Two weeks into January, the director of a St. Paul child care center called a family to ask why their daughter had been absent on-and-off since late last year. “We reached out to just see, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Is your child sick?’” said Angela Clair, whose child care center serves more than 70 children. The girl’s mother answered the phone. “ICE is in our neighborhood every…
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Elite consensus over the past year is that “defund” and “abolish” language from immigrant and Black Lives Matter activists of the late 2010s and early 2020s was a primary contributor to Harris’ 2024 loss to Trump. Despite this conventional wisdom lacking things like evidence, good-faith analysis, or empirical basis, it has quickly been cemented into the conventional wisdom of the Beltway and the media. The narrative, somewhat awkwardly, requires acting as if we jumped directly from 2017 to 2023, and requires ignoring that at the height of “abolish ICE,” Democrats over-performed in the 2018 primaries. And, at the height of “defund the police” rhetoric, Biden used the wave of George Floyd activism to help him capture the White House in 2020. But the story—and make no mistake, it’s simply a story—fit neatly into a left-punching, elite-serving narrative: Harris was bogged down not by a clearly sunsetting Biden clinging to power, not by veering to the center and thus depressing progressive energy, not by her continued support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but some vague brand association that swing voters had with Harris and anti-police and anti-ICE language in the preceding years.
This elite consensus has been, in large part, pushed out by billionaire-backed groups like Searchlight Institute, Third Way, Blue Rose’s David Shor and other influential liberal pundits. It is in this context one must examine this latest PR effort by center-left media and their allies in law enforcement to contain the populist anger over DHS abuses and their attempt to frame said abuse as an anomaly, a one-off deviation from a narrative of progress and reform after the mass
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 02, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
In the wake of immigration agents’ killings of three US citizens within a matter of weeks, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly moving forward with a plan to expand its capacity for mass detention by using a military contract to create what Pablo Manríquez, the author of the immigration news site Migrant Insider calls “a nationwide ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps.”
On Sunday, Manríquez reported that “a massive Navy contract vehicle, once valued at $10 billion, has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda.”
It is the expansion of a contract first reported on in October by CNN, which found that DHS was “funneling $10 billion through the Navy to help facilitate the construction of a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US in an arrangement aimed at getting the centers built faster, according to sources and federal contracting documents.”
SCOOP: A repurposed Navy contract to funnel tens of billions to ICE for a nationwide “ghost network” of concentration camps—just got a lot bigger. https://t.co/yvzszpD8t2— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) February 2, 2026
The report describes the money as being allocated for “new detention centers,” which “are likely to be primarily soft-sided tents and may or may not be built on existing Navy installations, according to the sources familiar with the initiative. DHS has often leaned on soft-sided facilities to manage influxes of migrants.”
According to a source familiar with the project, “the goal is for the facilities to house as many as 10,000 people each, and are expected to be built in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas.”
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Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was already facing scrutiny as temperatures plunged and winter storms rolled across much of the United States at the end of January. The expansive winter storms came just after immigration officers ultimately under her command killed two people in Minnesota. The killings heightened public anger against Immigration and Customs…
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Period products like pads and tampons are considered an essential public health need, but access for women and trans people held in federal custody — from prisons to immigration detention centers — remains inconsistent. While specific figures for women held in immigration detention have not been reported for President Donald Trump’s second term, the detention population broadly reached record…
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Senate and House minority leaders Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) subtly weakened their already tepid demands for ICE reforms in a press conference on Wednesday — before negotiations with Republicans even started. In a press conference about the Democrats’ demands, the two leaders reiterated their belief that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other…
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