The mass-deportation effort by the Trump administration, which is all but certain to cost the American people much more money than it saves — and deprive multiple industries of an able and willing workforce — soldiers on.

We've known for months now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Trump administration have been sniffing around California for facillities they could put to use as migrant detention camps. And now they've landed on one in Kern County, a shuttered former private prison about 50 miles east of Bakersfield.

As the LA Times reported Friday, ICE has signed an initial six-month contract with private-prison contractor CoreCivic, providing $10 million in startup funding for a project to renovate and reopen a former private state prison in California City, a small city in Kern County about 100 miles from Los Angeles.

The state ended its lease of the prison in March 2024, following a 2019 state law that banned the use of private prisons. That law was the subject of a lawsuit by the first Trump administration and a prison contractor, and a federal court ultimately ruled last year that the law could apply only to state prisons, but the federal government could continue to use private contractors as it wished.

The facility currently has capacity for 2,560 beds, but it may be modified to accommodate more. And the notion that undocumented immigrants by the thousands who are otherwise innocent of any crimes will be hauled off to what is, in fact, a prison, will no doubt spark more protest.

As the LA Times notes, California ranks third out of the three states with the currently largest populations of immigrants in detention. ICE now has around 23,000 people in detention facilities, 3,200 of those in California. In Texas, 12,500 are now being detained, with over 7,000 in detention in Louisiana.

ICE is currently funded for 41,500 detention beds, and the Trump administration has said it wants to up this number to 100,000.

And this will come at great expense to taxpayers. As the Associated Press reports, ICE is using no-bid contracts and modified a number of existing agreements with private contractors to make this happen quickly, citing "compelling urgency" for doing this.

ICE recently modified a contract with another private-prison contractor, Florida-based Geo Group, to reopen a shuttered prison in southeastern Georgia to serve as a migrant detention camp for 1,868 migrants, to the tune of $66 million annually. They've also engaged in a $73 million no-bid contract with a company led by former federal immigration officials, per the AP, for "immigration enforcement support teams" and administrative work for the detention process.

A 2,500-bed prison in Dilley, Texas was recently reopened by ICE under a modified contract, with no competitive process.

Another prison in Leavenworth, Kansas that's owned by CoreCivic, which has previously been described as a "hell hole" by a federal judge, will also be reopened under a new ICE contract. The AP notes that that facility would be in ICE's range of operations out of Chicago, which is 400 miles away. CoreCivic's plans there are being met with pushback by the city.

We had previously heard that the feds were considering FCI Dublin, the shuttered women's prison in the East Bay, as a potential migrant facility, but those plans don't appear to have gone anywhere. There was also some discussion of using part of Travis Air Force Base, which was met with major local pushback.

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