ICE's Warehouse Purchases Herald New Model for Immigration Detention

In July 2025, Congress did something unprecedented: it gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a total of $45 billion dollars to be spent on immigration detention, more than a decade of normal funding in one big pot of cash. Now ICE’s ultimate plan for that funding has become clear — a “reengineered” detention system consisting primarily of commercial warehouses owned by ICE and retrofitted into a national network of detention centers.

The goal of the revamped detention and deportation system would, as Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons put it, be “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

Historically, ICE’s detention funding ($3.4 billion in the most recent DHS budget) has gone almost entirely to contract detention providers; private prison corporations and state and local governments who lease facilities to ICE. As of February 2025, ICE owned just 10 facilities out of the 220 which are currently being used to detain immigrants. As a result, the current detention system is not centrally planned; it emerged slowly over decades as Congress gradually increased the agency’s funding. ICE now seeks to change that.

From tent camps to commercial warehouses

A leaked plan from July 2025 laid out ICE’s plan to use its new riches to increase detention capacity to 107,759 beds by the end of 2025, primarily through the construction of “soft-sided” tent camps. However, this plan seemingly fell through. Just one such tent camp was built, the infamous “Camp East Montana” on Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX, which currently holds over 3,000 people at any time.

Having abandoned the idea of tent camps, ICE is now adopting a much more dramatic plan, one that would fundamentally reshape immigration detention more than at any point since detention exploded in the 1990s. The backbone of this system rests on the purchase and retrofitting of a network of commercial warehouses. On February 20, the New Hampshire government released internal planning documents sent by ICE which explains ICE’s new plan.

The “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” as it’s called, aims to “implement a new detention model” by September 30, 2026. Under this “reengineering” initiative, ICE plans to do away with the decades of somewhat inefficient acquisition of contract detention capacity in pre-existing jails and prisons and instead replace the current system with a new one, under which ICE primarily operates out of 34 facilitiesthat it owns outright:

• 16 “processing centers” which will hold 1,000-1,500 people inside refurbished warehouses, with average stays of 3-7 days. Individuals would be sent here soon after being arrested by ICE, and then transferred out after initial processing or rapid deportations for those who chose not to fight to remain in the country.
• 8 “large-scale” detention centers which will hold 7,000-10,000 people inside refurbished warehouses, with the goal of average stays being less than 60 days. Individuals held in these facilities would remain detained during removal proceedings and appeals, and for any more complicated deportations.
• 10 “turnkey” facilities; pre-existing jails and prisons which currently contract with ICE to hold immigration detainees. ICE indicates that it wishes to purchase the underlying properties but does not explain in the document whether these facilities would be used as processing centers or longer-term detention sites.

This document, and reporting from the Washington Post, suggests that ICE intends to spend nearly the entirety of the $45 billion provided in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) to accomplish this “reengineering” of the detention system.

Crucially, ICE has already spent over $700 million to purchase 9 out of 24warehouses they intend to refurbish for this new project. Three of these facilities are intended to be “large-scale” facilities with 7,500 to 10,000 planned beds: a warehouse in Social Circle, GA located 50 miles outside of Atlanta; a warehouse in Socorro, TX in the El Paso metro area; and a warehouse in Trenton, PA in central Pennsylvania.

The other six which have already been purchased are smaller “processing centers,” with plans to hold 1,000-1,500 people each. These six are in Hagerstown, MD; Hamburg, PA; Romulus, MI; San Antonio, TX; Roxbury, NJ; and Surprise, AZ. ICE initially announced the purchase of at least two additional facilities (one in Chester, NY and one in Lebanon, TN) but walked those claims back after the deals apparently fell through.

Local advocacy and outrage has successfully blocked the purchase of at least 12 more, but ICE continues to explore other purchases. In short, despite setbacks, ICE appears to be full speed ahead with this plan.

How ICE plans to circumvent procedure to get facilities running almost immediately

ICE will be able to bring these facilities online far faster than expected thanks to another unprecedented action. Back in October, the Trump administration began funneling OBBBA detention funding through the Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy’s procurement system, known as the Supply Systems Command. The use of the military procurement system allows the federal government to essentially bypass the normal bidding process involved in most federal contracting.

At the time, the apparent intent was to use this funding to open up soft-sided tent camps on military bases. The funding for this was to be funneled through a military procurement system known as the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract (WEXMAC), which had primarily been used for international contracting. Now that system has been expanded and repurposed to be used to support DHS for mass deportations (known as WEXMAC Territorial Integrity of the United States, or WEXMAC-TITUS).

Under WEXMAC, companies can be “pre-qualified.” Once pre-qualified, the government can issue task orders without going through any normal bidding process. On Friday night, the Trump administration quietly announced that private prison giant The GEO Group had been added to the WEXMAC-TITUS list of pre-qualified vendors, along with several other companies which specialize in things such as “turnkey workforce housing and temporary shelters [and] large-scale camp construction,” “rapid-deployment staffing solutions” and “protective services and secure detention transport operations.”

In other words, ICE is now able to tap into the entirety of the $45 billion to award contracts to private prison operators and other contractors to start work on the warehouses it has purchased almost immediately, without any normal bidding process, and with potentially far less transparency than normal.

The agency’s plans to build these facilities are detailed and highly organized. A document released by ICE in relationship to the planned mega-camp in Social Circle, GA shows that ICE plans to retrofit the massive warehouse into a two-level detention facility to hold over 8,000 people, with its own custom-built wastewater treatment facility, massive cellblocks, medical wings, small outdoor recreation areas, administrative offices, and even a staff gun range. If operating at full capacity, the facility would nearly triple South Circle’s small-town population of 4,974.

ICE says it wants to have this facility open by April, which seems unlikely. But if constructed and used to full capacity, this facility alone would hold more people than any other prison or jail in the United States (only Rikers Island in New York City would have a higher maximum capacity).

While it’s impossible to know exactly how people will be treated in these facilities, we can expect many problems to emerge. When ICE constructed Camp East Montana in a matter of months, the facility opened with dozens of violations of detention standards, and has since become notorious for abusive conditions; three people have already died at the facility since it opened in August 2025, including what is reportedly the first homicide ever in a modern ICE detention center.

The Social Circle facility alone would be nearly triple the size of Camp East Montana, and ICE plans another seven such facilities. Rapidly constructing and opening these facilities is a disaster waiting to happen, as staffing, especially for medical care, will be very difficult; not to mention the fact that the private contractors responsible will be incentivized to cut costs and corners to pad out their profits.

2026 was always shaping up to be a transformational year for immigration detention, but few people anticipated this level of change. Should ICE’s “reengineering” initiative come to fruition, the system of detention which has existed for generations may be fundamentally transformed into something even more sinister and more prone to abuses than ever.