The Trump administration’s immigrant detention plan is pure evil | Opinion

California City is the site of one of the several hundred jails, military bases and other places across the country where immigrants are held awaiting deportation. It is the largest such detention facility in California.

Since its opening early last year, the detention center — which is operated by the company CoreCivic via a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — has become one of the most notorious facilities.

In November, detainees held in California City brought a class action lawsuit alleging, among other things, that the staff there “routinely engage in abusive behavior and unreasonable use of force.” It also alleges that people “are routinely subjected to solitary confinement for conduct that should not be punished at all.”

On Dec. 19, California Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote a letter to the Trump Administration detailing “dangerous and inadequate living conditions” endured by detainees. If even half of what he says is true, it should be intolerable. We should have learned from the horrors of slavery and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II that treating humans in an inhumane way leaves an indelible stain on our history.

And, unless something is done quickly to address the situation, things in immigration detention are going to get worse.

Trump’s inhumane plan

Late last month, The Washington Post ran a story about a Trump Administration immigrant detention plan so cruel that it could have been ripped from the pages of the Marquis de Sade’s playbook for sadism. The plan is to dramatically expand the number of facilities in which immigrants can be warehoused by using actual warehouses to hold them.

The administration hopes to utilize these facilities to expedite the movement of individuals from the moment they are picked up by ICE agents to the moment they are deported.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons told The Post. The article also states that the goal of the administration is “to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages.”

“Like Prime, but with human beings,” Lyons said.

Human beings treated like packages?

We must say, “not in the United States.” It is time for Congress to hold hearings to shed light on the cruelty currently happening in these facilities and halt the administration’s warehouse plan.

As The Post notes, “Such structures are designed for storage and shipping, not human habitation ... (for) thousands of full-time residents.”

Lawless places

It is already clear that existing ICE detention facilities across the country are lawless places not fit for human habitation. The immigrants who are housed there are being subject to dreadful conditions of confinement.

Remember Alligator Alcatraz? PBS reminds us that “President Donald Trump toured (the Everglades Detention Facility) in July and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide.”

A few months after that well-publicized tour, Alligator Alcatraz has become a nightmare for people who are sent there. Amnesty International notes that they “are living in inhuman and unsanitary conditions ... (M)edical care is inconsistent, inadequate or denied all together.” Moreover, people held there are “always shackled when they were outside their cage.”

Meanwhile, the ICE facility at Fort Bliss, Texas — the largest such facility in the country — “is a massive tent camp … located in the middle of the desert on a military base.”

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to ICE and to relevant Congressional Committees about Fort Bliss alleging that “detained immigrants are held for weeks at a time ... in cramped, squalid soft-sided tents with 72 people per unit, where toilets and showers flood eating areas with raw sewage.

“As immigrants detained at Ft. Bliss report, officers have beaten detainees and used threats of violence, criminal charges and imprisonment in attempts to coerce people held at Ft. Bliss to leave the United States and cross the border into Mexico.”

We can’t expect the courts to stop such treatment because prior judicial decisions suggest that detainees have less legal protection than prisoners. Because their detention is not regarded as punitive, it is not covered by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

But as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held more than 20 years ago: “(A civil) detainee is entitled to ‘more considerate treatment’ than his criminally-detained counterparts.“ And, according to the court, a civil detainee should not be “confined in conditions identical to, similar to or more restrictive than those in which criminal counterparts are held.”

Today, I am not confident that today’s Supreme Court would apply such a principle to people in Trump’s immigration detention gulag. That is why it is up to the American people and Congress to reject what the administration is doing in California City, Alligator Alcatraz, Fort Bliss and other detention centers.

Humans, whatever their immigration status, should never be treated as “packages.”

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.

This story was originally published January 7, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The Trump administration’s immigrant detention plan is pure evil | Opinion."