Bottom Line Up Front

ICE Spending Drops Dramatically: This month, ICE spent $130 million - an 88% decrease from last month and the agency’s lowest monthly spend so far this year. The drop in spending is likely due to Markwayne Mullin’s transition-in as Secretary, ongoing litigation, and internal contract reviews.

Border Wall Construction Continues: Outside of March, which saw a massive jump in spending, CBP’s border wall contracts have been relatively constant this year. The agency is spending, on average, $2 billion a month on border wall construction along the southern border.

Private Prison Companies Continue to Profit: Despite the drop in overall spending, April was business as usual for companies like The GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Akima. Each received tens of millions of dollars in continued detention and transportation contracts.

April’s Biggest Contracts

For the fourth month in a row, border contracts continue to dominate CBP and ICE spending. Barnard Construction and Fisher Sand & Gravel were each awarded another contract for border wall construction, this time in El Paso and San Diego, respectively. These two contracts alone totaled over $2 billion.

Additional new contracts included a $15 million award to Acuity-CHS LLC for pre-employment medical testing of potential CBP hires and a $12 million award to Edge Ops, LLC to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with “Project Safe Haven” - described as an “analytic capability to identify, track, and map movement of criminal and terrorist organizations.”

In April, the bulk of ICE’s spending flowed through modifications to existing contracts - only 17% went to new awards. The GEO Group received over $20 million, including $16 million in funding for the detention facility they operate in Aurora, CO. CoreCivic received additional funds to continue operations at the Central Arizona Correctional Complex.

Warehouse Conversion Contracts On Pause

The contracts awarded to KVG, LLC and Gardaworld Federal were both paused within a month of starting. The KVG contract to convert the Hagerstown/Williamsport, Md. warehouse into a detention facility was hit with a stop‑work order due to the ongoing lawsuit between the Maryland Attorney General and DHS. Interestingly, the Surprise, Az. stop-work order was issued one day before the Arizona Attorney General filed a similar lawsuit against the agency.

On April 15, Judge Brendan Hurson granted a preliminary injunction blocking work on the Maryland warehouse. In his opinion, Judge Hurson stated that the case “provides a crystal-clear example of a federal agency failing to comply with the basic requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act” and that “the State has met its burden of showing a clear likelihood of imminent irreparable harm should Defendants be allowed to proceed with their proposed course of action at the Williamsport Warehouse.”

There are currently four ongoing lawsuits against DHS in relation to the warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan. Project Salt Box is following these cases in our Litigation Tracker.

Analysis and Trends

Reliance on existing contracts over new awards: In April, ICE largely relied on modifying existing contracts rather than initiating new ones, with only 17% of the agency’s spending going to new awards. This drop in new awards is likely tied to a combination of factors, including the partial government shutdown, Markwayne Mullin’s transition as the new Secretary, and a possible agency‑wide push to avoid new awards that could invite additional scrutiny. It also underscores that, even without new contracts, ICE has already built a robust detention and transportation infrastructure that can keep operating through existing agreements.

Analytics and surveillance capability are expanding, even during “slow” month: Even as ICE’s overall spending fell to its lowest level so far this year, DHS continued to invest in the analytic backbone of immigration enforcement. In addition to the Edge Ops contract supporting Project Safe Haven, ICE ERO paid Palantir over $86 million for their case management and analytics platform. The agency also purchased additional Cellebrite tools for mobile forensics, along with “forensic kits” from firms like Impres Technology and FCN. These awards show how DHS is deepening its capacity to collect, analyze, and act on data about people in the immigration system.

Border wall construction continues: Border wall construction remained a dominant feature of DHS spending, with CBP obligating roughly 2 billion dollars this month to wall projects along the southern border. Large awards to firms like Barnard Construction and Fisher Sand & Gravel continue to drive this spending, with just a few contracts accounting for billions in obligations. This year has seen a steady flow of money into a small group of border infrastructure contractors, underscoring just how central wall construction remains to DHS’s agenda, despite volatility elsewhere in the department’s budget. Based on a Project Salt Box analysis of over 60 contracts, CBP has spent over $20B on the border wall since August 2025.

