With everything happening around Delaney Hall lately, including the protests, reporting, and growing public awareness around the human suffering happening inside detention facilities, I thought it was important to revisit and fully rewrite an article I originally wrote months ago about the expansion of ICE detention in the United States. A lot has happened since then, including new contracts, new reporting, new leadership connections, and even more evidence of how deeply profit and political power have become intertwined inside the detention system itself.I’ve also gained a lot of new followers since I first wrote about this, and I want people to understand clearly what mass detention expansion actually means in practice, who profits from it, how these systems sustain themselves, and why this conversation matters long after the headlines move on.The U.S. government authorized roughly $45 billion to expand ICE detention capacity through 2029, and I need people to understand what that actually means in practice because this was never just a symbolic budget line or “immigration policy” in the abstract. This is the federal government deliberately expanding the physical and logistical machinery of detention: more beds, more facilities reopening, more contracts being handed out, more transportation networks, more outsourced services, and more infrastructure built to hold human beings in cages for longer periods of time. When governments spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on detention capacity, they are not building empty systems. They are building systems meant to be filled.The companies positioned to profit the most from this expansion are CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two dominant private prison corporations that already operate a massive share of ICE detention. And yes, it matters that they are private corporations, because private detention is not funded by morality or restraint. It is funded by volume. It is funded by occupancy. It is funded by the ongoing supply of people the government chooses to arrest and warehouse. That is the business model.And this is where people need to follow the money all the way through. GEO Group, the private prison corporation that operates Delaney Hall, donated more than $1 million to Trump’s Super PAC and inauguration efforts. Since then, the company has been positioned to profit enormously from the administration’s detention expansion agenda. In 2026, former GEO Group executive David Venturella was selected to serve as acting ICE director after previously overseeing ICE detention contracts, raising additional concerns about the revolving door between private detention corporations and the government agencies responsible for immigration detention.That should alarm people, because once private detention corporations become financially intertwined with political power, the incentive structure becomes incredibly dangerous. The corporations funding the expansion of political power are the same corporations positioned to profit from the expansion of detention itself.At the same time, arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions surged dramatically during Trump’s return to office, undercutting the repeated narrative that this system is only targeting “the worst of the worst.” A detention system funded through tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, tied to private prison profits, and driven by aggressive arrest targets does not stay narrow for long. Systems built around quotas, occupancy, and long-term contracts require a constant flow of people to justify their expansion. That is the part Americans need to understand clearly: when detention becomes profitable, human beings stop being treated like human beings and start being treated like inventory.This is where the story stops being “politics” and becomes something much darker. Because the moment detention becomes a revenue model, human suffering becomes a predictable cost of doing business. The harm stops being incidental. It becomes structural. The system is no longer designed around care, dignity, or due process. It becomes designed around throughput: how many bodies can be processed, how quickly, and how cheaply.And now we need to talk about the numbers-driven machinery behind this, because the cruelty is never only the conditions inside detention. It is also the way people are pulled into it. The administration pushed arrest targets as high as 3,000 ICE arrests per day. Stephen Miller said it plainly at the time: the goal was a minimum of 3,000 every day, and they wanted to push it even higher.That is what a quota looks like, even if they wanted to avoid the word quota. And once you understand that, the rest becomes inevitable. A detention system funded through 2029 needs bodies to justify itself. A corporate detention system needs bodies to profit. A political system that measures “success” in arrests needs bodies to hit its targets. That is the collision point where policy becomes extraction. That is where power becomes predatory. That is where human beings become raw material.This funding fueled the reopening and expansion of detention sites and continues to sustain their operation, including facilities that had been idle and were later put back into service. That includes sites tied to family detention, which should make every person in this country feel a cold, familiar dread. Family detention does not “manage immigration.” It traumatizes children. It breaks people down psychologically. It takes families who have already been through unimaginable fear and destabilization and then cages them inside a system built to treat them like a problem to be contained.Now let’s talk about what this actually looks like for the people trapped inside it, because that is the part politicians always try to keep blurry. Detention means waking up under fluorescent lights that never fully shut off. It means sleeping in places where rest never feels safe. It means trying to stay healthy in environments where illness spreads quickly and basic hygiene is controlled by someone else. It means filing request forms for medical care and waiting while your body gets worse. It means being cut off from the people you love, cut off from real information, cut off from your own sense of time and control.It means the smallest needs becoming a negotiation and the biggest fears becoming daily life. It means people trying to advocate for themselves while being treated like they are guilty for existing. But I want to be even more direct than that, because the record is clear: this system does not just cause suffering in the abstract. It produces documented abuse. It produces documented neglect. It produces injury. It produces death.Congressional oversight documents stated that in 2025, at least fifty-three people died in ICE and CBP custody during Kristi Noem’s tenure overseeing DHS.This is not random. This is what happens when a detention system expands faster than medical care, oversight, accountability, and basic humanity. This is what happens when detention becomes the solution for everything. More people detained. More bodies packed into facilities. More stress, more illness, more neglect, more preventable deterioration, more people who do not make it out alive.And the conditions are not just “rough.” They are being described, credibly, as a pattern of human rights abuses that includes physical and sexual abuse, denial of medical care, overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions, inadequate food and water, exposure