexico, furthering the idea that Mexicans were smuggling drugs and needed to be surveilled.
In the 1980s, the modern immigration detention system was born. The war on drugs and crime panics transformed the prison and jail system, leading to overcrowding. Mass immigration detention and mass deportation was to provide a solution: in the words of Dianne Feinstein, returning immigrants with criminal convictions to their home countries relieves U.S. taxpayers from underwriting the prison costs.
A Mass Immigration Emergency Plan drafted in 1983 by the Reagan administration would expand detention capacity, seeing detention as a tool for deterring “economic migrants” undeserving of relief.
The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) is sometimes remembered as an “amnesty bill” that would legalize undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. But it also included provisions for harsher immigration policy that would vindicate broader war-on-crime narratives that targeted Black and working-class migrants.
Passed at the height of the war on crime, the IRCA allows for “aliens” convicted of a crime to face deportation proceedings “as expeditiously as possible after the date of the conviction.”
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was also passed in 1986, leading to “alien felons” swept up in the drug war being deported and thereby freeing up of space in jails and prisons for native-born Black and Latinx youth to fill.
The Bill Clinton era is particularly important for the era of mass immigrant detention, at a time when Democrats and Republicans aligned on a number of issues like crime, immigration and the economy, while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and rollback on welfare deepened economic inequality.
After ratifying NAFTA in his first year in office, Clinton touted it as a tool to curb “illegal immigration.” The agreement in practice, however, spurred a major rise in Mexican migration to the United States (as Mexican farm jobs collapsed). The cumulative impacts created a displacement crisis. Between 1990 and 1999, a prison opened somewhere in rural America every 15 days.
In 1994, Propositions 184 and 187 were passed in California. These are the famous three-strikes-and-you’re-out law and the, perhaps less famous, stipulation of refusal of health care to undocumented migrants and their prevention from attending schools (much of it struck down as unconstitutional).
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of the same year came to be seen as the most extensive federal crime legislation ever passed. Joe Biden stayed true to his legacy by championing the bill in the Senate.
Two years later, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was passed. Combined, these measures codified the notion that poor and working-class people are not only disposable, but to be disposed of by a more robust prison system — with more funding, more police officers staffed to expand it, and an expanded federal death penalty.
The 1996 laws supersized the immigration enforcement system, setting the foundation for the expansion of the deportation machine that would emerge after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and also changing the paradigm on immigration to one that resulted in people who had established regular lives in the United States being fast-tracked to deportation overnight.
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) was a concerted Republican strategy to complement the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of the same year. While AEDPA incorporated anti-immigrant provisions into crime-related legislation, IIRAIRA required legal permanent residents to go through immigration proceedings while in Confinement, and creating the 287(g) program that gave local law enforcement the authority to enforce immigration laws.
These laws normalized mandatory detention and ensured the undocumented immigrant population would grow, doubling the average daily population in detention from 1995 to 1998. Efforts to “fix ’96” were set back by the events of 9/11.
The war on terror permeated all aspects of domestic law enforcement and resulted in deadly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 9/11, every aspect of immigration enforcement infrastructure expanded. The 9/11 attacks produced the political and institutional will necessary for following through with the pre-existing legal frameworks for immigrant exclusion.
The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System resulted in 13,000 Muslim men being put into deportation proceedings. Months after the attack, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee was founded to strengthen deportation operations and secure more bed space for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the US Marshals Service. It would expand local jails and contract with private prison companies to increase pretrial federal jail capacity.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2002 in the framework of the “USA PATRIOT Act.” It split INS into three separate categories: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The first 287(g) agreement was also formed in 2002, creating a formal partnership renting out local county jail bed space and allowing for sheriffs and county commissioners to play intermediary between federal government and private prison companies.
Operation Endgame, established in 2003 by ICE, had the mission of protecting national security by ensuring the deportation of people perceived to be a threat to it. Weeks after galvanized Latinx communities came together on May Day 2006 in the largest mobilizations for immigrants’ rights in U.S. history, ICE launched Operation Return to Sender, worksite raids that resulted in mass arrests.
The typical narrative about crime and immigration is about how the criminal legal system and immigration detention system should be disentangled. In fact, a brief historical examination points to how it is impossible to view the two systems separately.
All this information is discussed at greater length and in greater detail in Silky Shah’s important 2024 work, Unbuild Walls, available for free as an ebook.
II. A Lower Public Profile?
The average daily population of detained immigrants has increased from approximately 7000 in 1994, to 19,000 in 2001, and to over 50,000 in 2019. Currently, the immigration detention system holds roughly 60,000 people, with an estimated total capacity of 70,000. The number of people in immigration detention peaked in January this year at 70,766.
Since the Trump administration began, 400,000 people have been booked into ICE detention. All detention is harmful; people face medical neglect, overcrowding, terrible living conditions and constant transfers that disappear people from loved ones and their support systems.
Using $38.3 billion from the Big Ugly Bill, the Trump administration has vowed to increase detention capacity to more than 100,000. This is a fraction of the $170 billion in funding allocated to anti-immigrant enforcement in the catastrophic piece of legislation.
Another $30 billion in additional funding will go towards manpower; $47 billion is slated for more border walls; $16 billion for increased border security; $14 billion for state and local agencies to participate in immigration enforcement, and so on. This money presumably is necessary to follow through on seasoned ICE official Tom Homan’s recent threat that “mass deportations are coming.”
In many ways, this moment represents a grim continuity and relies on the police, in formal or informal modes of cooperation, to do the work of ICE. But it also might reflect a small and barely perceptible departure from past practices insofar as ICE, now more than ever, plays the role of the police using violent tools to regulate and order working people.
