HV Detention Watch #9 – The Ulster Immigrant Defense Network

Media monitoring compiled by Susan Manuel, September 3-8, 2026

Long term deportation infrastructure under way

Project Saltbox, an independent volunteer-run investigative platform’s 4 September op-ed outlined an ICE plan to build the future of immigration enforcement: “From child-tracking contracts to government-owned prisons, ICE is creating infrastructure designed to outlast the current administration.” The article notes the record high number of arrests — more than 90,000 in June and July — and goes on to say, “ICE has dramatically increased its contract spend, awarding over $4 billion in the last two months alone.

Those arrest and spending numbers are concerning at face value. But what should concern us even more is what ICE is buying: systems designed not just to support the current enforcement push, but to reshape immigration detention and enforcement in this country for decades to come.” The article breaks down the infrastructure into sections: child location, facility ownership, turnkey operations and surveillance systems.

Some $20 billion in contract value has been awarded this year to locate immigrant children. “Under the guise of child welfare, ICE is collecting data on potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrant children and their caretakers.” The “ready-made infrastructure includes contractor-built databases linking children to sponsors, address verification and skip tracing services, teams trained in conducting home visits and systems for routing the information to ICE offices.” [Editors note: skip tracing is used to locate individuals who are hard to find, have moved without a forwarding address, or are intentionally avoiding contact.]

In terms of detention spaces, ICE is now buying or building property, instead of leasing or contracting, due to local efforts to ban privately-owned detention centers. “In other words, the agency was and is trying to circumvent state and local opposition and oversight.” This investment in detention infrastructure will be “hard if not impossible to undo. …. That is the point of this pivot: to turn detention from a network of politically vulnerable contracts into a permanent, federally owned footprint that communities will have far less power to stop.”

“Turnkey” sites are being developed in Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, and Washington. Ten-year contracts say that GEO group will provide facility operations, including medical care, transportation, food, staffing, security, etc. “ICE wants one contractor to deliver a detention center that is ready to operate.” The community in which the facility is located would not see individual contracts for services. “Congress, local officials, advocates and the public may have far less notice and far fewer opportunities to intervene, before those changes are already underway or people are already being detained inside.”

Surveillance systems under development will “allow ICE to map where people go, who they interact with, and how they move through their daily lives…. These capabilities do not disappear when a particular operation ends. They can be redirected to a new target population…or activated during the next enforcement surge with far less public notice than a new detention center or high-profile raid. …. The next fight is not only over the raids and arrests we can see. It is over the infrastructure being built now to make the next surge easier, less visible, faster and harder to stop.”

“The next fight is not only over the raids and arrests we can see.

It is over the infrastructure being built now to make the next surge easier, less visible, faster and harder to stop.”

End to Salvador TPS delayed

Temporary Protected Status which has covered some 170,000 Salvadorans since 1990 was to expire on 9 September. On that day, the Trump administration waffled and said it would make an announcement about the program’s future at the “appropriate time,” and until then “Salvadoran individuals present in the US under TPS retain protection.” The New York Times wrote that “the move stands in stark contrast to how the Trump administration has treated the 350,000 Haitians whose protections expired in July” and who have been deported to a failed state, and/or shackled with electronic monitors.

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has been a “willing White House ally,” the Times wrote, helping to detain hundreds of migrants to the U.S. in a notorious prison. Also, “TPS for Salvadorans earns Mr. Bukele political points at home where remittances from U.S.-based family members are critical to the economy. …. The ending of the program would be catastrophic for Mr. Bukele’s standing with the Salvadoran diaspora,” the Times wrote. And, “El Salvador appears to have reaped benefits from Mr. Bukele’s willingness to collaborate with Mr. Trump.”

The U.S. State Department in 2025 upgraded El Salvador’s travel advisory status to its highest safety rating, above Western European nations like France, after Bukele accepted Venezuelan migrants into its prison system. Still, many Salvadorans who have been in the U.S. for the past 25 years are preparing to self-deport, The Times wrote.

Angel helps kids

The Washington Post profiled Casey Revkin, a “California mom” who began helping immigrant children a decade ago and has been putting money into the commissary accounts of detained immigrant children so that they can buy healthful food and essentials like toothbrushes. She is currently sending more than $10,000 a week through her nonprofit, Each Step Home, to families held at the Dilley detention center in Texas.

“She’s a fairy godmother,” said Kristin Etter, an attorney with the Texas Immigration Law Council. “People literally could not survive Dilley without her.” Dilley and other facilities use third-party software systems that allow individuals to deposit funds for a specific detainee. Revkin, who reports have described as a financial expert and human rights advocate, sends money to 67 families a week. The funds largely come from small dollar donations from people who have learned about her campaign.

DHS spokespeople defended their provision of water and food at the detention centers. Revkin says in addition to bad food and unsafe conditions, children are being held beyond the 21-day limit established by the Flores Settlement Agreement. “We are not asking to abolish ICE or change the system,” she said. “We are saying stop locking up children. There are humane alternatives that allow people to live freely while their cases are adjudicated.”

Using U.S. Census data from 2012-16, Claude estimated that the eight Hudson Valley counties have more than 13,500 residents with Salvadoran ancestry. (All numbers are approximate.)

That included 700+ in Ulster, 1,200+ in Orange, and 500+ in Dutchess. The counties with the most Salvadorans were Westchester with 6,614 and Rockland, 4,072.

Many holes in last year’s Cato, NY, ICE raid

A year ago, more than 60 federal immigration agents stormed the Nutrition Bar Confectioners in upstate Cato on the first day of school. They herded pregnant women and young mothers into a break room packed with some 160 workers, Bloomberg Law reported in a story on the weakness in the federal case leading to the raid. In an operation planned for months, agents brought two search warrants—one to seize records and electronics that could prove the company had illegal workers and the other to conduct “consensual” questioning of employees.

According to the search warrant application, investigators determined that in the first quarter of 2025, 134 of the company’s 225 workers were using Social Security numbers that belonged to someone else, had been assigned to dead people, or were fabricated. However, a federal judge found that the agents simply rounded up workers, separating English from Spanish speakers, before looking at any records.

“A year after one of the largest immigration raids in recent NY history, many of the assertions made at the time by immigration officials, DOJ attorneys and ICE agents have been refuted by court filings, affidavits, body cam footage and judicial rulings,” Bloomberg Law reported. Fifty seven workers, some with valid work permits and others awaiting asylum hearings, were detained and shipped to facilities in Texas and Louisiana. None of those detained had criminal histories other than five charged with reentering the country illegally. Nearly all were deported. No criminal charges have been filed against the company, which claims it had not broken any laws.

Bloomberg Law quoted Jessica Maxwell, director of the Workers Center of Central New York, who speculated that “…ICE is experimenting on raids like this, and not just in Cato. Let’s see what happens if we go into a workplace, even if the warrant can’t really hold up, and keep doing it until we see if there are any consequences.”

On Sept. 10, 2026, the Worker Justice Center of NY, NY Civil Liberties Union, and Paul Tuck Law filed a class action suit against the Dept. of Homeland Security for its raid on the Cato factory.

You can read their media release here.