to extreme temperatures, denial of access to attorneys, and family separations.This is not the kind of thing you can explain away as a few bad actors. This is structural. This is what happens when a government builds a detention machine, hands it to contractors, and then measures the outcome by numbers instead of human lives.And then there is solitary confinement. People hear “solitary” and think of punishment in a prison movie. In reality, it is prolonged isolation that wrecks the mind and the body, especially for people already traumatized. Physicians for Human Rights documented that ICE subjected more than 10,500 people to solitary confinement over fourteen months, calling it a surging practice. That is not a rare emergency measure. That is a system using isolation at scale.So when I say detention is a weapon, I am not speaking poetically. I am speaking literally. This system injures people. This system breaks people. This system kills people. And it does it while Americans are told this is just “enforcement,” as if enforcement is supposed to require cages, medical neglect, sexual abuse, physical violence, and death.And when the system is private, the incentives get even more brutal. These companies are not paid to reduce suffering. They are paid to provide bed space. That means the goal is not “human outcomes.” The goal is “capacity.” The goal is “availability.” The goal is full beds and long contracts.One of these corporations projected that simply filling the beds it already had available could generate up to $600 million in additional annual revenue. That number is not just disgusting. It tells you exactly what’s happening here. Human confinement has been transformed into a business opportunity, and taxpayer money is being used to make it happen.This is profit meeting power, and we already know how that ends: when profit meets power, the powerless suffer first. They suffer quietly. They suffer off-camera. They suffer in places most Americans will never see, inside systems that are designed to make people invisible. And because the suffering is happening to migrants, the government assumes the public will tolerate it. That is the calculation. That is the gamble. That is the moral rot.This funding also expands the network around detention: the contractors that transport people, the vendors who supply services, the private infrastructure that keeps detention running like an assembly line. It becomes a detention supply chain where the cruelty is spread across so many entities that no one ever has to claim full responsibility. The system becomes unaccountable by design, because accountability is the enemy of growth.This is why conditions inside detention are so consistently horrific. It is not because a handful of people are “bad.” It is because the structure rewards harm. It rewards cutting corners. It rewards minimizing care. It rewards treating human beings like expenses. It rewards speed over dignity and volume over life.And I want to pause here for a moment, because I know what comes next when people read something like this. The feeling hits hard and immediate: what do we even do against a machine that big?We fight back in the ways people have always fought back against state violence. We get organized. We get louder. We stop letting the government build cages in our name with our money while we only react after the damage is already done. And we support the people already doing the dangerous, exhausting, deeply human work on the ground: documenting abuse, getting detainees legal support, pushing back on local contracts, and helping families survive systems designed to wear them down.Here are real, direct ways to fight back and the people already doing the work that you can support.Know your rights, then share them.The most basic protection is information. These resources are made to be shared quickly, especially when people are terrified and do not know what to do.Immigrant Defense Project — Know Your Rights with ICEhttps://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/know-your-rights-with-ice/Get raid-ready.ICE raids are not random isolated events. They are carried out through coordinated enforcement operations tied to surveillance, arrest targets, political pressure, and broader detention expansion strategies. Communities can still prepare, train, and build defense networks even when these operations are deliberately designed to create fear, confusion, and instability.Immigrant Defense Project — ICE Raids Toolkithttps://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/raids-toolkit/Support the National Immigration Detention Hotline.This matters because it connects people in detention to the outside world and helps track abuse. It is one of the clearest direct-action ways to help people trapped inside these systems.Freedom for Immigrants — National Immigration Detention Hotlinehttps://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/hotlineSupport the people fighting detention expansion itself.Detention does not shrink on its own. It shrinks when organized people fight contracts, fight construction, fight expansions, and fight normalization.Detention Watch Network — Take Actionhttps://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/take-actionSupport civil rights litigation and legal defense.These systems expand fastest when nobody is dragging them into court.ACLU — Immigrants’ Rightshttps://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rightsDonate, amplify, and show up locally.This fight is local whether we want it to be or not. Detention facilities operate in specific counties, with specific contracts, and specific local governments signing off on the harm. Look up who is organizing in your state. Support local immigrant-led coalitions. Show up at hearings. Help fund bail and legal support. Push your city and county to refuse cooperation and refuse contracts.And if you do nothing else, do not let this become invisible. Share this. Talk about it. Keep saying the words that power wants us to swallow and forget: this is mass detention expansion. This is a government deciding to spend billions to cage more people. This is profit being poured into private prison corporations. This is our money funding it.That is where we are. And if you are wondering why the treatment of detainees is so brutal, why medical neglect is so common, why abuse keeps surfacing, why people come out traumatized and sick and broken, the answer is sitting right here in the funding. A system built around detention quotas, private contracts, occupancy targets, and corporate profit is going to produce exactly the kind of conditions we keep seeing exposed over and over again. When the structure rewards volume over humanity, suffering stops being treated like a warning sign and starts being treated like operational fallout.You cannot build a humane system out of a profit model that depends on captivity. You cannot outsource human rights. You cannot put a price tag on suffering and call it governance. And that is why this conversation matters so much right now, especially as more people are finally paying attention to what is happening inside places like Delaney Hall and other detention facilities across the country. The suffering inside these systems is not accidental. It is connected directly to the incentives behind the system itself.This is what the expansion of ICE detention looks like when it is being done on purpose. It is a choice. It is a plan. It is funded. It is contracted. It is still being expanded and sustained in real time. And o