A higher profile and more violent immigration enforcement strategy is itself a means to overcome limited resources, similar to how criminalization or citizenship-status fast tracks individuals for deportation. The disciplinary and punitive policies extend to the broader working class, their purpose is to sow fear of state violence and bolster the confidence of capitalists in the short-term.
Silky Shah said in an interview about migrants in detention, “every detention center is either a former prison or jail or operated by a prison company. They are prisons and jails. That’s what they are. Detention is a misnomer.”
This interview is from February 2025, before any plan I’m aware of to remake the immigration detention system into “Amazon Prime with human beings,” according to ICE Director Todd Lyons.
The rapid expansion of immigration detention is now taking place through the conversion of idle warehouses into detention centers. However, as Silky makes explicit, the coordination of the jail and prison system with immigration detention continues.
If using existing prisons or jails for immigration detention is plan B in the specific case of the new plans for warehouse detention expansion, then it certainly was plan A in a previous case and continues to be standard practice.
How do we not become narrowly focused in organizing work where we find ourselves, needing to understand the historical background of the moment and the long road ahead?
III. The Immediate Situation
There are several important considerations locally to make, not least of which is the plans of DHS to convert a warehouse they bought in Romulus, Michigan for $34.7 million into a detention center while they expand administrative space in Southfield.
We should also consider the 287(g) agreement with police in Taylor (Detroit suburb) and how this results in more immigration enforcement, more detentions and more deportations.
We should understand that neither the Detroit Police Department nor the Romulus Police, nor the Michigan State Police, and so on, rely on any such formal partnership to work with ICE and Border Patrol — and that racial profiling is key to their work.
We should also amplify the demands of detained hunger strikers from North Lake in Baldwin, Michigan, to Adelanto Detention Center in California, to Delaney Hall Detention Center in New Jersey and many more, as courageous acts of collective resistance. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
Since September 2025, the federal government has expanded financial incentives for law enforcement agencies to formalize long-standing relationships with ICE, including reimbursing full salaries, benefits, and up to 25% overtime for 287(g) officers with added performance bonuses.
These deepening relationships have resulted in a 900% increase nationwide in formal agreements since the beginning of Trump’s second term. As the Immigrant Legal Resource Center implores us, “if you’re wondering whether your local police or sheriff’s departments work with ICE, the answer is yes. It’s always yes.”
INS Commissioner Doris Meissner made clear in 1997 that detention facilitates deportation, explaining to Congress: as capacity grows, detentions intensify. Punishment facilitates the act of deportation and coerces individuals to self-deport; Meissner explained that it is “labor intensive” to deport people who are not in detention.
Purchasing turnkey prisons or using local jail infrastructure through formal or informal agreements are two strategies for pursuing detention capacity necessary for mass deportation. The North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan — operated by the GEO Group, previously Wackenhut Corrections Corporation — was a former Bureau of Prisons facility converted in July 2025 into the largest midwest ICE detention center.
Because these facilities are existing prisons, there is much less political controversy with converting them to detention centers. Michigan state Attorney General Dana Nessel, in a lawsuit against DHS on behalf of the City of Romulus, poses existing prisons and jail facilities in Michigan, Ohio or Indiana — outside the Metro Detroit area with its 4.4 million residents — as preferable alternatives (ostensibly a plan B) to the Romulus warehouse detention center.
Not only is DHS intent on converting as many as possible of the 11 warehouse properties they purchased at inflated prices this year into detention centers, they will continue to expand their use of local jail and prison infrastructure to overcome limits to their operating capacity.
Our struggle is not limited to the Cogswell Street location of the Romulus warehouse, or any other specific iteration of harsh immigration enforcement. It is for migrant and racial justice.
IV. Building Resilience
The point here is not to overwhelm the reader into paralysis, but to meaningfully orient our movement’s limited capacity and energies towards long-term projects with a historically-grounded view for what a liberated, abolitionist future might entail.
It is the right wing that can count on the capitulation of their establishment opposition to their wildest fantasies of an enforcement crisis or crime panic. These establishment political actors try their best not to get in the way, even suggesting alternative strategies to make the work of ICE more effective.
In AG Nessel’s case against the DHS, the federal government now seeks to make a deal with the state outside the courtroom. This deal would mirror the one made in New Jersey which stipulates ICE will complete a final environmental assessment before proceeding with detention conversion work — despite failing to complete the review before advancing the purchase.
The federal government’s lackadaisical assignment of lawyers to the Michigan case shows how it sees such lawsuits as a mere boundary to be overcome, much as partnering with local law enforcement overcomes the federal gap in immigration enforcement manpower and detention capacity.
We live under adverse conditions, but the class struggle does not wait for us to catch up with it. With many more people becoming galvanized to build a more just world, we have the opportunity to broaden our networks. This means making up for lost time and lost opportunity.
While we build the movement against expanded capacity for detention and deportation, we should think about how to provide on-ramps to the moment at a variety of levels, in order to transform ruling-class struggles to maintain its power into multifarious resistance.
Rapid response trainings that advance knowledge about how the DHS operates, its historical existence, even its relationship to the underlying economic laws of motion that correspond to capitalism, can be the cause for the self-confidence that’s necessary to take more courageous steps in our workplaces and communities.
To stand together against authoritarian attacks on democratic rights we should build out these trainings, and the rapid response networks that follow, with politically engaged activity that is ongoing, inviting people to attend who are looking to become more involved with efforts to halt the plans of ICE or to work in mutual aid with their community.
Such networks have the capacity to extend beyond whichever administration is pulling the levers, or whichever specific levers are being pulled at any given time, and build toward long-term community resilience to handle anything thrown our way.
Chris Oliphant is a member of the Metro Detroit DSA International Solidarity Working Group, Tempest and Solidarity.
Leave a Reply