As the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency rapidly expands its carceral powers, immigrant detention centers around the United States have been facing relentless public scrutiny. It appears the pressure campaigns are finally having an impact as some centers are shutting down. While this doesn’t mean the Trump administration’s draconian anti-immigrant agenda is winding down anytime soon, it signals the importance of sustaining grassroots opposition.
The most significant closure—one that hasn’t garnered nearly enough media coverage—is Florida’s so-called Alligator Alcatraz. When it first opened in July 2025, the sprawling, hastily built complex located in the midst of South Florida’s Everglades became one of the ugliest symbols of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Only a year later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced it would be closed.
During its short lifespan, the center was notorious for its shockingly inhumane treatment of detained people, including torture and abuse. Republican Party officials, meanwhile, showed support for the center by selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, and Trump supporters were seen taking selfies before a large sign emblazoned with the prison’s nickname.
The detention center was named by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who boasted that the people being held there had “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,” and that the facility was cheap to run because it was surrounded by alligators and pythons. While the Trump administration has claimed it wants to remove people from the country in a way that will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs,” it turns out Alligator Alcatraz was a money sink.
DeSantis justified the center’s $1.2 billion price tag, saying it had served its purpose because 21,000 people had been detained there at various times over the past year before being deported. But, compared to the average cost of holding people in immigrant detention, Alligator Alcatraz was more than 20 times as expensive.
Trump’s project of rounding people up just because he can costs taxpayers massive amounts of money during a time when ordinary Americans are suffering financially and seeing essential service cuts. The US Government Accountability Office released a report in June 2026 stating that millions of dollars were wasted on operating ICE detention centers.
While the Florida center was likely shut down in response to an environmental lawsuit, other immigrant prisons are also under scrutiny across the country. The most high-profile fight is currently playing out in Newark, New Jersey, where Delaney Hall has been the focus of a protest by hundreds of detained people engaging in hunger and labor strikes on the inside and public pressure from activists and family members on the outside.
Just like state-run prisons where incarcerated people are forced to work under harsh circumstances for extremely low pay, conditions inside immigrant detention centers like Delaney Hall are documented as being tantamount to slave labor. Private companies like GEO Group, which runs Delaney, pocket the profits made through immigrant indentured labor.
“Delaney Hall and GEO Group [detention centers] generally are known for having really horrific conditions,” said Rachel Marandett, a detention attorney at the American Friends Service Committee’s New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program. Marandett cited severe medical neglect, in addition to inedible food and foul-tasting water, among the conditions that detained people are forced to endure. “They’re treated as if they’re less than human,” she said.
Such conditions are systemic. Across the US, people detained by ICE report widespread medical neglect, as per an investigation by KFF Health News and the Associated Press. Physicians for Human Rights released a new report concluding that in-custody deaths between January 20, 2025, and June 4, 2026, jumped dramatically to nearly four times the rate under the Biden administration. And, in what might be considered a de facto admission of routine violations of the law and people’s rights, immigrant prison contractors are seeking similar immunity from prosecution that police have long (undeservedly) enjoyed.
There is no legal requirement for the government to detain undocumented people who do not have a criminal record. Setting aside the fact that many immigrants are unlawfully detained—such as a Newark city employee named Rafael Rubio, who was arrested and detained for 158 days when he appeared at a routine interview as part of his asylum application. He was finally released after city officials mobilized to push for his release—the decision to imprison them is a discretionary one. “Instead of only detaining people that the government has some actual reason to argue are a flight risk or a danger, [ICE is] detaining everyone and just claiming that these interests apply to every single non-citizen,” said Marandett.
The cruelty appears to be the point. “We’re seeing a huge increase in people who are detained without criminal records, of people who are detained while they have ongoing cases where they’ve been appearing for every ICE check-in, for every court appearance,” added Marandett.
Between legal challenges based on zoning laws and environmental protections, public protests on the outside, and resistance from the inside, ICE is finding out firsthand the immense challenges of detaining a huge number of people in warehouses. Across the nation, strong public pressure against detention centers is bearing fruit. According to Cosecha, a New Jersey-based immigrant rights organization, a number of detained people have been released from Delaney Hall, “including pregnant people and 18-year-olds,” as a result of ongoing resistance. City officials have also filed a lawsuit to shut down Delaney.
After spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money buying 11 warehouses for detention, ICE is now reportedly selling seven of the structures in what The New York Times called “a major turnabout,” under the leadership of Homeland Security’s new head, Markwayne Mullin. According to the Times, Mullin “wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.”
Right-wing commentators credited public protest for the move to offload the warehouses. According to John Fabbricatore, a former Trump official, “the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks” to the expansion of immigrant detention, he told the Times. Detention Watch Network, a national coalition aimed at ending immigrant detention, says the development “is a direct result of community organizing.”
One reason why ICE seems to be downsizing its detention warehouses is that it has not been able to arrest and imprison as many people as it wants. The centers expanded faster than the agency’s arrest rates. But that may change in the wake of two recent earth-shattering decisions by the US Supreme Court. In back-to-back rulings on June 25, 2026, all six conservative justices supported the Trump administration’s decision to upend legal protections for asylum seekers trying to enter from the US-Mexico border. The second decision involved those living in the US for years under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who were stripped of these protections. This order will affect 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians and paves the way for the single “largest delegalization” in modern US history. Unless there is legislative restitution, hundreds of thousands of newly undocumented people could be subject to ICE detention and removal.
According to Marandett, who represents numerous people detained at Delaney Hall, “the ultimate goal and the ultimate demand absolutely is shutting down this really egregious carceral system.”