A Momentary Lull in the Spending Surge

Despite a low spending month for ICE, this slowdown is unlikely to last. The agency is moving forward with its plans to lease office space for over 300 personnel nationwide, and, as we previously reported, is conducting market research to establish its own fast-track construction contract vehicle. On top of that, ICE continues its hiring surge, with over 60 new job openings listed on LinkedIn in the last week alone. Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the agency still has access to billions in funding, and spending is likely to pick up again over the next few months.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. This is the fourth monthly report from Project Salt Box. If there are specific procurements, companies, regions, or topics you would like us to cover in future monthly reports, please reach out to us and let us know.

The federal government issued a stop work order on the $313 million contract to convert an industrial warehouse in Surprise into an immigration detention facility at least two days before Arizona’s attorney general filed suit to block the project, according to federal contracting records reviewed by Project Salt Box.

The records, posted to USASpending.gov, show two successive modifications to the contract held by GardaWorld Federal Services. The first, designated P00001 and signed April 22, initiated the halt. A second modification, P00002 — signed April 23 — bore the explicit description: “THIS MODIFICATION UPDATES THE STOP WORK ORDER IN EFFECT AT THE SURPRISE PROCESSING AND DETENTION FACILITY.” Both reflected a $0 obligation, consistent with administrative actions that carry no new funding.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced on April 24 that she had filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona seeking to permanently block the facility. A stop work order was already in place.

DHS, ICE, and GardaWorld did not respond to requests for comment sent by Project Salt Box prior to publication.

A Parallel Contract, Also Halted

Three weeks before the Surprise modifications appeared, an identical sequence played out on a companion warehouse contract in Williamsport, Maryland.

KVG LLC was awarded $113 million on March 6 — the same day as the GardaWorld contract — to renovate an ICE-owned warehouse in Williamsport into a processing and detention facility. On April 2, a contract modification appeared in federal records. Its language was direct: “THIS MODIFICATION IMPLEMENTS A STOP WORK ORDER.”

The Maryland stop work arrived as courts were weighing the state’s legal challenge to that facility. On April 15, U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson granted a preliminary injunction — the first court order halting one of the administration’s warehouse detention conversions. He found that DHS had defined the scope of its project so narrowly as to exclude the very purpose the project was meant to serve, and that the agency’s environmental review had recorded a conclusion rather than reached one. During oral argument, a government lawyer acknowledged that a proper environmental review could take years.

In Arizona, a stop work order was issued April 22, updated April 23, and a state lawsuit was filed April 24. Whether ICE issued the Surprise stop work in anticipation of court action, under instruction from the Department of Justice, following an internal policy review, or for reasons unrelated to the litigation is not established by the contract records. The government has offered no public explanation for either modification.

No Environmental Review on Record

The Arizona complaint, styled Arizona v. Mullin, names DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons as defendants. It is the fourth lawsuit brought by a state against the federal warehouse detention program on environmental and procedural grounds.

It is also the most procedurally exposed for the government, because unlike the cases in Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey, Arizona says there is no environmental review document to challenge at all.

In Michigan, records obtained by Project Salt Box showed that ICE’s Record of Environmental Consideration was completed in approximately 30 minutes, on the same day the state filed suit. In Maryland, the agency completed its review in a single day and purchased the property the next. In New Jersey, the review was signed off Feb. 6 and approved Feb. 24, one day after the property was purchased. Arizona has located no document at all.

That absence cuts against the government’s standard defense. In all three prior cases, DHS argued that modifying an existing building does not trigger the same environmental scrutiny as new construction, and that concerns about water, wastewater, and traffic belong to a later planning stage. Judge Hurson rejected that argument in Maryland.

When DHS has previously built or modified detention facilities, it complied with the National Environmental Policy Act. In 2021, the agency completed a full environmental assessment before advancing plans for a processing center in El Paso, Texas, sending draft documents to 23 stakeholders and soliciting public comment. No comparable process occurred in Surprise.

