Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City jail in Phoenix in 2012Charlie Riedel, File/AP
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States, is embarking on a plan to drastically expand its detention infrastructure. But considering the $45 billion it’s been given for the job, the agency’s vision for its new facilities seems startlingly low-tech.
In July, the Wall Street Journal got its hands on internal government documents revealing that ICE wants to incarcerate more immigrants in tents, or “hardened soft-sided facilities.” The administration hopes to erect thousands of these tents “as quickly as possible to expand detention capacity…at US military bases and adjoining bricks-and-mortar ICE jails,” the Journal reported. Officials say they like this approach, at least for now, because they can quickly set up tons of beds in a few new locations rather than finding space at existing facilities here and there.
One CBP tent facility was so shoddily built, a lawsuit claimed, that an immigrant was able to rip out a door frame molding with his bare hands.”
But tents raise serious humanitarian and safety issues. “There’s a reason no one wants to live in a tent,” says Eunice Cho, an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “There are many, many logistical problems—with sanitation, getting food. They certainly are not weatherproof. They do not have the setup to make sure people’s medical concerns are addressed.”
Prior to 2025, ICE did not use tents for long-term detention, but soft-sided facilities are not completely new in the incarceration realm. Here are some recent examples, each highlighting problems that are almost sure to repeat themselves as the Trump administration rolls out its plan.
Arizona’s Infamous Tent City
In 1993, then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—whom Trump has described as an “American patriot”—responded to jail overcrowding by setting up an outdoor detention space in Phoenix. At its peak, his team housed up to 1,700 people at a time, many of them still awaiting trial on criminal charges, in dozens of military tents left over from the Korean War. In the 2000s, Arpaio became obsessed with illegal immigration, and soon his “Tent City” was filled with undocumented people who’d been picked up by his deputies.
“Sheriff Joe,” who dressed his inmates in pink underwear and comical black-and-white-striped bandit uniforms, once referred to the facility as a “concentration camp.” He later claimed to be joking, but the conditions at Tent City were indisputably awful. As the Guardian reported, temperatures inside the tents could reach 130 degrees during the summer; lacking air-conditioning, detainees relied on wet towels to cool themselves. In the winter, the tents got down to 41 degrees some nights, while holes let in wind and rain that soaked the beds. Jail staff handed out trash bags as raincoats.
“Insufficient lighting hinders the medical staff from being able to clearly see what they are doing.”
Other corrections departments have deployed tents temporarily after emergencies, such as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But the “deliberate and permanent use of tents for the purposes of humiliation and punishment” has been rare, says David Muhammad, a corrections expert who now directs the nonprofit National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.
Taxpayers in Maricopa County ultimately paid more than $100 million in litigation costs as former inmates sued over Tent City conditions and other misconduct by the sheriff’s office, but Arpaio did not bow to pressure. A federal court held him in criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order to stop detaining so many immigrants. (Trump pardoned him in 2017, the year Tent City closed.)
Customs and Border Protection tents
ICE’s interest in tents is new, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—which polices border crossings and, unlike ICE, is not supposed to detain people for longer than 72 hours—has used them in the past. So has the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which detains immigrant children.
In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security audited a CBP station in El Paso, Texas, and found detainees in “netting-covered enclosures” in a parking lot. “There is no flooring other than the asphalt for the detainees to sleep on,” the auditor wrote. “Chain link fencing had been placed underneath the netting, but not safely…” Immigrants lacked direct access to water or places to sit. The auditor noted that it would be difficult to stop viruses from spreading if anyone got sick.
At another facility in El Paso, a tent was being used for medical triage, but “insufficient lighting hinders the medical staff from being able to clearly see what they are doing and increases the risk for errors to occur,” the auditor wrote. Meals were stored at dangerously high temperatures, creating a risk of food poisoning, the report added.
Dehumanizing immigrants and encouraging them to self-deport is “part of the design.”
In July, former staff from one of El Paso’s CBP tent facilities sued the companies that constructed it, claiming the workmanship was so shoddy that an immigrant was able to rip out a door frame molding with his bare hands, leading to an altercation that left officers injured. (In April, according to ProPublica, an ICE official said one of the companies, Deployed Resources, which made its name setting up tents for popular music festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, was “adding more rigid structures inside” CBP tents in El Paso to make them more secure.)
Amid a drop in border crossings, CBP has fewer people to detain, so in March it gave ICE one of Deployed Resources’ El Paso facilities, in part to relieve overcrowding at other ICE detention centers, according to the local media outlet El Paso Matters. Tents like these were “designed to be temporary,” says Stacy Suh, a program director at Detention Watch Network, a national coalition opposed to immigrant detention. “It’s not meant for longer-term detention, but we’re seeing a shift.”
Alligator Alcatraz
The Trump administration is inviting states to get involved in building soft-sided facilities. Florida recently opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent camp on an abandoned airstrip in the Everglades that was holding about 900 immigrants in July and could have capacity to detain thousands more by the end of August.
As my colleague Laura Morel has reported, horror stories are already emerging—from malfunctioning air conditioners to “rampant mosquitoes swarming” the facility. “People are not getting access to showers for days,” according to Suh. The ACLU’s Cho told me the toilets there are overflowing, the power frequently goes out, and detainees are reportedly given only two to three minutes to eat in the mess tent: “This kind of facility and the logistics lead to innumerable opportunities for cruelty,” she says—and what happens when a hurricane hits? Tents are already leaking and flooding after mere rainstorms.
Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the first Trump administration, has described Alligator Alcatraz as “an insult.” Immigration enforcement requires “real detention facilities and actual jails,” Morgan wrote in a Fox News op-ed, “not circus tents surrounded by reptiles.”
The awful conditions work to the administration’s advantage, Suh told me, by creating a spectacle that dehumanizes immigrants and encourages them to self-deport: “It’s part of the design.” Or, as The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer more generally describes the administration’s tactics, “the cruelty is the point.”
Florida officials have suggested that Alligator Alcatraz is for hardened criminals, but many of its detainees have no prior arrests. The Miami Herald reported that even a 15-year-old boy was locked up. Experts I spoke with said the Trump administration needs so many detention beds only because it’s arresting immigrants who might not have been detained by prior administrations—undocumented but otherwise law-abiding people living peaceful and productive lives.
And tents, adds Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, are likely unnecessary given how many jails around the country have surplus bedspace. “You have tons of existing facilities,” he says. ICE already contracts with some of them and could contract with more.
Nevertheless, additional tent facilities are on the way. The administration is gearing up to divert $608 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget to help states build their own immigrant detention centers. Florida officials expect to recoup the costs from Alligator Alcatraz.
And those costs are not insignificant. Tent cities may seem cheap—they’re certainly less expensive to build than brick-and-mortar jails—but they’re very pricy to operate, largely because more staff are needed to deal with the logistical challenges. In 2018, Vox found that it cost $775 per day to house an immigrant in a tent city vs. $133 to $319 to house them in a traditional detention center—and just $4.50 per day to let them stay in the community with an ankle monitor. Alligator Alcatraz will cost taxpayers a whopping $450 million annually.
“This isn’t cost-cutting,” wrote former CBP commissioner Morgan. “It’s theater. Worse, it’s dangerous.”