Trump Is Weaponizing America’s Depraved and Bipartisan Immigration Policies

Most notoriously, the Bush administration scaled up capacity after 9/11 and framed immigration control as a national security issue. This approach gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003 and brought immigration enforcement into close coordination with counterterrorism operations. New programs like Operation Endgame set explicit deportation quotas, while increased funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed for the construction and contracting of new detention centers, many of which are run by private prisons corporations eager to profit off the post-9/11 security boom.

Barack Obama would go on to deepen the system’s reach with programs like “Secure Communities,” which integrated local policing with immigration databases and drove deportations to record highs. Launched nationally in 2008, the “Secure Communities” program demanded the automatic running of fingerprints for anyone booked into a local jail through federal immigration databases, effectively turning police encounters into immigration checks, resulting in the ensnaring of hundreds of thousands of undocumented people and sending them hurtling into the deportation pipeline. By 2012, “Secure Communities” became a cornerstone of federal immigration enforcement, helping drive deportations to record highs: a startling 400,000 people per year, which is a level unmatched since. In 2016, the Obama administration announced it would phase out the Department of Justice’s use of private prisons for criminal incarceration, but the policy notably excluded immigration detention centers, which operate under the DHS. This deliberate carve-out ensured that private contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic continued to dominate the immigration detention market. In fact, these companies’ revenues from ICE contracts surged during the Obama years, buoyed by long-term agreements that guaranteed minimum occupancy rates. 

Despite campaigning on promises to end federal contracts with private immigration detention facilities, Joe Biden would go on to largely preserve and, in some instances, expand them. While his administration allowed a handful of individual contracts to expire, the Biden administration quietly renewed or signed on to new agreements with private operators to maintain and even increase detention capacity. By mid-2023, roughly 90 percent of ICE detainees were being held in privately operated facilities, leaving intact the same profit-driven infrastructure that fueled the current mass detention system. Biden not only kept Title 42 expulsions in place for over a year, he expanded fast-tracked deportations and ramped up surveillance of migrant communities. Children were continuously held captive in “emergency influx” facilities, and new family detention schemes were greenlit, marking a quiet normalization of the tactics that many liberals had spent years performatively denouncing. Predictively, far from dismantling this apparatus, the incumbent administration would further entrench this detention and deportation project by lobbying for harsher policies and further insulating themselves from any public oversight. 

The Trump administration has taken this detention infrastructure and weaponized it to a degree unseen in decades, most recently with “Alligator Alcatraz.” Constructed in the everglades of southern Florida, the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center has become the site of egregious human rights violations that many legal experts and health professionals now characterize as war crimes. Erected in July 2025 in record time on an isolated airstrip surrounded by alligator-infested wetlands, the facility confines migrants in chain-link tents under brutal 24/7 surveillance. Captives report being denied prescription medication and showers, are fed worm-infested foods, and see fecal flooding around sleeping areas, among many other indignities.

Legal advocates working with those inside say their client’s bond hearings have been denied, phone access is restricted, and legal visits are delayed or blocked, in clear violation of every standard of due process. Immigration advocates and medical experts warn that the detention facility resembles an internment camp, and “a public health experiment gone horribly wrong,” with multiple hospitalizations documented amidst extreme psychological trauma and physical neglect. With deportations proceeding inside the camp under duress and without legal counsel, rights observers argue that the facility’s design and systemic abuse amount to state-sanctioned crimes against humanity.

Sarah Decker, US staff attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, argues that the United States government is operating the world’s largest immigrant incarceration regime, “caging immigrants, asylum seekers, and longtime community members in conditions that are designed to break them,” and she has urged the United Nations to denounce these human rights abuses. Under Donald Trump, the same infrastructure emerges as the latest mutation of a barbaric system that has been stripped of even the pretense of legality. Each administration, no matter how vociferously liberal establishment figures claim otherwise, has maintained and expanded the scope of violent immigration enforcement, and “Alligator Alcatraz” is simply the latest and most grotesque expression of the system to date. The thin veil of respectability and political justifications that masked some of the darkest chapters of this nation’s immigration policing has been stripped away, and what remains is the naked cruelty of the state, on full display.