Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Media as Polls on ICE Turns Dire
I want to highlight two numbers and then ask you to just talk about what you found. One of them is that we’re essentially hitting 70,000 immigrants in detention right now, which is the highest ever. And the other is that over time, with the funding that they’ve now got, they will be able to get those numbers up to 135,000. That is an immigrant carceral state, a ballooning immigrant carceral state. Can you talk about what your report found along those lines?
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, that’s right. So when we think about the scale of ICE detention, you know, it’s important when we say 70,000 people, it’s not like the prison system where that 70,000 people is pretty static—though, of course, within prisons, there’s always some people leaving and some people going, but people generally stay in prison for a long time.
With immigration detention, the goal of the administration is to shuffle people through the system as quickly as possible, or if they do stay in there to pressure them into giving up their case so they just choose to accept deportation. So the bigger the system is, the more people they can cycle through it with the goal of getting them to be deported, because if there’s no beds, they may have to eventually release some people and let them attend their hearings outside of detention.