The procedural record in Surprise is thin in additional respects. In February, ICE issued a Floodplain Notice for the Surprise warehouse listing a public comment deadline of Jan. 19 — four days before the warehouse was purchased. On Feb. 20, before a separately listed deadline had passed, DHS removed the Floodplain Notice and replaced it with a notice for a facility in Romulus, Michigan. Judge Hurson cited an identical sequence in the Maryland case as evidence that the review process had been compromised.

ICE purchased the Surprise property for $70,035,000 on Jan. 23, 2026 — one day after DHS sent a consultation letter to the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office regarding the proposed acquisition, and before the preservation office had received the letter. DHS did not consult with or notify the City of Surprise before the purchase. At the first city council meeting after the acquisition was announced, residents spoke in opposition for nearly five hours, pushing a 7 p.m. meeting past midnight.

The Site

The warehouse sits at 13290 W. Sweetwater Avenue in Surprise, an industrial distribution facility of 418,400 square feet that was built to be leased to up to four commercial tenants. It was not designed to house people.

Directly across the street, Rinchem Co. LLC operates a 123,000-square-foot hazardous materials storage facility containing chemicals used in semiconductor production. Rinchem filed a Risk Management Plan on Jan. 1, 2026, three weeks before ICE purchased the warehouse next door. According to Arizona’s complaint, the plan does not account for the presence of a large captive population nearby, and Arizona is unaware of any risk assessment ICE conducted regarding the proximity of the two sites.

The warehouse is also approximately one mile from Dysart High School, which enrolls roughly 1,400 students, and Dysart Middle School, which enrolls around 600. ICE has made no public mention of either.

Arizona’s complaint alleges that the facility violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, which requires the federal government to arrange for “appropriate” places for immigration detention — a standard the state argues the Surprise site, given its location adjacent to a chemical hazard facility, can never meet.

The complaint brings four counts under the Administrative Procedure Act: a challenge to the NEPA bypass; a claim that the site fails the INA’s appropriateness standard because of its proximity to hazardous chemicals and inadequate water and sewer infrastructure; a claim that ICE failed to consider existing detention facilities as alternatives before acquiring new property, having considered only other industrial warehouses; and a claim that the decision was arbitrary and capricious, in that ICE provided no reasoned explanation for abandoning its prior practice of environmental review. The state is asking the court to vacate the acquisition decision and permanently enjoin ICE from converting or operating the site.

The Arizona filing was the 41st lawsuit Mayes has filed or joined against the Trump administration in its second term. She announced it standing outside the warehouse. “If there is a tank rupture or a chemical spill or a fire,” she said, “emergency responders will be responding to a potential mass casualty event involving hundreds if not thousands of people.”

The government has not yet responded to the complaint. The stop work modifications remain in the federal contracting database without explanation, alongside the modification at the Williamsport facility where a federal court has already ruled the government violated the law.

Project Salt Box tracks all warehouse updates and ongoing litigation at tracker.projectsaltbox.com.

Nj Esa

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Most notably, another company has emerged as a potential key player in DHS’ Detention Reengineering Initiative - Rudiarius, LLC.

The company is listed as the user of the report. While it’s unclear exactly what Rudiarius’ role was in the Roxbury warehouse, users of Phase I ESAs typically include brokers, developers, and firms conducting due diligence. Given that JLL is listed as the broker, it’s likely that Rudiarius was operating on behalf of DHS to conduct due diligence of the site - perhaps as a subcontractor to another firm, since the company itself does not have any direct contracts with the agency.

A Brand New Player at DHS

With a business registration filed in Wyoming in July 2025, Rudiarius appears to be a recent entrant into DHS contracting. The original address on the filing is a residence in Dorchester, MA, owned by James (Jim) Grossmann, who, around the same time, also formed several related companies, including Rudiarius Holdings and Rudiarius Solutions.

Rudiarius Holdings is registered in SAM.gov, a prerequisite for doing business with the federal government. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes are used by federal agencies to categorize businesses based on the type of economic activity they perform. The primary NAICS code listed for the company is 236220: Commercial and Institutional Building Construction. An interesting side note: the new construction contracts ICE is planning on establishing use this same NAICS code.

