The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up
“You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”—Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar
America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.
Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.
After all, a police state requires a prison state. And no one is cheering louder than the private prison corporations making money hand over fist from Trump’s expansion of federal detention.
Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.
At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.
With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.
The scope of this expansion is staggering.
The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—a move that will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the FBI, the DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons combined.
Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.
Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer: immigrants, activists, journalists, business owners, military veterans, and even spouses of American citizens.
What’s more, the vast majority of those being detained are not violent criminals.
According to analyst Robert Reich, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Many are longtime residents, laborers, and small business owners—people who have contributed to the economy for years.
Removing these individuals from the workforce and imprisoning them not only devastates families and communities—it burdens taxpayers and weakens the economy.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, it costs more than $150 a day to detain a single immigrant—totaling over $3 billion annually for ICE detention alone. Meanwhile, undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.
These are the workers who keep industries running—doing the jobs many Americans refuse. Locking them up doesn’t save money; it dismantles the very labor force that sustains the economy.
Like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.
Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves.
It’s not just authoritarian—it’s bad economics, funneling tax dollars into a bureaucracy that grows government while delivering no real public benefit.
We’re being told it’s about public safety and border control—but in reality, it’s a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy that shifts billions from productive parts of the economy into a black hole of surveillance, cement, and razor wire.
Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.
In other words, this isn’t just a prison expansion—it’s a taxpayer-funded machine that extracts labor from the very people it imprisons, while draining billions from the economy and undermining the industries it claims to protect in order to help corporations make a larger profit.
According to The New York Times, at least 60,000 immigrants were put to work in ICE detention centers in 2013—more than were employed by any single private employer in the country at the time. Paid as little as 13 cents an hour—or nothing at all—these civil detainees were used to prepare meals, clean facilities, and even provide services to other government institutions.
Unlike convicted criminals, these individuals are not serving sentences. Most are civil detainees awaiting immigration hearings, and roughly half are ultimately allowed to stay in the country. Yet while they await due process, they are locked up, stripped of their rights, and forced to work for pennies on the dollar—all while the government and its contractors avoid paying minimum wage and save tens of milli
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
