What makes this even starker is the contrast with Barack Obama, who already deported record numbers and still did not try to erect a parallel gulag system for immigrants. His administration leaned on removals and existing facilities, and despite serious criticism from advocates, it still operated within something recognizably like due process adjudicated in immigration courts. trump’s second term has gone the opposite direction, ripping legal status from over a million people while flooding ICE with money and 10,000 plus new personnel under Homan’s watch to hunt, detain, and disappear migrants at scale.

So why this sprawling new detention empire, if not to give a hyper politicized agency a place to warehouse bodies on demand under a loyal enforcer who boasts he will “get the hell out of the way” of mass arrests. The administration is already targeting “sanctuary” cities and dissenting local officials, blurring the line between immigration policing and political muscle, while private prison giants like GEO Group line up contracts to run this shadow infrastructure. With masked ICE tactical teams in major metros, Homan openly talking about family detention and mass sweeps, and a detention budget bigger than the entire federal prison system, it is not paranoid to see these centers as multipurpose tools of intimidation in trump’s broader war on opposition and on the idea that migrants have rights at all.