By Mel Wilson, NASW Senior Policy Advisor
NASW is deeply concerned by the path the Trump Administration’s deportation policy has taken – on many fronts – since its inception in January 2025. We are appalled by the dangerously aggressive disregard for due process by ICE agents.
However, we are equally shocked by the emerging human rights and child welfare crisis in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) expansion of immigrant detention facilities — driven primarily by its plan to apprehend and deport as many as a million immigrants in a year.
In order to achieve such an ambitious goal, DHS will have to expand its current detention capacity by 92,000 beds— for single adults and families— nationwide. The current DHS/ICE plan is for eight mega‑warehouse centers with each center capable of holding up to 10,000 detainees. Estimates are that the cost for the expansion will be f $38.4 billion.
The potential human toll of such as plan is both daunting and an affront to American civil and human rights values. First of all it is abhorrent that the White House would contemplate — let alone authorize— a plan that would house as many thousands as possible of men, women and children in converted warehouses. Such a plan conjures up images of internment camps last seen in the United States for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Secondly, the immigrant rights community is very skeptical DHS/ICE has the capacity or — more to the point— the commitment— to offer and provide the necessary health, behavioral health, child welfare, social services, and legal supports for 96,000 people. Absent those services and supports, the likelihood of human rights abuses will skyrocket.
Given the gravity of this emerging crisis, NASW will write and soon disseminate an in-depth social justice brief on the state of America’s immigrant detention system in the era of mass deportation.
