The U.S. Is Building the Largest Detention Network in Its History

Not Just Immigrants, Not Just Criminals: The United States is About to Mass Incarcerate Everyone Who Opposes the Government

The United States already incarcerates more people than any other country on Earth — approximately 1.8 million people as of 2024, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. That number has been rising again after a brief post-COVID dip, with 40 states increasing their prison populations between 2022 and 2024.

Now the federal government is building on top of that system.

ICE is planning to expand its detention capacity to over 107,000 beds, up from around 41,000 at the start of the Trump administration’s second term. To reach that number, the agency needs to open or significantly expand approximately 125 facilities nationwide.

The expansion is already underway. The number of ICE detention facilities grew from 111 to 144 in under a year — a 30% increase. Many of the new sites are former prisons and county jails that had been closed and are now being brought back into use.

What the facilities look like

Several of the new or expanded sites are large-scale operations. A warehouse in Williamsport, Maryland is being converted into a detention centre designed to hold around 1,500 people. Indiana agreed to convert an entire state prison to hold 1,000 ICE detainees. Nebraska opened a facility called the Cornhusker Clink — built from a former prison labour camp — with around 280 beds. The Fort Bliss facility in Texas was planned to hold up to 5,000 detainees, which would make it one of the largest immigration detention sites in U.S. history.

Private prison operators are central to the expansion. CoreCivic, one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the country, signed contracts with ICE in early 2025 to expand capacity across multiple facilities in several states. Because private operators can scale quickly when government contracts increase, they function as a flexible extension of federal detention capacity.

The scale in context

The U.S. detainee population hit a record high of around 66,000 people in ICE custody in 2025. The target of 107,000 beds would represent roughly a 160% increase from pre-expansion capacity.

For comparison, the entire prison population of Germany — a country of 84 million people — is around 60,000. The U.S. is planning a detention network, for immigration enforcement alone, that would exceed that.

The broader U.S. incarceration system already dwarfs every other country. The U.S. has about 4% of the world’s population and holds roughly 20% of its prisoners. The current expansion adds a parallel federal detention system on top of that existing structure.

What People Should Be Concerned About

The immediate justification for the expansion is immigration enforcement. Critics raise two separate concerns beyond that stated purpose.

The first is conditions and oversight. Existing ICE detention facilities have documented records of inadequate medical care, deaths in custody, and limited access to legal representation. Expanding the system rapidly — particularly by converting non-detention facilities with minimal adaptation — makes oversight harder, not easier.

The second concern is about the infrastructure itself. Large detention networks, once built, do not disappear when the political context that created them changes. The legal authorities that allow detention during declared national emergencies are already written into U.S. law and have never been repealed.

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Analysts who study democratic backsliding note that the combination of expanded detention infrastructure, broad executive detention powers, and political rhetoric about internal threats has historically preceded the use of detention systems against populations beyond their original stated purpose. Japanese American internment during World War II is the most direct U.S. example — the camps were built and filled within weeks because the legal and logistical capacity already existed.

None of that means the current expansion will be used that way. It means the capacity is being built, and capacity tends to get used.

Slavery was never fully abolished in the United States

This is not a metaphor. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

The exception is explicit. Incarcerated people in the United States can be compelled to work, and in most states they can be paid nothing or close to nothing for that labour. Incarcerated workers across the country earn on average between $0.13 and $0.52 per hour, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, with some states paying nothing at all for most prison jobs. The labour is not optional — refusal can result in solitary confinement or loss of privileges.

The industries that benefit from this are not marginal. Prison labour produces goods and services for dozens of major corporations and government agencies. The agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors all draw on it. UNICOR, the federal prison labour programme, generated over $350 million in sales in a recent year, with incarcerated workers producing everything from military uniforms to office furniture.

As the detention system expands to potentially hold hundreds of thousands more people, the pool of legally compellable labour expands with it. The 13th Amendment was not an oversight. It was a design choice that has never been revisited in any meaningful way.

Criminalising dissent: terrorism laws and protest movements

The legal definition of domestic terrorism in the United States is broad enough to apply to a wide range of political activity. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2331, domestic terrorism includes acts that “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” That language has no hard boundary.

Trump and members of his administration have explicitly named antifa and anti-capitalist groups as terrorist or criminal organisations. Antifa is not a formal organisation — it has no membership, no leadership structure, no headquarters. It is a loose descriptor for people who identify as anti-fascist. Designating an ideology, rather than a specific group, as terrorism creates a category that can expand to include almost anyone who opposes the government’s direction.

