Why this rural town wants an ICE facility

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

The Trump administration is planning to pour more than $38 billion into warehouses for mass immigrant detention. While some communities are starting to push back, one rural town has agreed to expand its detention facility. On today’s show, we visit a small town in Georgia to learn about the trade-offs of becoming a detention town.

Related episodes:
How well are ICE’s 12,000 new officers being trained?
How ICE crackdowns are affecting the workforce

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:02.0	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.4	I'm Waylon Wong.
0:15.2	Yesterday on the show, we talked about the hiring boom and immigration and customs
0:19.6	enforcement, or ICE. The Department of
0:22.0	Homeland Security says more than 12,000 new agents have joined the federal agency since last year.
0:28.4	The reason? To carry out President Trump's aggressive crackdown on illegal migration. There are about
0:34.8	71,000 people in detention right now, which is a record high. So at this point,
0:40.9	you might be asking yourself, where are these increasing numbers of people being held?
0:46.3	To help me explain all of this, I'm joined by NPR Sergio Martinez Beltran. He covers immigration.
0:52.5	Welcome to the indicator, Sergio. Hey, Waylon. Thanks so much for the invite. And you know, the short answer to that question you post is that the administration is building and expanding huge detention centers across the country, many in small economically depressed towns.
1:08.0	When you're in a rural community that relies on those jobs, this is truly our only
1:13.3	option as economic development. Today on the show, how and where the administration is expanding
1:21.6	its detention capacity and how one small town is reacting to the economic benefits and the negative tension associated with an ice facility in its backyard.
1:35.4	The Trump administration has dramatically changed how we as a country approach immigration enforcement.
1:41.9	Remember, there were millions of removals under President Obama,
1:45.6	but the majority of those removals were at the border. The Trump administration is going hard
1:51.2	on enforcement in the interior, picking people up in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.
1:56.8	And we know Trump is ambitious. His administration has said it even wants to be able to carry out even more detentions.
2:03.2	The goal, Wayland, is to be able to detain about 93,000 immigrants all at the same time.
2:08.4	And DHS has a lot of money right now to follow through on these big ambitions.
2:13.1	Despite the shutdown over the agency's funding, it got a big chunk of change from the so-called big beautiful bill.
	...

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