In mid-August the Washington Post broke an important story about Stephen Miller ramping up his mass deportation scheme. All over the country, ICE is eyeing defunct prisons and slowly re-opening some of them. Some communities have tried to fight these re-openings. Some see dollar signs and roll-over, often thinking they have no grounds to stop the feds making contracts with private companies like GEO and Core-Civic.
ICE’s new plan will double detention capacity to over 100,000 people and spread detention centers into new areas of the country. Fueled by the $45 Billion from the Big Beautiful Bill, ICE will hire 10,000 new employees and expand existing and soft-sided detention centers (like Alligator Alcatraz). Of special note is the impending growth in family detention facilities that the administration has said is its preferred method of deporting families. Apparently, we should expect to see a lot more of this in 2026 and onward.
In Colorado, ICE seems to be planning to open up to three new sites: Walsenburg, Hudson, and Ignacio. Reporting from Walsenburg indicates that their mayor is all in for ICE to come to town. He expects an economic boom. The problem is that there’s a body of research that suggests that prisons don’t actually lead to economic growth. The research indicates that employment growth doesn’t happen. Towns with prisons have lower retail sales, lower wages, and slower housing growth compared to towns without prisons. Property values decline near the prison with a shift to lower income households. Any jobs the prison might bring in generally go to senior people already in the system (or company). People in these small rural towns where ICE wants to re-open a defunct prison often don’t have the skillsets required to be hired. One study showed that prison employees commuted twice as far as other workers indicating prison workers often don’t reside in the communities where the prison is located.
And those wonderful economic benefits that are sure to flow back into a community with a prison? They just don’t materialize. A prison (or ICE detention facility) operates as a unique business model, a self-sustaining entity that takes care of its own food, laundry, maintenance, security, transportation, etc. It doesn’t link into the community to buy things or stimulate local businesses the way any other kind of operation might. In addition, prison or detainee labor can compete and crowd out local competition for services in the community.
And then there are the costs that local taxpayers would be required to bear to have the “privilege” of being stigmatized with having a morally repugnant entity in town. It’s a shame that so many towns have already had ICE reactivate these centers. More are scheduled to open unless something changes and changes fast.
For more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2miN1ltrOUc&t=18s
ICE documents reveal plans to double immigrant detention space by 2026 – The Washington Post Washington Post, 15 Aug 2025, “ICE Documents Reveal Plans to Double Immigration Detention Space by 2026” by Douglas MacMillan, N. Kirkpatrick, and Lydia Sidhom
•So You Think a New Prison Will Save Your Town? | The Marshall Project The Marshall Report, 6-14-2016, Tom Meagher & Christie Thompson
•ACLU: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration (Nov 2, 2011) bankingonbondage_web.pdf p. 20-22: Scant Economic Benefit for Local Communities
•The Local Economic Impacts of Prisons | The Review of Economics and Statistics | MIT Press Nov 7, 2024, The Review of Economics and Statistics (2024) 106 (6): 1442–1459.
•The Development of Last Resort: The Impact of New State Prisons on Small Town Economies, Terry L. Besser and Margaret M. Hanson, Iowa State University (paper under review at the Journal of the Community Development Society) Microsoft Word – Besser Hanson CDS 04.doc
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