Utopia Talk / Politics / ICE: the best is yet to come!

Average Ameriacn rank	Tue Feb 10 16:47:38 https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/2020917424996925777 ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little to no real oversight. Right now Rikers Island, the physically largest jail in the entire United States, is holding under 7,000 people. ICE's warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation. The largest federal prison in the nation is Fort Dix, which has a rated capacity of 4,600 people. The largest of these warehouse camps may hold more than twice that number of people. The federal government hasn't operated a prison camp that large since Japanese Internment. The closest modern historical parallel is the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay for intercepted Cubans and Haitians during the HW Bush and Clinton administrations, where at maximum capacity roughly 12,000 migrants were detained. But those migrants were never in the physical US. Purchasing and converting these warehouse detention camps will cost the U.S. government billions of dollars. So far ICE has purchased at least half a dozen warehouses at a cost of $70-$110 million each. It'll cost billions more to refit them into detention camps, and hire staff. In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in: - Hagerstown, MD: $102 million - Surprise, AZ: $70 million - Hamburg, PA: $87 million - Tremont, PA: $120 million - San Antonio, TX: $82 million - El Paso, TX: $123 million - Social Circle, GA: price unknown This is unprecedented. Crucially, many local governments are furious with ICE over these purchases, because they were not consulted or even told. Because they are federal property now, it's taking a commercial property off the tax rolls while likely imposing dramatic additional infrastructure costs. In each case, it's been a standard sale of a commercial warehouse property owned by a private landlord to the federal government. The real profit will come with the private prison companies and contractors hired to refurbish and staff these facilities. To give you some sense of costs for converting these warehouses into detention centers and staffing them, Camp East Montana in El Paso, hastily built on Fort Bliss, is currently the largest ICE detention center at 3,000 beds. It costs over $600 million a year to operate. I’m not making up a damn thing. The contract for running Camp East Montana was for $1.24 billion. There has been extensive reporting on it. It is currently holding around 3,111 people, up from around 1,000 in August when it opened, and may eventually reach 5,000 beds.
Seb rank	Tue Feb 10 16:48:41 Ah, the American Gulag takes shape.
murder rank	Tue Feb 10 19:16:02 And somehow none in South Florida. :o(
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