Doctors and medical researchers expect more outbreaks of infectious disease as the Trump administration crams thousands more people into miserable conditions.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

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**AUGUST 18, 2025**

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Tuberculosis might sound like a disease from the past, conjuring black-and-white images of people in slums, sanatoria, and “lungers” camps, or maybe, if you’re an opera lover, Mimì from

**La Bohème**. But it remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease, surpassed only briefly by COVID-19, and it’s on the rise in the United States. Trump’s overcrowded and unsanitary [link removed] immigrant detention centers are one place the disease can easily thrive, and if you look closely enough at governmental and news reports, it is. Two doctors cautioned me that there’s no way to know how bad it is inside detention centers, so we may not know the extent of the spread until it’s already jumped to the rest of the population.

**– Whitney Curry Wimbish, staff writer**

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STEPHEN SMITH/AP PHOTO

Tuberculosis Spawning in Crowded, Dirty ICE Detention Centers [link removed]

Consumption is flourishing in immigration detention centers across the country, yet another sign that America is grinding its way through a second Gilded Age [link removed]. It’s better known now by its other name, tuberculosis, and it’s the most deadly infectious disease in the world, the World Health Organization says [link removed], responsible for killing 1.5 million people each year, even though it’s both preventable and curable.

Detainees have tested positive for tuberculosis at the Anchorage Correctional Complex [link removed] in Alaska and Adelanto ICE Processing Center [link removed] in California, according to news reports. One immigrant died days after a diagnosis of the disease in the Eloy Detention Center [link removed] in Arizona, an ICE death notice shows. Detainees may have been exposed at the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora [link removed], according to a lawsuit. And in Washington state, several possible cases of tuberculosis in the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma [link removed] were reported this month to state authorities, and one man was hospitalized for it, his attorney said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not respond to a request for comment. Officials have previously downplayed the presence of tuberculosis, the reports show, including responding to questions about the cases in Tacoma by saying, “This false claim needs to stop.”

The same conditions that allowed the disease to flourish [link removed] at the end of the 1800s are hallmarks of immigration detention, medical experts and immigration advocates told the

**Prospect**, including overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a breakdown of health protocols.

Tuberculosis outbreaks can allow the disease to become more resistant to treatment, one of the major global concerns about the massive outbreaks in post-Soviet Russia [link removed]. And, of course, the disease doesn’t recognize the limits of prison walls, Dr. Leonardo Martinez, assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University, noted. If someone leaves ICE with an active case of tuberculosis, they can transfer it to the larger population. “By protecting people in carceral settings,” he said, “we’re protecting people outside of carceral settings.”

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