Federal prisons to house ICE detainees as Trump furthers immigration crackdown

The federal Bureau of Prisons is accepting into their facilities thousands of immigrants detained by the Homeland Security Department, a highly unusual move that raises significant legal and logistical questions.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees have begun arriving or will soon do so at least at federal prisons in Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Leavenworth, Kansas and Berlin, New Hampshire, according to BOP employees briefed on the plans. The move comes as President Trump looks to fulfill his promise to end the release of detained migrants and conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. 

The individuals will be held in federal prisons so the bureau can “continue to support our law enforcement partners to fulfill the administration’s policy objectives,” said Scott Taylor, an agency spokesman. 

The Bureau of Prisons, a division of the Justice Department, typically only houses inmates charged with crimes and awaiting trial or those already sentenced for criminal violations. Detained immigrants, meanwhile, are involved only in civil proceedings. The Trump administration briefly held ICE detainees in federal prisons in 2018, but stopped doing so after the American Civil Liberties Union's victories in court forced the bureau to give the immigrants in custody access to counsel and outside communications.

Bureau employees questioned the morality and legality of their new responsibilities and said their prior experience housing detainees in Trump’s first term was a “disaster.” 

“Our mandate is federal pretrial or sentenced inmates,” said a Miami-based corrections officer whose facility received around 120 detainees this week and is expecting as many as 500. “What legal jurisdiction do I have with someone [detained by] ICE?” 

A California-based employee said there is a “huge difference” between caring for a detainee and a convicted felon. 

“I don’t think we are equipped with the right tools to house detainees,” the employee said. “These people have not been charged with a crime and haven’t been convicted yet we hold them in a prison with extremely restrictive conditions.” He added he did not think detainees would be able to use his facility’s phone systems as they are currently set up. 

The Trump administration has so far arrested more than 8,000 undocumented immigrants since taking office, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday, while noting 461 have since been released. She cited a lack of detention space as one reason for the releases and said the White House has implored Congress to provide more resources to up that capacity. 

Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, said the new policy raises a series of concerns. 

“Placing people in bureau facilities begins to blur the line,” between civil and criminal detention, Cho said. Federal prisons, she added, are not typically equipped with what must be provided to individuals in immigrant detention facilities. 

Cho noted the government holds significant discretion in which immigrants should be detained, but federal law specifies it should only do so when it limits dangers to the community or flight risks. She accused the Trump administration of tapping into the federal prisons system “for show,” suggesting it serves no real purpose and wastes taxpayer dollars. 

“What we’re seeing is the government is greatly expanding the number of people who are being detained without exercising its discretion purely in service of a larger political agenda of terror and fear,” Cho said. 

Justice has separately authorized BOP employees to engage in immigration enforcement and arrest activities, but they must first go through specific training for those tasks. To house the detainees, bureau employees said, they are not being provided any training. It created questions as to whether BOP policies would be applied to detainees, what rights the detainees hold and if more staffing and overtime would be required, they added. 

For now, the Miami-based officer said, his facility has space for the first batch of detainees, though the staff already have their plates full. 

“We have enough stuff going on with the inmates we have,” the employee said. “We can deal with it but is that really our mission to deal with immigration issues?”