AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump is pushing Republican senators to back his, what he calls, “big, beautiful bill,” which includes key funding to carry out his administration’s agenda of arresting as many as 3,000 immigrants and asylum seekers a day, then jail them until their deportation. The bill includes more than $150 billion in additional funding to hire new ICE agents and add detention space. ICE has already signed new agreements with jails around the country.

This comes as many high-profile student activists facing deportation have been transferred to ICE jails in Louisiana. And the family of a New York City high school student from Venezuela who was recently detained at his immigration court date say he was shuttled between four different states in five days: New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Immigrants have protested poor conditions at the ICE jails, many of which are run by private prison companies, like GEO Group and CoreCivic. On Sunday, activists joined La Resistencia for a solidarity day outside Northwest Detention Center run by GEO Group in Tacoma, Washington.

ACTIVIST: We know that when we fight for a single migrant is not just about freeing all detained migrants, but about ending the root causes of forced migration, the abolition of all systems that lead to deportations.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as ICE confirmed there’s been nine deaths in custody since President Trump took office.

For more, we’re joined by Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah, author of the book Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.

Silky, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Describe where people are being brought to, what this detention network — as the Trump administration says they’re cutting costs — they’re doing it to pay for tax breaks for the rich — they are massively increasing the Homeland Security and ICE budget.

SILKY SHAH: Yeah. I mean, the detention system a sprawling. People are detained in every single part of the country. There has been a massive expansion of detention for years. And now what we’re seeing under President Trump is even more expansion, which could be even that much more exponential if this budget bill passes.

And it really feels like a paradigm-shifting moment. After 9/11, we saw so much more money funneled into the system, into border security, into immigrant detention, and the detention system doubled. We’re in that situation again, where now the numbers are reaching close to 50,000, which is what it was back in 2019. People are being packed into overcrowded cells. People are not getting medical care. They’re in conditions where they’re languishing. And they’re doing everything they can to expand, expand, expand, both here in the U.S. and also seeing people be now detained in third countries abroad.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Silky, I wanted to ask about that, this offshoring of detention by the Trump administration through third-party countries. To what extent do you see that growing, as well? And, of course, there continue to be legal battles over the constitutionality of doing that.

SILKY SHAH: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing to remember is that the U.S. has the largest immigration detention system in the world, largely because the U.S. has the largest prison system in the world. So, U.S. policy is always focused on detaining people here, especially those people who are coming to the border, who are — or currently live here and are being detained and are in deportation proceedings. But across the world, many countries actually detain people in other locations. Australia, England — I mean, the U.K., Israel, other places have done this. And so, it’s not totally unprecedented.

It is really concerning to see the U.S. move in this direction, while at the same time building up the detention capacity here. So, we need to make sure that we’re doing the work to say, “No, it’s not OK to transfer people offshore,” but not normalize the detention that’s growing here more and more in county jails, in private prison companies and all these other types of spaces, military bases, the use of Bureau of Prison facilities. We’re seeing expansion. It’s in so many levels.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about this tactic of effectively disappearing people who have been detained by constantly transferring them from one ICE detention facility to another, so that their family members and lawyers have trouble even finding them?

SILKY SHAH: I mean, this is actually nothing new. We’ve seen this for years in ICE detention, where people are constantly transferred, sometimes because of retaliation, because people might be organizing on the inside, sometimes because of capacity concerns, because — and often to, like you were saying, you know, to disrupt their experience and get them to sign away their rights and be deported, because they are no longer near family or no longer near counsel or in these remote detention centers that don’t have medical care. The conditions are terrible. So, it’s a tactic that’s been used for a very long time. And what we’ve seen over time as the detention system has ballooned in these moments when it’s really heightened, transfers are much more rampant, and it’s much more disruptive to the system.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Democrats’ response to what’s happening.

SILKY SHAH: I mean, I think what’s so frustrating about the sort of what we are seeing right now is that for months, especially last year, there was much enabling. I mean, Harris ran a campaign where she was positioning herself as more hard-line than Trump on this issue, leading to the passage of the Laken Riley Act in January, which actually expanded mandatory detention the most we’ve seen in 30 years. And so, really, what’s so frustrating is that the Democrats have really capitulated on this issue.

And now we’re seeing many more members of Congress doing unannounced inspections of facilities, which is great to see, but we really need to make sure this budget bill doesn’t pass, and make sure that leaders say, “No, we don’t want to balloon the system.” I mean, it would mean $45 billion more for immigrant detention, 13 times what the budget is currently. So, you know, detention facilitates deportation, and their goal is to expand, expand, expand, so that they can scale up the number of deportations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the Trump administration’s use of detention to basically — to repress political dissent, especially in relationship to the war in Gaza? You wrote a piece for Truthout, “Khalil Case Shows How Migrant Justice and Palestine Solidarity Are Tied Together.”

SILKY SHAH: Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is that the immigration detention system has become a testing ground for authoritarianism. And so, you’re seeing that in the case of the student detentions, where you have people being targeted, essentially, for thought crimes. But the thing that we have to understand is that for 30 years, immigrants, many immigrants, have been denied due process because of their interactions with the criminal legal system or because they’re newly arriving. And so, this is really building on many, many years of expanding mandatory detention, including for people who have green cards and people who are legal permanent residents. And so, that’s not necessarily new.

But then to move and say they’re going to go after people for thought crimes, and particularly — and part of the reason I wrote that piece is to say, you know, the immigrant justice fight is an internationalist fight. We have to understand that U.S. foreign policy plays a huge role in the reason why that people are migrating. And we have to see that, you know, the people who are on the receiving end of that are people who are being targeted here, whether they’re Palestinians or people who support Palestinians, or Haitians or Venezuelans or other communities that have been on the receiving end of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s so important for us to really think about our work as understanding the root causes and the role that U.S. foreign policy plays in migration right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Silky Shah, I want to thank you so much for being with us, executive director of Detention Watch Network, author of the book Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.

Coming up, we look at how Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, is helping DOGE build a master database to surveil and track immigrants. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Honduran musician Karla Lara performing in our Democracy Now! studio.