ICE Largely Abandons Plan To Turn Warehouses Into Migrant Detention Facilities

As part of President Donald Trump’s plan to deport every single undocumented immigrant—and perhaps tens of millions of citizens and legal residents—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) planned to spend billions of dollars buying up industrial warehouses across the country.

The stated purpose was to convert them into detention centers to house migrants targeted for deportation, with the ultimate goal of expanding total detention capacity to 100,000.

Reportedly, and in a welcome development, the DHS is largely scrapping the plan, and most of the warehouses it has already purchased will be sold or used for another purpose.

“In a major turnabout, [ICE] is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright,” Hamed Aleaziz reported this week at The New York Times. In particular, that includes two in Georgia, two in Pennsylvania, and one each in Michigan, New Jersey, and Utah.

The shift seems to have been in the works for a while. “DHS and ICE officials have identified several of the eleven previously purchased warehouses, some of which were expected to be repurposed to hold as many as 8,000 immigrants, for potential sale,” Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler reported last month for NBC News.

The warehouse plan seems to have been a vestige of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s tenure: Aleaziz called it a “signature initiative” of Noem’s, while her successor, Markwayne Mullin, “privately expressed skepticism about the plan [and] has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.”

“These heinous criminals, once arrested, should be removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense,” Mullin told the Times in a statement. “D.H.S. is moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.”

The plan is apparently not completely dead: Aleaziz notes that ICE “appears to still be moving forward with four of the warehouses purchased for detention purposes”—two in Texas, and one each in Arizona and Maryland—and “also plans to buy immigrant detention facilities from private prison companies that it already contracts with.”

That’s too bad. The warehouse gambit was wasteful, inhumane, and short-sighted, and ending it would be a net positive.

When Trump fired Noem in March, her profligate spending was reportedly a factor, and the warehouses were part of it. As NBC News noted last month, “The DHS inspector general is examining ICE’s purchases of warehouses around the country as part of an audit examining whether DHS met the need for new detention space in a ‘cost-effective manner.'”

The warehouses were a boondoggle from the start. Each was expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and retrofit, not to mention operation costs.

The government also significantly overpaid: According to Project Salt Box, a Substack that tracks government procurement and infrastructure spending, ICE has so far spent $1.07 billion for the 11 facilities—134 percent above their total estimated market value.

That will now affect how much money can be recouped. “The markups that the government paid in rushing to buy the warehouses set the floor for any loss, and a private buyer has little reason to pay what the government did for warehouses that had sat empty for years before ICE acquired them,” wrote Michael Wriston of Project Salt Box.

That rush was also apparent when the government was called to explain how massive detention facilities—that in some cases would hold 8,500 people or more, plus an entire staff—could be built in rural or suburban areas without straining local resources.

As Reason reported earlier this year, many in targeted areas—even Trump-friendly towns and states—opposed the plan. Officials in small towns warned that their infrastructure was already at or near capacity and could not support such a sudden, large increase in the local population.

The government’s explanations were often unsatisfying, and in many cases, officials simply abandoned plans in the face of opposition from both citizens and elected officials. (Project Salt Box notes that in addition to the 11 facilities purchased, the government also canceled sales of 13 sites.)

Social Circle, Georgia, is one of the towns where the government bought a warehouse that it now plans to offload.

“I’m glad that DHS has concluded that Social Circle is not the right place for this type of facility,” city manager Eric Taylor tells Reason. “That is what we have been trying to say from the beginning. If they had bothered to speak to us before purchasing the building, maybe they would have realized that the $129 million they spent could have been put to better use elsewhere. We look forward to seeing what the ultimate fate of the property is. If it is retained for government use, hopefully they reach out to us to discuss plans from the very beginning.”