The Department of Homeland Security is backing away from one of the most ambitious and controversial elements of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement expansion, the plan to convert empty commercial warehouses into massive immigration detention centers.
Internal documents obtained by The New York Times revealed Thursday that ICE plans to offload at least seven of the 11 warehouses it purchased across the country, either by selling them or transferring them to other federal agencies.
The federal government spent $1.074 billion buying those 11 buildings. It has converted none of them.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin described the pivot in a statement: the agency is "moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners."
The $38.3 billion ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative, the program that envisioned shrinking the current patchwork of more than 200 detention facilities down to 34 government-owned mega-centers, appears to be, at minimum, fundamentally restructured.
How A $38 Billion Plan Fell Apart
The warehouse detention plan had an internal logic that was straightforward: ICE currently relies on a fragmented system of more than 200 facilities run by a combination of private contractors, county jails and state partners.
Consolidating that system into large-scale government-owned facilities would, in theory, give ICE more control, reduce per-bed costs over time and allow the agency to expand capacity rapidly as it pursued aggressive immigration enforcement.
The execution ran into problems that compounded on each other with unusual speed.
The first problem was logistical. Converting a commercial warehouse, built for storing goods in a climate-controlled environment, into a detention facility capable of housing thousands of human beings requires water and sewage infrastructure, electrical capacity, medical facilities, security systems, staff accommodation and emergency services access that most of those buildings either lacked entirely or could not practically acquire.
The cost of that conversion was estimated at approximately $600 million per warehouse, a figure that would more than double the $1.07 billion already spent buying the buildings.
The second problem was legal. Lawsuits were filed in at least three states alleging that DHS had failed to conduct the environmental impact assessments required under the National Environmental Policy Act before purchasing and converting the sites.
A federal judge in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction in April blocking ICE from converting the Maryland warehouse while the litigation proceeded, a legal setback that signaled the other pending lawsuits had merit and that conversion at multiple sites could be stalled indefinitely in the courts.
The third problem was political, and it came from an unexpected direction. Opposition to the warehouse conversion plans was essentially universal at the local level, including in communities that had otherwise supported Trump's immigration agenda.
In Pennsylvania, the governor, senators and local officials at every level expressed alarm that DHS had purchased a 7,500-bed warehouse in Tremont Township without informing them. New Hampshire's Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte took her objections directly to then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and successfully got the New Hampshire warehouse scrapped.
Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker achieved a similar outcome. In Virginia, after days of protests and a unanimous resolution from the Hanover County Board of Supervisors, the warehouse owner pulled out of the deal.
What Happened Town By Town
The pattern repeated across the country with variations in the specific local cast but a consistent structure, DHS or ICE would identify a warehouse, initiate purchase negotiations without informing local officials, and then encounter the combination of community opposition, infrastructure problems and legal challenges that the agency had not adequately anticipated.
In Salt Lake City, ICE wanted a warehouse owned by The Ritchie Group. Residents picketed the site.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall told The Ritchie Group the facility did not meet city code. Within a week of the protests beginning,
The Ritchie Group issued a public statement: "The Ritchie Group and its investors have no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government." In Social Circle, Georgia, a small town that had a warehouse purchased without any advance notice to city or county officials, Senator Jon Ossoff launched a formal inquiry into DHS and ICE's failure to consult the community.
The city was notified Thursday that DHS is dropping plans for that site as well.
In Pennsylvania's Tremont Township, where a former Big Lots distribution center was slated to become a 7,500-bed detention facility, local officials wrote to the DHS Secretary in February identifying specific infrastructure failures, inadequate water and sewage systems, insufficient electrical grid capacity, no local law enforcement or emergency medical capacity to serve a facility that size, and no appropriate medical facilities within meaningful proximity.
The warehouse was purchased anyway. It is now being offloaded.
The Pivot And Its Critics
Mullin's statement that DHS will "utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners" describes the alternative to the warehouse plan.
That alternative is increased reliance on private prison companies, primarily CoreCivic and GEO Group, whose existing facilities are already operated under ICE contracts and can absorb additional detainees without requiring the environmental review or community consent that the warehouse conversions could not avoid.
Critics of the warehouse plan are noting that this pivot is not a step back from aggressive detention, it is a change in method.
The administration's enforcement priorities have not changed. Immigration arrests and deportations have continued at the pace the administration has publicly committed to.
What is changing is the infrastructure in which detainees are held, away from warehouses the government owns toward private facilities the government contracts.
Seven warehouses. More than a billion dollars spent. Not one converted.
The federal government is now in the position of selling back or transferring industrial buildings it bought for detention purposes after community opposition, legal challenges and basic infrastructure reality made the plan unworkable.