Theme: deportation machinery
The apparatus of removal — its scale, its logic, its asymmetric efficiency.
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Tracking the Scale of ICE Detention's First Year
Federal data through March shows more than 450,000 people experienced ICE detention in the Trump administration's first fourteen months — a count that includes both new bookings and inter-facility transfers.
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Hanne Engan, Type 1 Diabetic, Detained
Hanne Engan, a Norwegian woman married to an American citizen, was detained at her green card appointment in San Diego; while in custody at Otay Mesa, the equipment and insulin she needs to manage her Type 1 diabetes were withheld, she was nearly killed multiple times, and after her release she discovered her credit-card information had been stolen while she was in detention.
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The Memo That Said What ICE Already Did
The legal memo ICE used for more than a year to justify courthouse arrests does not, on its face, grant that authority — a fact ICE's own counsel has now confirmed in writing to the Southern District of New York.
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Thirteen Thousand Sent Anywhere But Home
Thirteen thousand people have been removed under the third-country deportation framework — many under removal orders issued decades earlier that prior administrations would not have enforced this way.
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Twenty-Three Hours
Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, an Afghan father of six who had worked alongside the US military in Afghanistan and was applying for asylum, died less than twenty-four hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him outside his apartment in suburban Dallas.
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Seventy-Three Percent
Of people booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the start of the second Trump administration's enforcement push, seventy-three percent had no criminal conviction of any kind; eight percent had a conviction for a violent or property offense.
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The Procurement Officer's Former Employer
The federal official directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention procurement is a former GEO Group executive who, by ethics waiver, was permitted to award contracts to his prior employer — a company poised to receive tens of billions of dollars over four years through detention contracts often awarded without competitive bids.
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Eighteen Days for Being Latino
A 20-year-old lawfully present in the United States was arrested for being Latino and held for eighteen days in a Minnesota detention cell so cramped he couldn't sit down — an arrest the federal courts have since ruled unlawful.
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The Customer in Question
CoreCivic's CEO described Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a 'customer' on a 2025 earnings call; investors on the same calls expressed frustration that the agency's record detention numbers were not yet high enough. ICE revenues for the contractor more than doubled that year.
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One Hundred and Fifty Leases
WIRED reviewed federal records showing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has secretly negotiated more than 150 new office leases and expansions across nearly every U.S. state — many near schools, medical offices, and places of worship — with the General Services Administration explicitly asked to bypass usual procurement procedures and conceal listings under 'national security' pretext.
2026
2025
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Seventy Years, A Refugee Camp, Alligator Alcatraz
Paul Bojerski, seventy-nine, was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp after World War II and emigrated legally to the United States with his family in 1952; in July of 2025 he was detained at a routine ICE check-in and sent to the Everglades detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz on a decades-old removal order that had previously gone unenforced.
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Cash Bonuses for Locating Immigrants
An ICE procurement document reviewed by The Intercept solicits private contractors to locate immigrants in batches of ten thousand at a time, with monetary bonuses paid based on how many targets are successfully tracked down — the contractor model resembles a plan circulated earlier in the year by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.
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Operation in the Most Conservative Neighborhood
A Border Patrol operation seized people working in the front yard of a home in Edison Park, Chicago, transferred them in a parking lot in a neighboring suburb to a prisoner van, and was met by neighbors blowing whistles and shouting at the agents.