For those in Donald Trump’s orbit, great power often comes with great dispensability. Take Kristi Noem, who, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, was in charge of the President’s top domestic priority of carrying out mass deportations, until she wasn’t. She became the first Cabinet secretary to be fired in Trump’s second term earlier this month, when he announced that he would replace her with Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator and a former mixed-martial-arts fighter. Noem, who’d been willing to do virtually anything in the role to boost her standing, was a product of the White House agenda, never a shaper of it. Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and there’s little reason to think that Noem’s ouster will change Miller’s approach. It may even serve to embolden it, by giving him fresh cover. The department has temporarily paused large-scale arrest operations in the wake of a national outcry over abuses in Minnesota, and it is in the midst of a partial shutdown owing to opposition from congressional Democrats. The Administration’s bigger ambitions show no signs of flagging, however. In fact, they are leading toward a new humanitarian and legal crisis.
D.H.S. is now detaining some seventy thousand people in jails across the country, more than at any other point since the department was founded, in 2002. Twenty-three immigrants have already died in custody in the current fiscal year, putting it on pace to surpass the previous one, which had the highest number of deaths in immigration detention in decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Administration has opened new facilities, repurposed others closed by previous Administrations, and converted temporary holding cells at federal buildings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York into spaces for longer-term detention.
Overcrowding, abuse, and neglect have made conditions far worse, and basic agency oversight has been gutted. The government has also detained at least four thousand children, sending many of them to a notoriously grim facility in South Texas called Dilley. A legal settlement in place since the late nineteen-nineties is supposed to bar the government from keeping minors in immigration custody for more than twenty days, but ICE has routinely flouted that rule. “Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” a fourteen-year-old girl from Honduras, who has lived in New York for seven years, told ProPublica; by then, she’d been in custody for forty-five days while waiting to be deported.
The largest detention site in the country, holding three thousand people, is a tent camp called East Montana, on a military base in El Paso. It was put up in less than two months, but started housing people two weeks after construction began. “Dust comes in through holes in the vents,” a detainee said in a sworn declaration to the A.C.L.U. A confidential ICE report, obtained by the Washington Post,