Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.

Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.

We’re now learning that this year, ICE plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.

Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”

The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:

Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?

Favor: 35 percent

Oppose: 64 percent

Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.

But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually okay with such a horror? Apparently it is.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some analysts suggested that his win reflected a decisive cultural shift in the direction of his restrictionist views on immigration, one that Democrats must accommodate themselves to going forward. Call it the “MAGA Moment” thesis.

But it’s hard to square that idea with what we’re seeing now. As political scientist Julia Azari argues, notions of such a shift are bound up with the deeper idea that the culture is undergoing a meaningful conservative reorientation on race and nationalism. Yet that now looks baseless, Azari notes, because “the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.”

To wit: Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad.

So at the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering of the country and their effort to choke off all humanitarian pathways for settling here. Such public sentiments seem very much at odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.

Relatedly, Substacker Brian Beutler recently argued that social signaling is generating opposition to Trump’s worst policies, as more and more ordinary people see them as shameful and heinous in the most basic moral and human terms. Something like that is helping drive opposition to detention centers: See this remarkable column in the Kansas City Star that seeks to shame warehouse owners into refraining from selling to ICE, arguing that doing so risks social ostracism. Similar efforts probably helped persuade owners to nix selling in Oklahoma and deep red parts of Virginia. The growing opposition to ICE prison camps suggests much, much more of this to come.

In short: If there ever was a big “MAGA Moment” cultural shift on immigration, well, it’s already long gone.