Treating [non-white] Human Beings like Freight: DHS is Turning Warehouses Into Mass Detention Camps

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) warehouse detention system is rapidly unfolding across the United States, advancing in open contempt of oversight, outpacing public scrutiny, and operating with the same disregard for the Constitution, the rule of law, and human life that defines the Trump administration’s exercise of power.

In November 2025, NBC News reported that DHS was actively scouting enormous industrial warehouses across the country, particularly in rural areas near major airports and transportation hubs, in an effort to expand the administration’s capacity to execute its mass deportation agenda—a system Secretary Noem recently aptly described as “one of the most consequential periods of action and reform in American history.”

After the “Big Beautiful Bill” allocated an additional $45 billion specifically to ICE for building new immigration detention centers through 2029—a budget 62 percent larger than the entire federal prison system—DHS gained unprecedented financial capacity to expand its system of terror on a massive scale. Some of the warehouses under imminent consideration exceed 800,000 square feet and could hold far more people than existing detention centers, compressing thousands of human beings into spaces designed for inventory, not habitation.

Further reporting in December showed that with this massive budget increase, DHS is not merely expanding capacity at the margins, but is redesigning the model itself. All those detained by DHS and ICE agents, including predominantly people without criminal records, both documented and undocumented im/migrants, and US citizens, will presumably be swiftly processed at local sites before being funneled into a small number of mega-facilities, each holding between 5,000 and 10,000 people. The plans outlining the duration of confinement and the conditions under which people will be held in these warehouses while awaiting deportation remain unknown. [MORE]