For Immediate Release Saturday, April 25, 2026 Nationwide — Today, over 200 actions, including in Hagerstown, Maryland, Atlanta, Georgia, Alexandria, Louisiana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, occurred across the country to denounce immigration detention expansion for the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention. The day of action is as a part of a coordinated nationwide mobilization against Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda organized by Disappeared In America, Detention Watch Network, Indivisible, MoveOn, Public Citizen, and Workers Circle.ICE is scouting, purchasing, and retrofitting warehouses nationwide for immigration detention, which are expected to detain between 1,500-10,000 people each. Jailing people in large-scale, makeshift detention warehouses will exponentially increase the likelihood for abuse and death in ICE custody, subjecting people to conditions that are meant for storing products, never people. Detention warehouses will also divert critical resources such as water and electricity away from local communities and could cut off tax revenue and foreclose economic opportunities.Last summer, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security a $170 billion dollar windfall to supersize its deportation and detention apparatus, enabling the purchasing of warehouses for detention. Despite the American people’s persistent demands that their elected leaders stop funding ICE, Members of Congress are now planning to use the reconciliation process to provide an additional three year’s worth of ICE and CBP’s budget on top of the money they already received through the reconciliation package. This would add up to approximately $85.5 billion more to the agency’s already astronomical budget. This funding is unfathomable and unnecessary.Communities across the country are courageously taking on ICE to fight detention warehouses from entering their community and winning in Utah, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Virginia, Mississippi, and more. People are uniting together, uplifting their shared values to welcome people and keep everyone safe, calling on businesses to take a stand, and demanding ICE out of their communities.National organizations who coordinated the day of action issued the following statements:Nanci Palacios, Organizing and Membership Director at Detention Watch Network, said: “Detention is deadly. People in immigration detention are describing it as ‘hell on earth’ because it is. What we’re seeing now is heightened cruelty under the Trump administration. People are not commodities to be shipped, discarded, and profited off of in detention warehouses or any detention facility — full stop. We demand an end to Trump’s cruel mass detention expansion and that detention facilities be shut down for good.”Leah Greenberg, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible, said: “Warehouse facilities are built for storing products, not people. Converting them into detention centers exposes our neighbors to unsafe, degrading, and inhumane conditions, harms surrounding communities, and locks states into long-term infrastructure without public input. Communities across the country are making it clear: they don’t want these atrocities and human rights abuses in their backyards. Leaders must cancel these warehouse conversions, reject any funding or permits that enable detention expansion, and ensure full transparency and real community consent before any project moves forward.”Lisa Gilbert, Co-President of Public Citizen, said: “Trump’s Big Ugly Bill opened the floodgates for ICE to spend excessive amounts of money, criminalize families, throw them into ungodly large warehouses in, oftentimes, unsafe or even deadly conditions, and militarize immigration enforcement with abandon. Even as the administration proposes a second ugly bill that could give as much as 140M in additional funds to ICE and CBP, people continue to suffer at the hands of the Trump administration’s menacing deportation agenda. The administration must free families from ICE detention now, and we must stop ICE from expanding its detention facilities. How can America claim ‘justice and liberty for all’ when we throw our neighbors into cages?”Ann Toback, CEO of the Workers Circle, said: "Silence in the face of ICE's mass detention center warehouse expansion plan is not an option for any of us. As an organization founded by Jewish immigrants fleeing European authoritarianism, we know this playbook all too well. But you don't have to be Jewish to see where this is headed. With a $100 billion budget that now exceeds the budgets of hundreds of nation-states around the world and a mandate to detain and deport people as if they are inventory — units to be warehoused, sorted, and removed as if they were Amazon packages— not human beings. We must stop this ICE warehouse scheme in its tracks.Todd Schulte, President, FWD.us, said: “In nearly 200 different events across the country in just one day, today community members, advocates, and leaders across the country are coming together to protest the harmful policies that are allowing ICE to purchase and use warehouses for immigrant detention. Just months ago, ICE and CBP were given a shocking $170 billion — yet just this week, the administration has proposed giving an additional $140 billion to ICE and CPB. This money will be used to terrorize our communities when instead we should be funding healthcare and making life more affordable for American families. In at least 10 states, communities have fought back and succeeded in stopping warehouse detention facilities from opening - from rural Georgia to Utah to Tennessee and Maryland. And the pushback has been across the ideological spectrum. We hope that trend continues as people across the country stand in solidarity to ask that elected leaders champion projects that bring investments in education, health care and housing that supports families, not harm them.”Katie Bethell, MoveOn Civic Action Executive Director said: “Communities are fed up with ICE’s brutality, chaos and terror. Across the country, everyday people are rising up against the Trump administration’s plans to cage tens of thousands of immigrant kids and families in their backyards. Backlash to ICE converting warehouses into massive detention centers has been swift, vocal, and growing. We will not stop protesting until contracts and expansion plans are cancelled. With gas prices skyrocketing, health care premiums exploding, and the cost of living growing exponentially unaffordable, we need elected leaders to invest in our communities, not in cages.”###Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.