April 24 (UPI) — Hundreds of rallies are planned nationwide on Saturday as part of a “Communities Not Cages” action aimed at protesting the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The protests come amid ICE’s plans to construct eight new detection centers and 16 processing centers, adding at least 116,000 beds to the number the agency has available for detaining people who are allegedly in the country illegally, Axios reported.
At the end of March, No Kings held its third protest — which saw more than 3,000 simultaneous demonstrations across the United States — since President Donald Trump retook office and engaged in a crackdown on immigration.
Detention Watch Network, the organization behind this Saturday’s rallies, called the scouting, purchasing and retrofitting of warehouses to detain between 1,500 and 10,000 people each “particularly horrifying.”
“Shockingly, ICE’s budget now exceeds many militaries around the world,” the organization said on its website.
“In the face of the administration’s unrelenting expansion of immigration detention, communities across the country are demanding to shut down detention centers and halt detention expansion,” it said.
One local group that is coordinating with Detention Watch Network’s “Communities Not Cages National Day of Action” is Shut Down Etowah, a group that previously protested the Biden administration until it stopped detaining people there, AL.com reported.
The Etowah County, Ala., facility is “too broken to be fixed,” the group said this week in a press release, noting that its’ “atrocious” conditions include bed bugs, 23-hour lockdowns and light fixtures that have not been fixed.
ICE earlier this year said it was launching a program under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act after lauding its 2025 record of motivating 2.5 million alleged illegal immigrants to leave the country, more than 600,000 of whom were arrested and deported.
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