The US deportation machine is rapidly expanding its capacity to terrorize and disappear people. With support from the Trump Administration, masked and unidentified federal agents have been kidnapping people around the country and forcing them into a labyrinth of field offices and detention centers. Much of the response to this cruel reign of terror has focused on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in major cities — most notably in Los Angeles, where Trump imposed an occupying military force of thousands of National Guardsmen and Marines in June.

ICE is of course a worthy target for resistance. It is a federal law enforcement agency that increasingly resembles a secret police force, and it’s being used to target political dissidence and arbitrarily detain whomever it wants. Created in 2003, ICE is now poised to become the highest-funded federal police force in US history. But in addition to — and in coordination with — ICE, officers from numerous other agencies are working to abduct people from farms, factories, and the streets of big cities and small towns. The extent to which this expanding federal police state relies on a vast network of jails, prisons, and local police to do its brutal work is often overlooked. The US’s sprawling carceral infrastructure — built up across the land over decades, and designed from the start to dehumanize — enables the capture and deportation of increasing numbers of people. As the federal government deputizes these federal, state, and local agencies to partake in ICE’s work, it remakes existing infrastructure and political relationships in ICE’s image: remakes them, that is, toward fascism.

A recent raid in rural Kentucky illustrated several features of this transformed and expanded deportation machine. On the afternoon of May 29, 2025, armed federal agents descended on the small city of Harlan in a fleet of black SUVs and a white unmarked van. The agents — employees not of ICE, but of the Drug Enforcement Administration — raided Sazon Steakhouse, a popular Mexican restaurant. According to Jennifer McDaniels, who reported on the raid and its aftermath for the local Tri-City News, the agents handcuffed “an unconfirmed number of individuals . . . and loaded them in an unmarked white van” before driving away. Some people in the Harlan community report that there was a simultaneous raid at El Charrito, a restaurant down the road from Sazon.

Harlan sits in the coalfield of eastern Kentucky and has been immortalized in popular culture for its history of labor struggle and class warfare. The people of Harlan who gathered in the parking lot of Sazon during the raid were held back by Kentucky State Police and told that the abduction of their neighbors by the DEA was part of “an ongoing drug investigation.” Given Kentucky’s recent status as one of the states most affected by the opioid crisis —and given the state’s distinction of having one of the highest local jail incarceration rates on the planet — the words “ongoing drug investigation” bought DEA agents enough time to abduct a group of workers and leave town unimpeded. In Kentucky, as around the United States, mass criminalization and the jail and prison boom of the past thirty-five years have set the stage for federal police to disappear people in broad daylight.

McDaniels, the Tri-City News reporter, lives in Harlan County and was on the scene during the raid in May. In the course of her reporting, she was told by a DEA spokesperson that the agents had come to Sazon for a “judicially authorized law enforcement operation pursuant to a drug investigation.” She was also told that the investigation was ongoing, and that there would be no further comment.

We spoke with McDaniels at Sazon in June. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” she said. “And our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. We took it personal here. We just really want to know what’s happening . . . and nobody’s telling us.”

Opacity and confusion are critical tools of the US police state. Collaborations across jurisdiction and scale rely on mystification. McDaniels noted that in the days following May 29, people in Harlan looked through online jail rosters and found that at least thirteen people had been taken from the community and booked into the Laurel County Correctional Center, a county jail seventy miles away on the western edge of eastern Kentucky’s coal country. They saw that the roster listed all the cases as “Immigration,” and that no one had been charged with a drug offense.

Why send in the DEA to execute an immigration raid unrelated to drugs — to, in effect, do the work of ICE? This flexibility of objective and jurisdiction is a feature of police power. The US deportation apparatus can repurpose agencies whose authority would seem to lie outside immigration. Maria (not her real name), an immigrant justice advocate we spoke with in Lexington, noted that the Harlan immigration raid executed by the DEA was unexceptional. According to Maria, there are fewer than twenty ICE agents living in Kentucky and they are concentrated largely in Louisville; several other federal agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI, have been involved in carrying out immigration raids in the state. “That’s the fight I’m having with [our] city council,” Maria said, “that federal agents can morph into ICE at any point and can make arrests if they suspect you are undocumented. Especially in smaller counties, we are seeing cooperation between DEA and ICE to go after people.” Reports from around the country, including documentation of the startling conscription of IRS agents into carrying out immigration arrests, corroborates these observations in Kentucky.

The official Instagram page of the Louisville office of the DEA boasts openly about the agency’s collaboration with ICE, ATF, and local police, as well as its role in arresting immigrants in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. The agency’s social media posts frequently showcase what the scholar Travis Linnemann has called “police trophy shots,” where officers representing different agencies pose with arrested immigrants. A characteristic post, from March 24, 2025, reads, “#DEA agents are working with @DHSgov personnel to enforce US #immigration laws and assist with the #removal of #illegal #migrants from our communities. #deportations.” Another post, from June 12, shows ten people clearly arrested at work, in a restaurant, sitting in handcuffs in the dining area in their aprons. The caption reads: “#DEA does not turn a blind eye to immigration crimes. If we encounter anyone who is in this country illegally during a drug investigation, those individuals can expect to be arrested and processed for deportation.” Posts announcing these partnerships with the Department of Homeland Security started in early February 2025, just weeks into the Trump Administration.

