Reports emerged this week of the death of two more immigrants in the custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Emmanuel Damas, 56, a Haitian asylum seeker, reportedly died from an infection linked to a toothache that his family said went untreated for two weeks while Damas was incarcerated at the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona. Damas appears to be the tenth person to die…
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MINNEAPOLIS — Gabi has big brown eyes, pigtails, and a genetic condition that makes her bones brittle. They fracture easily, leaving the 2-year-old in such pain that her mother quit her job cleaning offices to stay home and cradle her in the one-bedroom apartment they share with six relatives. When federal immigration agents descended on their city, officers deported Gabi’s father and…
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President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he is removing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from her post and is seeking to replace her with Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma). The change comes as Noem has led a tumultuous campaign of federal raids on U.S. cities that has seen thousands of people deported and detained, and record high deaths tied to the nation’s immigration…
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The Trump administration is moving forward with its plan to convert former industrial warehouses around the US into massive immigration detention facilities capable of holding thousands of people at a time. In rural Western Maryland, near Hagerstown, the Department of Homeland Security purchased a giant warehouse for over $100 million and claims the retrofitted facility will hold upwards of 1,500 human beings. In this on-the-ground report filmed outside the Hagerstown warehouse, immigrant data expert Austin Kocher breaks down the chilling truth about ICE’s detention reengineering program.
Additional links/info:
Austin Kocher Substack, Facebook page, Bluesky page, and Instagram
Project Salt Box, Substack, “A 1,500-bed detention facility is coming to rural Maryland. We’re calling on ICE to account for what that means — and asking you to do the same”
Austin Kocher, Substack, “92% of ICE detention growth in FY 2026 driven by immigrants with no criminal convictions”
Marina Dunbar, The Guardian, “Ice director wants to run deportations like ‘Amazon Prime for human beings’”
PBS NewsHour, “ICE spending billions to turn warehouses into migrant detention facilities”
Credits:
Filmed by Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production by Maximillian Alvarez and Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Austin Kocher:
I’m Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University, and we are standing in front of the Hagerstown warehouse where ICE plans on holding upwards of 1700 people or more as part of its massive immigrant detention re-engineering program. The government has already spent over a hundred million dollars acquiring this facility and $30 million on design services to refigure the facility to hold human beings. The utilities are not at all equipped.