The address for Rudiarius Holdings is listed as 12 Ericsson St., Dorchester, MA - the address of Boston-based construction firm RISE Construction, also co-owned by Mr. Grossmann. The company has faced financial strain in recent years, including liens and litigation involving unpaid amounts to subcontractors on multiple projects.

Ties to the Social Circle, GA Warehouse

The Roxbury warehouse Phase I ESA is not the first time Rudiarius has been associated with DHS’ Detention Reengineering Initiative. In documents released by Social Circle, GA, Mr. Grossmann’s name and signature appear on the Infrastructure Analysis provided to the City by DHS.

It appears that Grossmann and his team, possibly operating through Rudiarius, conducted the engineering assessment and analysis of the site and concluded that the project would have “no adverse effect on the community and surrounding properties.” Local officials in Social Circle disputed this finding, saying the document was “insufficient in fully answering our questions and does not adequately support the conclusion that the surrounding area would not be impacted.” They further noted that their concerns about water and sewer infrastructure remained unaddressed to their satisfaction and that they left the meeting with “more questions than answers.”

Another Piece to the Puzzle

Given that Mr. Grossmann/Rudiarius can be linked to at least two of the warehouses purchased by ICE, it’s not unreasonable to assume the company has been involved in others. This places them among several other key players. These companies include SK2 LLC, who was tapped to advise DHS on identifying, structuring, and brokering warehouse acquisitions for ICE’s detention initiative, and Solv LLC, who has supported the agency with their environmental and historical reviews of the warehouse properties.

Both SK2 and Solv hold prime contracts with DHS, while Rudiarius does not, suggesting that Grossmann may be operating either as an independent consultant or as a subcontractor under another firm. This makes Rudiarius harder to spot in standard procurement records, even as traces of its involvement show up in technical documents. What is striking here is that DHS specifically attempted to obscure Rudiarius’s role in this filing - despite leaving other companies fully visible in comparable materials - raising questions about why this particular company was treated differently and what, exactly, the agency is trying to keep out of view.

Project Salt Box was unable to locate contact information for Rudiarius LLC, and the company could not be reached for comment.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed suit in federal court Thursday to block the conversion of a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona into an immigration detention facility, the fourth such challenge brought by a state against the federal government’s warehouse detention program on environmental and procedural grounds.

Arizona v. Mullin

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The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, names Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons as defendants. It asks the court to declare the warehouse acquisition unlawful and to permanently enjoin ICE from converting or operating the site.

The filing arrives nine days after a federal judge in Maryland halted a similar conversion in Williamsport, finding that DHS had attempted to shoehorn a large-scale detention project into environmental exclusions designed for minor renovations. Courts in Michigan and New Jersey are weighing comparable claims.

The Surprise purchase

On Jan. 22, 2026, DHS sent a consultation letter to the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office regarding a proposed acquisition in Surprise. One day later, before the preservation office had received the letter, ICE purchased the property for $70,035,000. DHS did not consult with or notify the City of Surprise before the purchase. At the first city council meeting after the acquisition was announced, residents spoke in opposition for nearly five hours, pushing a 7 p.m. meeting past midnight, according to the complaint.

The facility, a 418,400-square-foot industrial distribution facility at 13290 W. Sweetwater Avenue, was built to be leased to up to four commercial tenants — and, as the term “warehouse” suggests, was not designed to house people.

Directly across the street, at 13255 W. Sweetwater Avenue, Rinchem Co. LLC operates a 123,000-square-foot hazardous materials storage facility containing chemicals used in semiconductor production. Rinchem filed a Risk Management Plan for the facility on Jan. 1, 2026, three weeks before ICE purchased the warehouse next door. According to the complaint, the RMP does not account for the presence of a large captive population nearby, and Arizona is unaware of any risk assessment ICE has conducted regarding the two sites’ proximity.

The warehouse is also located approximately one mile from Dysart High School, which enrolls around 1,400 students, and Dysart Middle School, which enrolls around 600. ICE has made no public mention of either. At a press conference outside the facility Thursday, Mayes said students at Dysart High, where roughly 60 percent of students are Hispanic according to state enrollment data, were frightened to walk to school because of the increased ICE presence in the area.

