>At Stewart Detention Centre, America’s second-biggest, overcrowding is causing chaos. The constellation of low-slung buildings in rural Georgia has roughly 1,750 beds, but on any given day in April the number of people living there was closer to 2,200. One room which housed 30 people in rows of bunk beds last autumn now has over 70. Newcomers sleep on plastic sheets on the floor. Women are stealing toilet paper because there aren’t enough tampons.
>The usual order is crumbling because guards are overwhelmed, says a detainee who has been there for months. In normal times uniforms distinguish between tiers of inmates—red for ones who committed crimes, khaki for ones who didn’t—but now people are being dressed in the wrong colours. Enough drugs were being smuggled inside in hair scrunchies that the facility recently banned them. Detainees report not getting medicines for conditions like high blood pressure. A study by a trio of watchdog groups found that 95% of the 52 deaths in detention centres between 2017 and 2021 were due to medical negligence. As conditions worsened the federal government closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which gave detainees advocates on the inside.
>The Trump administration is on the hunt for a fix. In May a detention centre in New Jersey reopened, after an eight-year lull, at twice its previous capacity. Many more will be needed. The government put out an emergency request for companies to bid on building them, but getting new facilities running could take months. In the meantime plans are under way to convert part of a military base in El Paso into a camp where immigrants sleep in tents; a shuttered women’s prison near San Francisco known as the “rape club”, after half a dozen staff were charged or convicted of sexual assault, might be repurposed.
>The House’s new budget bill gives the administration $59bn to play with. The government reckons that should be enough to double the number of beds. But in the short term Mr Trump may quietly resort to the catch-and-release strategy he chastised his predecessor for.
A link for the global poor to access the rest of the story [America’s immigration detention centres are at capacity](https://archive.is/342wy)
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>At Stewart Detention Centre, America’s second-biggest, overcrowding is causing chaos. The constellation of low-slung buildings in rural Georgia has roughly 1,750 beds, but on any given day in April the number of people living there was closer to 2,200. One room which housed 30 people in rows of bunk beds last autumn now has over 70. Newcomers sleep on plastic sheets on the floor. Women are stealing toilet paper because there aren’t enough tampons.
>The usual order is crumbling because guards are overwhelmed, says a detainee who has been there for months. In normal times uniforms distinguish between tiers of inmates—red for ones who committed crimes, khaki for ones who didn’t—but now people are being dressed in the wrong colours. Enough drugs were being smuggled inside in hair scrunchies that the facility recently banned them. Detainees report not getting medicines for conditions like high blood pressure. A study by a trio of watchdog groups found that 95% of the 52 deaths in detention centres between 2017 and 2021 were due to medical negligence. As conditions worsened the federal government closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which gave detainees advocates on the inside.
>The Trump administration is on the hunt for a fix. In May a detention centre in New Jersey reopened, after an eight-year lull, at twice its previous capacity. Many more will be needed. The government put out an emergency request for companies to bid on building them, but getting new facilities running could take months. In the meantime plans are under way to convert part of a military base in El Paso into a camp where immigrants sleep in tents; a shuttered women’s prison near San Francisco known as the “rape club”, after half a dozen staff were charged or convicted of sexual assault, might be repurposed.
>The House’s new budget bill gives the administration $59bn to play with. The government reckons that should be enough to double the number of beds. But in the short term Mr Trump may quietly resort to the catch-and-release strategy he chastised his predecessor for.
A link for the global poor to access the rest of the story [America’s immigration detention centres are at capacity](https://archive.is/342wy)