Trump Admin Now Also Using Federal Prisons To Detain Migrants As Part Of Crackdown

As President Donald Trump continues carrying out what he has vowed will be the largest deportation operation in American history, his administration is now using federal prisons to detain undocumented migrants. The move comes despite a lack of staff, infrastructure and budgetary shortages, media reported.

It remains unclear how many individuals are being detained in these prisons, as the Bureau of Prisons declined to provide that detail in a recent statement to The Associated Press. However, three people familiar with the matter said the federal jails used for these efforts are located in Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, and the federal prisons are in Atlanta, Leavenworth, Kansas and Berlin, New Hampshire.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also told the AP that the Miami jail alone is set to receive up to 500 detainees.

In a recent statement, the Bureau stood by the Trump administration, saying it would continue assisting the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "by housing detainees and will continue to support our law enforcement partners to fulfill the administration's policy objectives."

The recent use of the federal prison system comes amid continuous reports of the bureau's straining resources.

The Bureau of Prisons is the Justice Department's biggest agency with more than 30,000 employees, 122 facilities, 155,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion. In December, the agency said it was closing one prison and idling six prison camps to address "significant challenges, including a critical staffing shortage, crumbling infrastructure and limited budgetary resources," according to Border Report.

Similarly, a 2022 investigation by The Associated Press shows deep, previously unreported flaws within the agency. That report revealed layers of abuse, neglect and leadership missteps— including rampant sexual abuse by workers, severe staffing shortages, inmate escapes and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic— leading directly to the agency's director announcing his resignation that year.

In that report, nearly one-third of federal correctional officer positions remained vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates. Similarly, more than 100 Bureau of Prisons workers were arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019, but the agency reportedly turned a blind eye, in some cases failing to suspend them after their arrests.

The usage of federal jails and prisons come as President Trump announced late January in a memo his plans to house up to 30,000 migrants at Guantanamo Bay suspected of being in the U.S. unlawfully. After that announcement, the White House directed the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to "take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity."

However, that directive has been met with several legal challenges. On Monday, a federal court temporarily blocked Trump from sending three Venezuelan men from immigration detention in New Mexico to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

The men are currently being held at Otero County Processing Center, in New Mexico and "have a pending case before the court challenging their unlawfully prolonged detention," according to a statement from The Center for Constitutional Rights. They added that the men faced the risk of "imminent transfer to the island prison," Axios reports.