ICE Wants to Build a Shadow Deportation Network in Texas -- WIRED
Last edited Fri Oct 31, 2025, 07:53 PM - Edit history (1)
Much more detail on law and state leo's, including a video, at
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-building-a-24-7-shadow-transportation-network-across-texas/
Early planning documents reviewed by WIRED describe a statewide transport grid designed for steady detainee transfers across Texas, with ICE estimating each trip to average 100 miles. Every county would have its own small, around-the-clock team of contractors collecting immigrants from local authorities deputized by ICE. ...The plan fits neatly into that strategy; a logistical framework for a system built to move detainees faster and farther, with fewer federal agents ever seen in public...
According to the document, ICE envisions 254 transport hubs statewide—one for each Texas county—each staffed continuously by two armed contractor personnel. Vehicles must be able to respond within 30 minutes, maintaining an 80-percent readiness rate across three daily shifts. ICE’s staffing model adds a 50-percent cushion for leave and turnover, raising staffing needs by half over the baseline necessary to keep the system running uninterrupted.
WIRED calculates this would require more than 2,000 full-time personnel, in addition to a fleet of hundreds of SUVs roving the state at all hours.
What the plan describes, in essence, is a shadow logistics network built on agreements with local police departments under the 287(g) program. These once symbolic gestures of cooperation are today a pipeline for real-time biometric checks and arrest notifications. Transportation is merely the next logical step. For ICE, it will create a closed loop:
Local authorities apprehend immigrants.
Private contractors deliver them to either a local jail (paid to house detainees) or
a detention site run by a private corporation.
The plan even specifies that contractors must maintain their own dispatch and command-and-control systems to manage movements statewide.
ICE is all but extricating itself from the process—becoming little more than an overseer that sets routes, response times, and reporting standards—while effectively turning immigration enforcement into a service industry; a continuous, privatized, and largely unseen system capable of moving detainees hundreds of miles overnight while operating without direct federal presence.
In June, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 8, requiring any sheriff who runs a jail to seek a 287(g) agreement with ICE. The law aims to create “uniformity and cooperation among all counties,” according to the bill’s sponsors. Governor Greg Abbot signed the bill on June 20. It is scheduled to take effect at the start of the new year."
Nowhere does DHS comment on who the "steady stream of detainees" are.
They''ve said detainees are immigrants who'll be deported. We know many have been U.S. citizens, and that 9 out of 10 have no criminal backgrounds. Under this setup we wouldn't really know if those violations would continue.
They could be U.S. citizens. We wouldn't know.
Because it's a privatized, industrialized, networked gulag. Illegal. Corporate.
Presented at first as deportation centers. But later? work camps? death camps? We wouldn't know.
This, while we are distracted by a resource war threatened by the felon under pretext of a drug war.
= new reply since forum marked as read
