Trump is creating ‘one big beautiful’ gulag state

The anti-migrant onslaught in the United States is being significantly expanded with a US$170 billion injection into the border and immigration regime.

Even before this injection of funds, militarised raids have laid siege to Latino communities. Teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have descended on farms. And it has become routine for heavily armed, masked goons to abduct people from immigration hearings, leaving undocumented people deciding whether to risk arrest by showing up or risk becoming more of a “criminal” by missing their court date.

President Donald Trump had been stymied in his administration’s first months in his attempt to reach unprecedented levels of deportations. But the massive assault that started in Los Angeles in June began to turn the situation around, breaking the record for the most immigration arrests ever. Now, it looks like all systems go for the president’s fascistic agenda.

The program is real, not rhetoric

In April, ICE Director Todd Lyons pledged to make the deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings”. The administration has a target of 3,000 arrests per day, a tenfold increase on last year’s number. Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, in early July called for at least 7,000 arrests per day, which would amount to 2.5 million per year.

Migration cops exhibit exceptional cruelty as they attempt to reach these massive government targets. Agents recently camped outside of a hospital for a week to re-apprehend a woman who suffered a health crisis caused by the initial raid, which left her “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, according to a report in the Los Angeles Public Press.

ICE leaders now openly encourage agents to target as many migrants as possible—without warrants or even evidence of criminality. These “collateral” arrests of random people boost deportation numbers as much as any other. Since January, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in arrests of migrants with no criminal history, and now almost two-thirds of all people in ICE custody reportedly have no criminal conviction.

When a journalist pointed out these statistics, Homan got openly racist enough to suggest that a person’s “physical appearance” was a good enough reason for ICE to target them. And shamelessly, raids have expanded to workplaces and community hubs where they expect to find vulnerable undocumented people.

There is a discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of deportations because not all arrestees are legally allowed to be deported immediately. But the administration is trying to lower the bar by expanding classifications for expedited removal and expediting the removal of those already in proceedings. It has increased the pool of officially targeted immigrants by removing legal protections for more than 1 million people. It is also seeking more deals with underdeveloped countries to take payments in exchange for deportees who can’t be sent back to their countries of origin.

With the massive cash injection to support these attacks, Trump’s stated goals of a million deportations per year start to seem more frighteningly possible than ever.

Immigrant prisons are reaching new depths of horror

The federal government has allocated an extra $45 billion to expand the country’s detention facilities. The prisons are packed with hundreds more people than they have beds for, sometimes at triple their capacity, and brutal new tent cities are being built. Among them is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, where cages inside tents were thrown up in eight days to hold hundreds of migrants on a remote airstrip in the sweltering Florida Everglades.

This effort has fuelled a boom in the for-profit immigrant prison system. Most of these for-profit prisons are incentivised to hold as many people for as long as they can, so they overcrowd facilities, deny medical care and keep sick people detained for as long as possible. The leading prison profiteers involved, Geo Group and Core Civic, have been raking in record profits from human misery and speculating on even better years to come.

They also use part of their profits to lobby for policies that strengthen their position. Detained migrants accused of crossing the US-Mexico border illegally will not be able to seek bond to be released while their case is processed through the courts. So now, in the months or years in which they are awaiting a decision on their status, they will be trapped in these immigration gulags while prison capitalists will rake in greater profits each day.

ICE is becoming more powerful

ICE is the primary agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants within the US. The agency aims to hire 10,000 new agents, nearly tripling its force of arresting officers, and creating the potential for the spate of raids unleashed on Los Angeles to be repeated elsewhere at an even greater scale.

This already brutal machine has been forged into a ghoulish army of masked people snatchers under the Trump administration. They’ve become even more explicitly politically reactionary, using Zionist hate groups to find lists of anti-genocide activists to brutalise.

This injection of resources will make ICE the best-funded police agency in the US—more well resourced than the vast majority of the world’s militaries.

The immigration machine is becoming embedded

One of the other morbid innovations of the Trump administration has been to coopt virtually all federal policing agencies into the immigrant oppression machine. This builds on the legacy of cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE that was established through the Bush and Obama eras in the 287(g) program. When agencies sign onto these programs, local police are deputised as immigration agents and act as a force multiplier for ICE.

Since Trump came to office, these agreements have increased more than sixfold. More than 6,200 local cops are already deputised as immigration agents. The targeting of people for minor infractions in the hopes that they will be deportable has been an increasingly common pastime for local police, and more migrants are running out of space to breathe.

Trump’s budget will further entrench this cooperation: US$15 billion has been earmarked for local and state collaboration with immigration enforcement. This triples federal expenditure for these agencies.

People are still fighting

It’s not all bad news, however. Even before the explosion of immigration protests in June, there had been more immigrant rights protests in the first five months of 2025 than in the previous five years. And despite the brutal crackdown that followed the Los Angeles protests, people are still confronting ICE outside immigration courts and demonstrating against proposed jails. In one instance, doctors and nurses tried to protect vulnerable workers when they took shelter in a California medical clinic.

An Economist/YouGov poll in July found that 52 percent of Americans think that Trump’s immigration policies are too harsh, up from 40 percent six months ago. A Gallup poll also found that the share of people wanting immigration reduced dropped from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today. So while only a minority of people are fighting against the government, the number of people hostile to Trump’s policies is growing.

The administration has unleashed a brutal attack, and the future is frightening, but the situation remains volatile. What we witnessed last month in Los Angeles shows the potential for a fightback. Let’s hope the next fight is even bigger.