The Trump administration is hiding mass detention inside vans that follow arrests.
Buried in a $7 billion construction contract dump signed Sunday, paperwork first obtained by the watchdog group Project Salt Box and reported by NPR this week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to deploy “mobile detention facilities” across Pennsylvania. These are vans operated by GTI, the transportation arm of GEO Group, one of ICE’s primary private contractors. The vans will follow ICE officers into the field as arrests happen. They will hold human beings until they are “full” or until the operation ends.
That is the entire standard.
Not how long a person may remain inside. Not how a person uses a bathroom. Not how a person is fed. Not whether there is medical screening, a phone call, a lawyer, a minimum age, or a maximum stay.
The paperwork says women cannot be held in the vans for more than ten hours. It says nothing about men. It says nothing about food, water, sanitation, or the duration of confinement. The same administration that stripped political-interference language from its scientific-integrity policy cannot be bothered to write down how a person in federal custody uses a toilet.
This is what mass deportation looks like after the warehouses fail.
ICE spent 2025 buying enormous warehouses across the country and converting them into mega-detention centers. Communities answered with protests and lawsuits. Maryland sued. Residents of Williamsport and Roxbury stood up in town meetings. Linda Powell of Williamsport said, “We don’t need it here.”
The fixed-footprint strategy failed because a fixed footprint can be seen. It can be mapped, inspected, marched against, and challenged in court.
So the administration is trying a fixed footprint that moves.
The warehouse had an address. The van has a route.
The van can park behind a Home Depot, at a National Guard armory, on a state police barracks, or on any piece of federal or contracted land where a community has not yet organized. It has no zoning hearing. It has no county council meeting. It has no public entrance where a family can stand and ask who is inside. The lawsuit machine that killed the warehouses is about to discover that it has been given a moving target.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons described wanting squads of trucks rounding up immigrants and having the deportation process run like “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” That was supposed to be a sales pitch. It is the clearest description of the policy anyone in the administration has offered.
Prime means speed.
Prime means a package moves through the system until it reaches its destination.
Prime does not mean the package has a family, a lawyer, a medical condition, a fear of the dark, or a right to know where it is being taken.
The numbers tell us what kind of deportation this is. ICE arrested roughly 100,000 people in the last two months. About 70 percent of the people currently in ICE detention have no criminal record, according to TRAC Reports. Not 70 percent of those arrested. Seventy percent of those held.
The administration’s claim that it is hunting only the “worst of the worst” collapses inside that number.
Michael Wriston, a former military intelligence analyst and co-founder of Project Salt Box, said that if this were truly targeted enforcement, ICE would have “a list of a couple of names” and send officers to make specific arrests. The paperwork, he said, describes “sweeps.”
He is right.
When your enforcement model requires vans that follow officers into the field and hold people on the spot, you are not arresting only the worst of the worst. You are arresting whoever is standing near the van.
Pennsylvania was chosen for a reason. It is a large state where many police departments are barred by state law from cooperating with ICE. Detained immigrants cannot simply be dropped at the county jails ICE has historically used as overflow. They need to be held in ICE custody.
In Pennsylvania, ICE custody is increasingly going to mean a van.
Sanctuary policies did not slow the deportation machine. They forced the machine to invent a new limb.
George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group, told investors in August that ICE currently operates 68,000 detention beds and aims to reach 100,000. That leaves roughly 30,000 beds to find somewhere, fast. GEO Group’s transportation arm now offers the answer: overflow, surge capacity, a detention system that arrives with the arresting officers and leaves before a town can organize.
The vans are not an accidental detail. They are the infrastructure.
ICE became the highest-funded law-enforcement agency in the country after receiving a $75 billion supplement through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Department of Homeland Security signed construction contracts worth more than $7 billion to expand detention in five states, while Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania were announced simultaneously. The agency is not short of money. It is short of places where the public can see what the money is doing.
The warehouse strategy exposed the people, the contractors, the land, the permits, the lawsuits, and the local beneficiaries. The mobile strategy removes the address.
Even ICE’s existing detention system, already overcrowded and marked by deaths, has nominal federal oversight, an inspection regime, and recognized points of access for lawyers and consulates. The mobile units appear in one paragraph of one contract document. That document limits women’s detention to ten hours. It does not establish a maximum for anyone else.
The standard is the absence of a standard.
A person detained in a van behind a Home Depot will have no published guarantee of food, water, sanitation, medical care, a telephone call, legal access, or a timely transfer. The contract does not promise those things. The contract promises that the van will remain until it is full or the operation is done.
That is not a detention policy. It is a permission slip.
The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He also says, “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
But the Christian-right apparatus has built a rival gospel around these words. White evangelical leaders and media figures align themselves with Trump-era deportation while preaching Romans 13 as obedience, “order” as holiness, and law enforcement as the proof of righteousness. They invoke Jesus when he blesses their nation and silence him when he stands inside the stranger. They invoke Matthew 25 as a promise to the favored while ignoring its judgment on those who refuse the hungry, the imprisoned, and the foreigner.
You cannot use Romans 13 to make the state absolute and Matthew 25 to make the migrant invisible. You cannot preach order from the pulpit while accepting a policy that refuses to say how long a human being may be confined. The verses have not changed. The conduct has revealed what the citation was being used to hide.
The people inside these vans are not a logistics problem. They are not packages. They are not overflow. They are people whose bodies, names, families, and futures have been placed inside a system designed to move faster than accountability.
Those of us who have accepted the convenience of cheap labor, undocumented work, and a legal system that keeps millions in twilight status are not outside this judgment. I have taken work from contractors whose practices I should have refused. Catholic clergy have endorsed raids. Parishes have withheld sanctuary. Bishops have stayed silent while families were taken. The Catholic Church has defended its sanctity while failing people in its care.
Evangelical and cultural Christians have their own confession to make. White evangelical institutions and Christian-right media have lent religious language, votes, money, and moral cover to a deportation program that treats the stranger as disposable. We have allowed “order” to become a holy word for other people’s suffering. We have taught ourselves to see the migrant as a threat before seeing the migrant as a neighbor.
Our complicity does not make this policy less evil. It tells us why the machine has found so many willing hands.
Dorothy Day wrote that “the Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” The van is the state’s newest way of making that distinction at speed: the deserving person gets a hearing, perhaps; the undeserving person gets a seat in a vehicle with no posted limit.
You cannot call that order while refusing to say how long a human being may be confined.
You cannot call that targeted enforcement when 70 percent of the people already detained have no criminal record.
You cannot call that accountability when the detention site moves faster than the people trying to find it.
The administration learned from its own defeat. It learned that a permanent detention center can be seen, named, protested, sued, and shut down. It has now designed a detention system that can move before the community knows where to stand.
This is not a softer machine.
It is the same machine, scaled down, sped up, and stripped of the accountability mechanisms the warehouse strategy accidentally exposed.
Romero once said, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people … I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!” The command belongs here. Stop building a deportation system that treats human beings as cargo. Stop placing the power to confine inside vehicles with no published rules for confinement. Stop calling disappearance efficiency.
A humane immigration policy would protect the right to asylum, keep families together, provide counsel and medical care, and make every exercise of state power visible, reviewable, and answerable. It would recognize the migrant as a neighbor before it recognized the migrant as a case. Catholic Social Teaching calls that human dignity. Matthew 25 calls it the test.
The vans are coming. The vans are here. The paperwork describes them.
The infrastructure of mass deportation does not need to be permanent to be terrifying.
It just needs to be mobile.