Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, migrant arrests have surged in the United States. More than 610,000 people have passed through detention centres run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal immigration agency in under two years. The pace only continues to accelerate: in August 2026, nearly 51,000 arrests were made in a single month – a record for Trump’s second term. Who are the people being held in these centres? What are their living conditions like? And how is Trump’s mass deportation policy upending the lives of families settled in the United States? In this report, Valérie Defert and Pierrick Leurent investigate the issue in Texas – the heart of the new US immigration detention system.
