1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

Trump and Republicans’ new budget increases the allocation to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to $700 billion over 4 years up from $9 billion per year. A large part of that increase is for the construction of new detention facilities. In a memo released on July 8th, 2025, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons, immigrants who entered the United States without authorization will no longer be eligible for bond hearings during deportation proceedings. The memo directs ICE officers to detain these individuals for the entire duration of their removal proceedings, which could potentially span months or even years. Under the new directive, bond hearings are prohibited except in rare instances where ICE officers may grant parole, effectively removing the immigration judge's discretion in these cases. The policy will impact millions of immigrants in the United States, those who are undocumented, those who seek asylum, those who have overstayed visas and those who are picked up "inadvertently" by ICE. I am sharing all of this with you because we will now have new facilities to put these people for years and federal guidelines allow them to be assigned to work for wages on the order of $0.12/hour. This will essentially create a class of slaves in federal detention unable to extricate themselves from slavery for years. Sounds dystopian and yet here we are. I want you to stop this. I want you to claw back the ICE budget, I want you to make sure we are not creating slave concentration camps. I want you to get into every ICE detention facility you can as often as you can to inspect - You can do that with no notice. I want you to resist this fascist assault to create a class of slaves in concentration camps. THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE AS AMERICANS AND YOU NEED TO STAND UP AND STOP IT.