As detention efforts by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency continue, new reports are detailing that the Donald Trump administration is working to develop large-scale holding centers to speed up deportations. This is according to internal ICE documents reviewed by the Washington Post.
One location being considered is a facility with the potential to hold 10,000 people in Stafford County, Virginia.
This plan would change the current system — where people are moved around to whichever facility has open beds — into a staged pipeline built around “processing sites” and massive “warehouses” intended to speed removals.
In his report, Douglas MacMillan said the Trump administration aims to build seven large-scale holding centers that can hold as many as 80,000 immigrants in warehouses at a time.
One senior ICE official told the Post the move is “similar to an Amazon Prime warehouse, but for people.”
Newly arrested detainees would spend weeks at intake locations before being transferred into one of the facilities designed to hold anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people each.
The Post noted acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said at a conference back in April that “the administration needs to treat deportations like a business.”
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
- Ralph Fox:
What’s the plan and ultimate goal here?
- Douglas MacMillan:
All year, the Trump administration has been increasing the capacity for this country to hold immigrants, and they have reopened former prisons. They’ve opened detention camps on military bases. It looks like now they’re shifting the priority a little bit towards trying to make this system more efficient.
The Trump administration wants to begin deporting people more efficiently, more rapidly. And to do that, they feel like they need to set up kind of a hub and spoke system where they’re going to book people into a processing center where they’ll be held for a few weeks, and then they’ll be sent to one of these kind of mass camps that they hope to renovate at least seven large industrial warehouses to act as sort of the hubs of this system all around the country.
- Ralph Fox:
And that could have an effect on our area as well. Yes?
- Douglas MacMillan:
Yes, they are planning. One of these seven facilities is planned for Stafford, Virginia, and it’s an industrial center. They seem to be targeting areas that are just outside of major metropolises and near kind of industrial logistics hubs.
I think that, you know, they want to be near airports, they want to be near highways and make this whole system kind of more efficient, more streamlined. You know, one quote from a current ICE official from a conference earlier this year is, he said that they want this whole system to act more like a business, and they want to be as efficient as Amazon moves packages. And, he said, ‘like Prime but with human beings.’
- Ralph Fox:
And now has Homeland Security actually confirmed that this is happening?
- Douglas MacMillan:
We reached out to them and for comment. We shared a lot of questions with them. They did not answer the questions, and they said that they cannot confirm this.
Usually we will get some kind of a statement denying things when things are wrong. So they didn’t do that. Our reporting is based off of an internal draft document that they were planning to send out to industry partners last week.
So we believe that this is very much kind of in the works and about to kind of be put into action. We don’t know if they’ve actually procured, obtained any of the actual buildings yet, but we think that that might be the next step of this process.
- Ralph Fox:
And there’s been stories, a number of stories, of people not knowing where loved ones are for days. They just disappear, sometimes weeks under the current program. This looks to get people out of the country even faster. Is there possibly more accountability, as far as that’s concerned, or, maybe less?
- Douglas MacMillan:
Yeah, it’s hard to say. I mean, on the one hand, if they’re trying to make the system more efficient, maybe they would have, be able to track people better.
But I think at this point, it’s hard to believe that anything this administration does will make it things easier or better or more transparent or accountable for immigrants and the people and their friends and family.
- Ralph Fox:
And when you look at it globally, a hub and spoke makes sense if you’re trying to move certain things and not speaking specifically about humans. But, do we have an idea what kind of price tag taxpayers could be looking at here?
- Douglas MacMillan:
That’s a good question. We don’t have any idea the numbers yet, but we do know they have a lot of money to spend.
Congress made available over $100 billion to the Department of Homeland Security in their budget bill this year, $45 billion of that is allocated towards immigrant detention. It’s the largest amount this country has ever dedicated towards immigrant detention.
So, they have almost a blank check to go out and buy buildings and to renovate them. Whether they can do this in a way that is humane and actually respects the lives that they’re going to be holding in these buildings, I think will be a big question, and one that we’ll continue to be looking at in our reporting.
- Ralph Fox:
And again, just to confirm, at least half, or nearly half of these people that have been deported so far have no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Is that right?
- Douglas MacMillan:
That’s right.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
