Trump Administration Scrambles to Expand Immigration Detention Centers

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Support for KQED podcasts comes from the San Francisco Marin Food Bank. The culinary event One Big Table on October 3rd features celebrated Bay Area chefs, dancing and more, all to help end hunger.

Tickets at sfmfoodbank.org/onebigtable.

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Sara DiNatale (0:28)

Oh, not really.

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Tyche Hendricks (0:35)

Xfinity, imagine that.

Sara DiNatale (0:37)

Restrictions apply, not available in all areas.

Alexis Madrigal (0:40)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. The Trump Administration came into office promising to transform immigration in America, and they have endeavored to do so arresting and deporting entirely different groups of people than previous administrations. Immigration agents arrested close to 50,000 people in July alone. So where do all those people go?

In Northern California, it's not a simple situation. We don't have a big ICE facility nearby. In fact, the closest one is a converted prison in California City out in the Mojave Desert. We're going to talk about the network of facilities that exist now and that may get built with the surge of money that the Trump Administration is plowing into ICE. Joining us first, we've got Tyche Hendricks, Senior Editor covering immigration here at KQED. Welcome, Tyche.

Sara DiNatale (1:26)

Glad to be here.

Alexis Madrigal (1:27)

And we've got Sara DiNatale, who is a reporter covering politics and the impacts of the Trump Administration's policies on the Bay Area and California at the San Francisco Chronicle. Welcome.

Sara DiNatale (1:37)

Hey.

Alexis Madrigal (1:38)

So, Tyche, just kind of give us an overview here. Like how is immigration detention supposed to work? How did it generally speaking work in the past and sort of what's different now?

Tyche Hendricks (1:47)

Sure. Well, I mean, I think at the get, we should say immigration detention is civil detention. It's not punishment for a crime. It's not supposed to be punitive. It's primarily aimed at people who are a flight risk or a danger who, you know, the government feels should be held in custody until they go through their immigration court proceeding, deportation proceeding. There are some people subject to a mandatory detention, people, for example, who have some certain criminal convictions. And this administration and this Republican Congress have vastly expanded, you know, who they think should be mandatorily detained, which is part of why we're seeing this huge increase in people in detention facilities.

But yeah, arrests are coming up to record numbers and detention also is near a record high.

And but one thing we should say, even though in California, there are some really high numbers of it's, we're the third highest in arrests after Florida and Texas is the number one. And in those places, it's ramped up significantly. So partly because we have these sanctuary laws that mean that when you have a traffic stop with a police officer, you're not necessarily going to be handed over to ICE as you would be in those other states, right?

Alexis Madrigal (3:12)

Yeah.

You know, what about the, you know, we've seen many of these arrests, either, you know, the viral ones and the many more that occur, you know, out of the public eye. Where do people actually go? Like, if you got detained, you know, there was someone detained on Telegraph Avenue, you know, a few weeks ago or a month ago. What are the kind of pathways that someone might go through there?

Tyche Hendricks (3:35)

Sure. I mean, typically, you would go to an ICE office where there are sort of short-term hold rooms in San Francisco. It's at the ICE sort of field headquarters at 630 Sansom Street, where we've seen a lot of protests. And those are hold rooms meant for like a 12-hour processing, you know, short-term, not for overnight. And then you would be taken on to a long-term detention facility. As you say, there are none currently in Northern California. So, the closest are down in Southern Kern County.

But I will say that, you know, there had been, there was kind of a bottleneck with those short-term hold rooms. And people were being held there for days and days without proper medical care, medical screening, without bedding, without proper, you know, food and hygiene. And a court order has now said like, that's no good. And so ICE has sort of fallen back and tried to regroup.

Alexis Madrigal (4:38)

Sara, you were reporting on what's been happening at SFO, which seems like exactly an example of one of these situations, right? Where it's supposed to be short-term detention. But as you discovered, talking to people who are actually held there, it has not been.