[[link removed]]

TRUMP’S NEW “PRISON CAMP” THREAT UNLEASHES FURY EVEN IN MAGA
COUNTRY  
[[link removed]]


 

Greg Sargent
February 4, 2026
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The next phase of ICE’s big ramp-up: a nationwide network of vast
detention facilities. But guess what? Even parts of Red America are
saying no. _

Overcrowding at an imigrant detention facility in McAllen, Texas,
Office of Inspector General

 

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout
[[link removed].]
of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he
demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He
gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open
land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of
deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement,
Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever
dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become
public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely
places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.

Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The
public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far
deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly
coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological
project.

We’re now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement plans to retrofit
[[link removed]]
around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s
visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some
will reportedly hold
[[link removed]]
up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat
to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in
earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic
“capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then
deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than
70,000 migrants
[[link removed]]
are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is
running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would
supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to
buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump
by 26 points
[[link removed]]
in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern
suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned
[[link removed]]
the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting
[[link removed]]
only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors
opposed
[[link removed]]
the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled
[[link removed]]
the sale.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township
Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted
unanimously
[[link removed]]
to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals
sharply protesting
[[link removed]]
the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma
City came out against
[[link removed];]
a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale.
Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City,
Utah, are also dead set
[[link removed]]
against plans for ICE camps in their locales.

Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s
Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition
[[link removed]]
Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside _existing_
facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps
ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring
[[link removed]]
in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse.
“If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling
them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those
facilities are going to be run?”

The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains
this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll
[[link removed]]
sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose
mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:

Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in
detention centers while their cases are decided?

Favor: 35 percent

Oppose: 64 percent

Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention
_while their cases are being decided._ This is a decisive repudiation
of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated
the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to
profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and
civilizational decline.

But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white
voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With
majorities also opposing
[[link removed]] deporting
noncriminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA
understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass
detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also
supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous
presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it
really possible that majorities are actually OK with such a horror?
Apparently it is.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some
analysts suggested that his win reflected a decisive cultural shift in
the direction of his restrictionist views on immigration, one that
Democrats must accommodate themselves to going forward. Call it the
“MAGA moment” thesis.

But it’s hard to square
[[link removed]]
that idea with what we’re seeing now. As political scientist Julia
Azari argues
[[link removed]],
notions of such a shift are bound up with the deeper idea that the
culture is undergoing a meaningful conservative reorientation on race
and nationalism. Yet that now looks baseless, Azari notes, because
“the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore
principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.”

To wit: Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and
ICE has become a pariah agency
[[link removed]].
Majorities oppose
[[link removed]] deporting
longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view
immigration
[[link removed]]
as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll
[[link removed]],
60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75
countries Trump has singled out
[[link removed]],
apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,”
and _two-thirds_ oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing
horrors abroad.

So, at the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both
the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering
[[link removed]]
of the country _and_ their effort to choke off all humanitarian
pathways for settling here. Such public sentiments seem very much at
odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.

Relatedly, Substacker Brian Beutler recently argued
[[link removed]]
that social signaling is generating opposition to Trump’s worst
policies, as more and more ordinary people see them as shameful and
heinous in the most basic moral and human terms. Something like that
is helping drive opposition to detention centers: See this remarkable
column [[link removed]] in
the _Kansas City Star_ that seeks to shame warehouse owners into
refraining from selling to ICE, arguing that doing so risks social
ostracism. Similar efforts probably helped persuade owners to nix
selling in Oklahoma and deep-red parts of Virginia. The growing
opposition to ICE prison camps suggests much, much more of this to
come.

In short: If there ever was a big “MAGA moment” cultural shift on
immigration, well, it’s already long gone.

_Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of
the podcast __The Daily Blast_
[[link removed]]_._

* immigrant detention
[[link removed]]
* Trump Concentration Camps
[[link removed]]
* Popular Resistance
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]