More than 20 years ago, while most of my peers were finishing college, I took a job as a corrections officer, intending to transition into law enforcement. At the training academy, I was assigned to a newly constructed immigration detention center in the Tacoma tide flats: the infamous Northwest Detention Center, now operated by the private prison company The GEO Group.
I was awakened to a dehumanizing, harmful system built on a foundation of profit and prejudice. Today, Congress has appropriated billions to expand that system, despite the availability of more humane, effective, and less expensive options. Plans propose repurposing warehouses into detention “mega centers” across the U.S., including an additional, larger facility in Washington state. This must not be allowed to happen.
With 9/11 still fresh in our collective memory, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were established, and detention was expanded in the name of national security and public safety. No data was publicly available on who was being detained, and officers were prohibited from learning individual case details.
While employed there, I observed the harms of detention and deportation extend beyond its walls into the public. I witnessed parents, many of whom have been in the local community for several decades, say goodbye to their heartbroken children and grandchildren, to spouses and other loved ones. The experience left a profound impact on me and my values. Rather than pursuing a career in law enforcement, I shifted toward social work and addressing the harms I witnessed.
Although certain media and political narratives frame all undocumented people as a threat to public safety, the data paint a much different picture.
What shocked me most in the years after leaving was how unnecessary detention often is. Roughly 70% of the people detained over the last five years have no criminal convictions, and many of those who do have only minor violations. The majority of those are imprisoned at the discretion of agency officials, not legal mandates.
Immigration detention is a civil process, not a criminal one — meaning it is not supposed to punish. In practice, however, people can spend years in detention if they fight their case with only limited access to legal counsel if they can afford it.
The NWDC has a long history of neglect and rights violations, but these problems are widespread. Government and independent analyses identify persistent patterns of medical neglect, routine use of solitary confinement and deaths deemed largely preventable, with recent findings demonstrating that conditions continue to deteriorate.
Why go through so much trouble to put people in prison who are not a threat to public safety?
Detention serves many “off-label” purposes. Research shows that detention increases the likelihood of losing deportation cases, inhibits access to legal counsel and family support and pressures people to sign voluntary departure orders.
It is also a booming business. With the average cost of keeping someone in ICE detention at $152 per person, per day, mass detention generates billions in revenue for the two largest private prison corporations: CoreCivic and The Geo Group. To sustain this growth, Congress increased ICE’s budget to over $14 billion a year, with 90% of custody contracted to private companies. For perspective, the entire federal prison system has a budget of $8.4 billion a year.
The disconnect becomes even clearer when you consider that more humane options are available, specifically, community-based case management programs. These programs allow people to stay with their families, maintain employment, and receive legal aid — crucial since deportation hearings provide no right to appointed counsel.
Community-based case management consistently achieves compliance rates above 95% and at a fraction of the cost of detention — a finding echoed by the DHS’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office, whose pilot program recently reported near-perfect compliance.
In a national survey I conducted, more than two-thirds of eligible voters viewed detention expansion as a problem and supported moving toward community-based alternatives. Two-thirds said they would vote for a congressional candidate who backs this shift, including half of Republicans. Yet, expansion persists.
I witnessed the modern mass detention system materialize after the 9/11 terror attacks, when immigrants became increasingly framed as national security threats. Today, that system is poised for its largest expansion yet. In a country that already locks up more human beings than any other nation, citizen and noncitizen alike, do we really need more human warehouses?