The fourth case

Unlike the cases in Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey — where the government produced environmental review documents, however hastily — Arizona states it is unaware of any such document existing at all for the Surprise warehouse. No environmental impact statement, no environmental assessment, no categorical exclusion.

That distinguishes the Arizona case in a meaningful way. In Michigan, records obtained by Project Salt Box show that ICE’s Record of Environmental Consideration was completed in approximately 30 minutes, on the same day the state filed suit. In Maryland, the agency completed its review in a single day and purchased the property the next. In New Jersey, the review was signed off on Feb. 6 and approved Feb. 24, one day after the property was purchased.

Arizona can point to no document at all.

The complaint notes that when DHS has previously built or modified detention facilities, it complied with NEPA. In 2021, DHS completed an environmental assessment before advancing plans for a processing center in El Paso, Texas, sending draft documents to 23 stakeholders and soliciting public comment. No comparable process occurred here.

In February, ICE issued a Floodplain Notice for the Surprise warehouse that listed a public comment deadline of Jan. 19 — four days before the warehouse was purchased. A separate section of DHS’s website listed the deadline as Feb. 20.

On Feb. 20, before that deadline had passed, DHS removed the Floodplain Notice for the Surprise warehouse and replaced it with a notice for a facility in Romulus, Michigan. It was a nearly identical sequence of events to the one Judge Hurson cited in granting Maryland’s preliminary injunction nine days ago.

A contract with GardaWorld

On March 6, ICE contracted with GardaWorld Federal Services to retrofit and operate the Surprise warehouse at a cost of approximately $313 million, with a potential ceiling of $704 million. An economic analysis produced by DHS projected the construction phase would require nearly 1,400 workers.

GardaWorld, which provides security staffing at immigration detention facilities including one in Florida that Amnesty International has separately documented for human rights violations, has not previously undertaken facility conversion work of this scale, according to the complaint.

What’s ahead

The government has not yet responded to the Arizona complaint, but its filings in the other three cases offer a preview of its likely defense. In each, DHS has argued that modifying an existing building does not trigger the same environmental scrutiny as constructing a new one, and that questions about water use, wastewater capacity, and traffic belong to a later stage of the project. In New Jersey, Maryland, and Michigan, the government argued those projected harms were speculative — contingent on future decisions not yet made.

Judge Adam Hurson of the U.S. District Court in Maryland found that argument unpersuasive. He ruled that DHS had defined its project so narrowly as to exclude the very purpose the project was meant to serve, and that the agency’s review had recorded a conclusion rather than reached one. He granted a preliminary injunction on April 15. During the hearing, a lawyer for the federal government acknowledged that completing a proper environmental review could take years.

Arizona’s complaint brings four counts, all under the Administrative Procedure Act. The first challenges the NEPA bypass. The second and third argue the site is inappropriate under the Immigration and Nationality Act — both because the facility lacks adequate water and sewer infrastructure, and because the INA required ICE to consider existing detention facilities as alternatives before acquiring new property. ICE, the complaint notes, considered only other industrial warehouses. The fourth count argues the decision was arbitrary and capricious, in that ICE has provided no reasoned explanation for abandoning its prior practice of environmental review, nor any explanation for selecting a site adjacent to a hazardous chemical storage facility, according to the filing.

The state is asking the court to vacate the acquisition decision and permanently block construction and operation.

Follow this and the other warehouse cases at tracker.projectsaltbox.com.

The Department of Homeland Security was back in court Thursday — in New Jersey, this time — defending the same argument it has now made in three states: that buying a warehouse and retrofitting it for detention does not trigger the environmental review that federal law typically requires.

In a 36-page filing that opens by observing that New Jersey “clearly dislikes having immigration detention centers within the State,” the Department of Homeland Security asked a federal court to reject the state’s bid to halt the conversion.

DHS Reply to Request for Preliminary Injunction

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State of New Jersey and Township of Roxbury v. United States, Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

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The substance of that filing matches its tone. The government’s case rests on a single proposition: the court is being asked to rule on a building, not a detention center, and the two are not yet the same thing.

Modifying an existing building, the government says, is not the same as constructing a new one, and therefore does not require the same level of scrutiny. What a facility will do once it opens — and what pressures it will put on local water systems, sewers and roads — are questions for later.

