SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
From now through the November elections, NPR's reporters are bringing us the immigration briefing - a weekly look at the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
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SIMON: This week, we focus on the expansion of detention centers managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. NPR's immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd joins us now. Jasmine, thanks so much for being with us.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: Hi.
SIMON: This week, you reported on ICE's huge expansion of its detention system. How's that going?
GARSD: Yeah. So right now, ICE is the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the U.S., and that's because they got $75 billion in additional funding last year. Now, listeners might remember that earlier this year, they started buying a bunch of warehouses to reconvert into detention centers, and they faced a ton of backlash for that. Now let's fast-forward to today. The government is selling most of those warehouses, but ICE is also detaining record numbers of people. They arrested about 100,000 people in July and August alone, according to DHS. And in order to house all those people, they need detention centers.
So I'm going to play you a clip from the August earnings call for GEO Group, which is the private prison company - one of the main ones that ICE works with. This is CEO George Zoley. He's speaking to an investor.
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GEORGE ZOLEY: They're at a - presently about 68,000. So they have another 30,000 or so more beds to go.
GARSD: And so what you're hearing there is this push for expansion. We use documents attained by Project Salt Box, which is a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the expansion of ICE's power. And they show that Homeland Security signed construction contracts worth over $7 billion just this week to expand immigration detention in several states - New York, Texas, California. ICE also announced it's going to be expanding in Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania.
SIMON: And while you were reporting on this expansion, you found out that ICE is looking into mobile detention facilities. What are those?
GARSD: Right. So buried in all this paperwork about the expansion is a page about Pennsylvania in which ICE says it's looking to create something called mobile detention facilities. And what they describe is, like, a network of vans that would follow agents into the field as they're making arrests. Here's Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Very conspicuously missing from this description was - what are the standards for how long a person can be kept in a van? How are people using the bathroom? How are they feeding them?
GARSD: And we reached out to ICE multiple times, and we did not get a response.
SIMON: And do we know why Pennsylvania?
GARSD: We think that it's because Pennsylvania is such a huge state in which a lot of police departments don't cooperate with ICE, so they can't hold detainees for the agency. But, Scott, I think there's a bigger picture here, which is, you know, how vast and sweeping these immigration rates are that they would require a mobile detention unit. These aren't targeted operations in which ICE is going after someone with a criminal record, and the detention statistics show that. Right now, you have around 65,000 people in ICE detention, and around 70% of them have no criminal conviction.
SIMON: And while we're speaking of detentions, there has been a lot of concern in recent days, in particular, over excessive and even deadly use of force during ICE arrests and at detention centers.
GARSD: Yes. So this week in Austin, Texas, a man named Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28 years old, was shot. He's part of a long list of civilians who've been shot by ICE agents. And there's been so much talk in the last year or so about agents wearing body cameras. Several states require that police wear body cameras. And, you know, ICE received $20 million for body cameras, and they themselves have said they have enough body cameras to put on all of their agents. And yet the shooting of Garces Perez - once again, we saw that the agent was not wearing one. And this keeps happening.
Now, when it comes to detention, we are now at an unprecedented number of deaths in immigration detention centers - 58 deaths since Trump took office. And that's according to Homeland Security's own count.
SIMON: NPR's Jasmine Garsd. Thanks so much.
GARSD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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