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In Harlan, DEA agents abducted both men and women; the youngest was 18 years old and the oldest was in her fifties. After their detention in the Laurel County Correctional Center, abductees were transferred to the Kenton County Detention Center in northern Kentucky on June 2. They were held in Kenton County until June 9, at which point they were listed on the jail roster as having been transferred out of state. We could not find any of the people who had been abducted from Harlan on ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System, and, after a few days, there was no record of them ever having been detained in the Kenton County jail. But by comparing information about people abducted in Harlan with ICE detainer data obtained by the Deportation Data Project via Freedom of Information Act requests, we could see that at least a few people were moved from Kenton County to the Clay County Jail in Indiana. From Clay County, at least one person was moved to the Broadview Service Staging Area in Illinois, just outside Chicago, and from there, deported from the Gary/Chicago International Airport in Gary, Indiana.

Following these trajectories illuminates the significant role county jails — many of them recently built or expanded — play in the infrastructure of detention.

The Laurel County Correctional Center is a massive county jail that was opened in 2020 in London, Kentucky. The jail cost the county $24 million and has a capacity of almost seven hundred beds, with the ability to expand to a thousand beds — several times the capacity of the previous county jail. Laurel County’s population is just over 60,000; Lexington, ninety minutes north, and with five times the population, has a jail capacity of 1,300.

The eye-watering size of the new jail was financially motivated: the Laurel County Correctional Center was built with the purpose of generating revenue by renting jail beds to federal agencies such as ICE and the United States Marshals Service (USMS). This process is not unique to Kentucky. Recent reporting from the New York Times has documented how ICE has worked with rural communities in Louisiana to repurpose existing state prisons and county jails, converting them into detention centers. During the first Trump Administration, this federal capture of jail and prison capacity tripled the number of ICE detention beds in the state. Other reporting and independent research have shown similar arrangements in Florida, Texas, and beyond. “County jails,” as the immigration scholar and activist Silky Shah has written, “are the bedrock of the detention system.”

Federal agencies give Laurel County $70 a day for each person held by the county on their behalf. While Laurel County signed an Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) with USMS and not specifically with ICE, it is well understood that IGSAs with USMS can be used by other federal agencies. As an Iowa county jail administrator explained in 2019, “We have a contract with the Marshals, but we never actually housed Marshal inmates. It’s just that ICE piggybacked off that, so we just have ICE inmates.”

Laurel County is now an important hub for today’s federal police state — and, with the revenue gained from the jail, a place where everyday life in the county is tied directly to masked federal agents disappearing neighbors from their workplaces and off the streets. “We can use the money we’re saving from the jail to help our county progress in a lot of different ways,” the judge-executive David Westerfield said in 2021. “We will spread it among the magisterial districts for more roadwork. The biggest thing I’m looking for is to make the county better for the people.”

Better for which people? By 2022, two years after the opening of the enlarged Laurel County Correctional Center, 2 percent of all working-age people in Laurel County, on any given day, were locked up in the county jail — an incarceration rate six and a half times that of the United States as a whole.

This use of local jails as a sort of protofascist infrastructure has unfolded over decades, a product of the quiet jail boom that expanded local jail capacity across the country, particularly in rural communities. The addition of Section 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996 inaugurated the formal deputization of local and state police to carry out specific immigration enforcement policies. But the use of local jails in rural counties specifically for the purposes of immigration detention has grown especially rapidly since the second Trump Administration began.

North of Laurel County, Kenton County’s collaboration with ICE is a recent development. The county signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE in May 2025, one of ten jurisdictions in Kentucky that have signed such an agreement since the first week of March. Elsewhere on some of the Harlan detainees’ trajectory of terror, the Clay County Jail — in Brazil, Indiana, halfway between Louisville and Chicago — was recently expanded in the wake of the Illinois Way Forward Act (SB 667), a 2021 law that ended Illinois jail contracts with ICE. The ICE revenue, instead, has flowed to Clay County.

More and bigger detention infrastructure follows a strict logic of “if you build it, they will fill it.” Larger county jails not only enable the incarceration of more people by local police, they also offer flexible detention capacity to ICE and other federal agencies. As one recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, local jails both “obscure and facilitate” mass deportation.

Unsurprisingly, immigration arrests and detentions have continued in central and eastern Kentucky since the May 29 raid in Harlan. On Sunday, June 8, between 5 AM and 11 AM, twenty-five women were booked into the Laurel County Correctional Center on immigration charges; an additional eighteen people were booked on immigration charges three days later. The next day, June 12, seven more people were booked into the Kenton County Detention Center.

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On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which allocates $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next four years. With recent funding levels for ICE at around $9 billion per year, the bill exponentially expands the scope of the agency, including more than $40 billion for border infrastructure, more than $40 billion for new facilities, and more than $25 billion for hiring new officers. The funding, according to one analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, will “supercharge” what is already an expansive geography of detention. A senior fellow at the American Immigration Council noted that over the four-year period, “ICE’s budget would be slightly larger than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons, and US Marshals Service combined. ICE would have more funding than any federal law enforcement agency has had in history.”

In Kentucky, more than a thousand people have been ensnared in this immigrant dragnet since January. According to Maria, there have been no concomitant expansions to legal or other support services for people arrested on immigration charges, nor for their families or communities. “We have zero nonprofit organizations in Kentucky that can do detention work,” she told us. “We don’t have the infrastructure to tackle this work, and that’s my worst nightmare.”

While we track and fight the deployment of the Marines and National Guard in Los Angeles, turn our attention to the creation of a massive detention facility in the Florida Everglades, and prepare for the expansion of ICE enabled by the bill, we should not overlook the ways federal mandates mobilize and even repurpose ostensibly distinct agencies and capacities of the state. Midsize city offices of the DEA; small-town sheriff’s departments; expanded county jails; legal agreements between local and federal agencies — these are the mundane infrastructures that fascism requires.