Congress has approved $45 billion to expand immigrant detention over the next four years. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has stripped away oversight measures and provided limited details on how they plan to address chronic issues that led to past problems at these facilities, including understaffing in remote areas.Get Starting PointA guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.Enter EmailThe troubled facilities were closed during the Biden administration after serious incidents, and in some cases, years of recurring problems.At the sprawling Reeves County prison in West Texas, which could hold more than 4,000 people, inmates rioted to protest poor medical care, food, and the use of solitary confinement, causing $20 million in damage.A Senate investigation found that a physician affiliated with the 1,000-bed Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia appeared to have performed “excessive, invasive and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” on dozens of women detained between 2017 and 2020.And at a prison in Leavenworth, Kan., with capacity for about 1,000 inmates, understaffing led to such a level of violence and chaos that one federal judge characterized the facility as “an absolute hell hole.”“The facilities that have been closed in prior administrations were closed for good reason, generally after a lot of thought and negotiation and consideration,” said Deborah Fleischaker, former acting ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden. “And to reopen those without really, really clear mitigation plans and oversight and staffing models is just a recipe for more harm to detainees.”Reeves was overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Irwin by ICE, and Leavenworth by the US Marshals Service. Representatives for the private companies that operate the Reeves and Irwin detention facilities - Geo Group and LaSalle Corrections, respectively - did not respond to requests for comment.Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the owner of the Leavenworth facility, said in an email that the company meets or exceeds government standards at all its 42 correctional and detention facilities across the country. He said that the Kansas prison faced security challenges related to understaffing during a short period of its 30 years in operation, and that the company has seen a positive response from job seekers as it lays plans to reopen the facility.Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement that ICE detention centers abide by higher standards than most prisons. She also said that the internal planning document is still subject to changes, and the agency may ultimately decide against issuing certain contracts. DHS noted that funds for staff that would be responsible for medical and detention standards compliance were included in Congress’s spending bill.The Trump administration said in March that it was closing two watchdog agencies that oversaw detention centers and investigated detainee complaints. DHS reversed course, but lawyers for immigrants and nonprofit advocacy groups assert that deteriorating conditions at some locations are festering unchecked. A federal judge in New York ruled last month that ICE needed to improve conditions at a Lower Manhattan immigration holding facility, where detainees claimed they were held without beds, showers, or medical support and received only two small meals a day.Unlike criminal detention, immigration detention is not meant to be punitive. A Supreme Court ruling and ICE’s website state that those facing civil violations should not be held as a form of punishment; rather, detention for immigration offenses is meant to ensure people show up for proceedings.Detainees at some facilities are housed in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds and limited access to a recreational area at certain times during the day. But Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, says detainees are increasingly being locked in cells with little access to bare necessities.“Punitive conditions can take place in a number of ways,” Cho said, including “deprivation of medical care, deprivation of access to counsel; abuse of force; severe overcrowding.”Many of the facilities that ICE plans to reopen are in remote, rural areas where, historically, few people have been willing to work a difficult job that requires frequent overtime shifts. Many state and local prisons are already experiencing a staffing crisis, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches private prisons as a senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, a nonpartisan law and policy organization affiliated with New York University’s law school.Nearly 90 percent of ICE detainees are held in facilities run by contract companies in the private sector. These firms shifted away from holding people in federal prisons over the past decade after Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden ordered the Bureau of Prisons to phase out contracts with privately run prisons, citing federal research showing such facilities were more likely to have security problems and do not substantially save taxpayers money.Trump has reversed these policies, but federal prison contracts have continued to wind down and private prison companies now own many empty facilities. This year, ICE started working with contractors to convert a few of these prisons into immigrant detention centers, including in Michigan and Tennessee, and plans to issue many more contracts in the coming months.The Irwin County Detention Center is in the tiny town of Ocilla, Ga., which is more than 100 miles from the nearest major city and has a population smaller than some high schools. In 2020, former Irwin detainees complained that they’d undergone nonconsensual and unnecessary gynecological procedures by an outside doctor that Irwin’s medical staff had referred them to.Sarah Owings, a Georgia-based immigration attorney who represented some of the women alleging mistreatment, said the facility’s location “in the middle of nowhere” likely constrained its ability to hire qualified medical staff, as well as the failure of authorities to see what was happening to the women there.“There’s no oversight,” she said. “When you combine that with the absolute powerlessness of the people you are talking about detaining, that makes it possible for bad things to happen in the dark.”Studies have shown numerous deficiencies in the health care that ICE and its contractors typically provide detainees, from ineffective mental health screenings to improper surgical procedures. One report last year by the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights found that over 95 percent of the deaths that occurred in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021 could have been prevented.A bipartisan Senate report in 2022 found that ICE failed to end a years-long pattern of what medical experts described as “aggressive and unethical” treatment by a single doctor working with Irwin’s detainees.With the reopening of these facilities, some people who live near them see the problems of the past as reason to worry about what happens next.A group of residents in Leavenworth has come together to oppose the planned reopening of the local prison as an ICE facility, writing newspaper editorials, putting up yard signs and staging protests. They contend that the facility’s owner, CoreCivic, presided over an era in which the prison failed to keep its guards and inmates safe.A judge in Kansas issued a temporary injunction this summer blocking CoreCivic from reopening the facility without a local permit or sign-off from a court. CoreCivic is appealing that decision.