It is already happening in allied countries. In the United Kingdom, people have been arrested and imprisoned for social media posts — not for physical acts, but for words. In the United States, protesters have faced terrorism-adjacent charges for participation in demonstrations. The legal scaffolding to criminalise political opposition is being constructed incrementally, charge by charge, definition by definition.

If anti-capitalism — an extremely broad political position held by tens of millions of people globally — is ever formally designated a form of extremism in U.S. law, the implications for free political speech would be severe. It has not happened yet. The direction of travel is visible.

Surveillance, digital identity, and the monitoring of dissent

Several converging developments in digital infrastructure point toward a system in which personal identity, online activity, and government databases become deeply linked.

The push for Real ID compliance, now mandatory for federal purposes, has standardised identification across states and created a national de facto ID system. Proposals to link government IDs to social media accounts have circulated in various forms at both state and federal level. The FBI and DHS have documented programmes that monitor social media at scale, including the activity of protest movements, journalists, and political activists, according to documents obtained by the ACLU.

Immigration enforcement has already built a template for this: ICE uses commercial data brokers to track location data, licence plates, and financial records without warrants, using data purchased from private companies that are not subject to the same constitutional constraints as law enforcement. Palantir, the data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel, holds major contracts with ICE, the FBI, and the U.S. Army.

The infrastructure for comprehensive population surveillance exists. It is operational. It is currently aimed primarily at immigrants and protesters. Whether it stays that way depends entirely on who controls it and what laws govern its use — and those laws are being written, or left unwritten, right now.

The ideological blueprint: Yarvin, Thiel, and the neoreactionary programme

To understand where some of the people currently shaping U.S. policy want to take it, it helps to read what they have actually written and said.

Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, developed what he calls neoreaction — a systematic rejection of democracy, equality, and the Enlightenment values that underpin liberal governance. His core argument is that democracy is a failed system producing managed decline, and that it should be replaced with a sovereign — effectively a CEO-monarch with total executive authority and no democratic accountability. He calls this model “the Patchwork” or simply “monarchy,” and he is not being ironic. He describes equality as a fiction and universal suffrage as a mechanism for elite manipulation of an ignorant public.

This is accelerationist in a specific sense: the goal is not to reform existing institutions but to demonstrate through their failure that something entirely different is needed. Pushing deregulation, defunding, and dysfunction to their limits is not incompetence in this framework — it is strategy. Break the system until people accept that it cannot be fixed, then install the replacement.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has publicly stated that he does not believe democracy and capitalism are compatible. He has funded Yarvin-adjacent intellectual projects and has been personally connected to neoreactionary circles for years. Thiel was one of the earliest and most significant financial backers of JD Vance — he donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign and is widely credited with making his political career viable. Vance has cited Yarvin in interviews and has spoken approvingly of the idea of a president who governs by concentrating executive power and ignoring institutional constraints.

The policy agenda that follows from this framework is not libertarianism in the traditional sense. It is deregulation in service of capital concentration — the removal of constraints on corporate power while simultaneously using state power to suppress labour organisation, political dissent, and any movement that challenges the position of those at the top. It has no meaningful social contract component. The poor, in this framework, are not a constituency to be served. They are, at best, a labour pool.

The comparison with China — and why the U.S. model may be more brutal

China’s system of governance is authoritarian and its surveillance infrastructure is among the most extensive ever built. Its social credit system, its monitoring of communications, and its suppression of political dissent are well documented. None of that is in dispute.

But China’s authoritarianism is bundled with a social contract of a kind. The government has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over four decades — the World Bank describes it as the fastest large-scale poverty reduction in history. China has universal healthcare, heavily subsidised housing programmes, and pension coverage that has expanded dramatically in recent decades. The authoritarianism is real. So is the provision.

The neoreactionary model emerging in segments of the American right offers the surveillance and control without the provision. No universal healthcare. No guaranteed housing. No safety net worth the name. Corporate power unchecked by regulation, labour rights, or democratic accountability. A state apparatus capable of monitoring, detaining, and compelling the labour of its population, in service of private capital rather than any notion of collective welfare.

That is not China’s model. China’s model, for all its brutality, retains a concept of the state as responsible for its people’s material conditions. The model being advocated by Yarvin, funded by Thiel, and given political form through figures like Vance proposes corporate sovereignty with no such obligation. In that respect it is historically novel: a high-technology feudalism in which the mechanisms of mass surveillance and mass detention serve private accumulation rather than any state project, however repressive.

Whether that is where the United States is heading is not certain. What is certain is that the infrastructure — the detention network, the surveillance systems, the legal definitions of dissent, the compelled labour of the incarcerated — is being built. And the people who have thought most carefully about what to do with it have written down their intentions in considerable detail.

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