Under Donald Trump, the United States is constructing its own Gulag of prisons and detention centers, ICE way stations for mass deportations to the Gulags of the rest of the world. At least 200,000 people have been deported by ICE since Trump came to office for the second time, but their goal is 3,000 immigration arrests per day and 1 million deportations each year.
Hidden within this general campaign of repression and terror is an alliance of the Trump administration with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes around the world aimed at imprisoning and killing their opponents wherever they may be on the planet. While ICE does not publish any up-to-date or accurate statistics, hundreds and possibly thousands of those deported are asylum seekers fleeing from political repression in Russia, Iran, and other countries.
At the same time, another more insidious danger lies within the ICE system of repression.
At the beginning of Trump’s second administration there were about 1.3 million people from about 20 countries living in the United States legally with Temporary Protected Status. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been busy trying to terminate TPS. Despite court challenges, the Supreme Court allowed her to end TPS for more than 600,000 Venezuelans at the beginning of October. Even if she fails to end TPS early for refugees from other countries, that status will expire for all those protected within the next year.
It will expire for over 100,000 Ukrainians in October 2026.
According to CBS News, “The number of detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody increased to 66,000 this week, setting a new record high as President Trump intensifies his crackdown on illegal immigration… ICE’s detainee population has ballooned by nearly 70% since Mr. Trump took office for a second time in January, when ICE was holding around 39,000 individuals in its detention system.”
Meanwhile, back in May there were 3.6 million immigration cases pending in the U.S., according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. (more recent figures are not available.)
The new wave of repression against refuges began in summer 2024 while Biden was still president but has escalated since. According to the Guardian, since summer of 2024, “… many have been detained upon entering the US, and some of them have been held for more than a year…children have been separated from their parents.”
According to the New York Times, at two least flights operated by ICE have deported about 80 Russian. Deportees’ documents were confiscated and then after a stopover in Egypt, they were ordered to board a flight to Moscow where they were interrogated.
These flights were not publicized and were only uncovered after, “Rumors about the August removals first began to filter out over online Telegram chatrooms for detained Russians on August 26. Flight records obtained by ICE Flight Monitor, a group that tracks removal fights, show a charter flight leaving Alexandria, Louisiana on August 26 before making stops in Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico.”
How many other flights have there been? How many others have been deported to face interrogation, torture, and/or death in the prisons of Russia, Iran, El Salvador or Israel?
The situation has become so bad in the United States that on September 3, 2025, a group of Russian asylum seekers and refugees published an open letter to Canada asking for asylum for Russian dissidents facing deportation from the USA.
The Ukraine Solidarity Network stands for the right of asylum for all political refugees, an end to all arrests and detentions of asylum seekers, an end to all ICE raids and detentions. Abolish ICE and CBP. No human being is illegal.