That position is now being tested in federal courts in New Jersey, Maryland and Michigan, where judges are being asked to decide whether the government can separate the physical building from the detention camp it is intended to be.

David Broderick, a member of Project NINJA, a volunteer civil liberties group in Warren County formed to oppose the Roxbury conversion, compared the agency's definition of the project to Humpty Dumpty's theory of language. “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean,” he said, quoting Lewis Carroll. DHS, he argued, has redefined “project” to mean only the physical work of securing the building — not the end use that work builds to. Federal guidance instructs agencies not to divide connected actions into smaller parts to avoid environmental review. Broderick said that is precisely what is happening here.

How the government cleared the review

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, federal agencies are generally required to assess the environmental impact of major projects before proceeding. But the law allows for exceptions — known as categorical exclusions — when a project is deemed unlikely to cause significant harm. The government has relied on those exclusions, repeatedly, to move forward with the warehouse conversions under its Detention Reengineering Initiative — now paused as the agency undergoes a transition in leadership and a rewickering of its core policies and strategies in the wake of Secretary Noem’s ouster last month.

The mechanism of review runs through a document called a Record of Environmental Consideration, or REC — an internal analysis that agencies use to justify bypassing a more detailed review. According to documents reviewed by Project Salt Box, the analyses in these cases were conducted by Solv LLC, an environmental consulting firm working under a fiscal year 2026 contract with ICE’s facilities management office worth roughly $1.7 million.

Exhibit 1 - Record of Environmental Consideration

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State of New Jersey and Township of Roxbury v. United States, Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

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The REC for the New Jersey facility, located in Roxbury, concluded that the project qualified for multiple categorical exclusions. It defined the work as retrofitting an existing building with security and infrastructure upgrades — nothing built from the ground up. That definition is what allowed the agency to avoid a more detailed review.

The government goes further, claiming that when accounting for the facility’s intended use as a detention center, any physical changes needed are modest enough that existing infrastructure can absorb them. The facility is designed for 542 detainees — a figure the government used to rebut the state’s water calculations, which assumed nearly three times that number. Upgraded sewer connections, if needed at all, would be handled through routine permitting. None of this, the government argues, rises to the level of extraordinary circumstances that would override the exclusions.

The document does acknowledge what the facility is ultimately for — housing units, security systems, and support infrastructure already planned. But it treats those details as belonging to a separate, later stage of the project. Questions about wastewater upgrades and sewer connections, it says, will be addressed in “final engineering review” and future permitting — not now.

But that argument works only if a court agrees to treat the retrofit and the detention center as two separate things: the building as it is purchased, and the detention camp it will become.

State and local officials previously raised concerns about water use, wastewater capacity, traffic and public health. Today, DHS lawyers dismissed them: those problems, the government said, belong to a later stage of the project, once it is clear how the facility will actually run. Based on its narrow definition of the project, the agency concluded it posed no significant environmental risk and required no further scrutiny.

The same argument, three courts

The New Jersey filing is the second time this week the government has made this argument in court. The playbook is roughly the same across all three cases, though each has its own procedural wrinkle.

In Maryland, a federal judge halted a similar conversion after finding that the environmental review had been completed in “just hours” before the property closed. The judge concluded that the agency had decided to proceed before the review was done — that the analysis recorded a conclusion rather than reached one. The court also found that by separating the retrofit from the facility’s intended use, ICE had drawn the boundaries of the project too narrowly. Shortly after, the agency moved ahead with contracting tied to the facility — a sequence the court found had compromised the process, and grounds enough to grant the state’s injunction.

In Michigan, ICE purchased a warehouse near Detroit in early February and did not complete its environmental review until late March — the same day the state filed suit. The review came after the decision, not before it.

In New Jersey, the timeline is longer. The Roxbury review began in late January, was signed off on February 6 and approved on February 24 — one day after the property was purchased. That sequence of events avoids the compressed timing cited in Maryland, but the underlying logic is unchanged.

What a ruling would mean

The legal question in all three cases is one Judge Brendan Hurson in Maryland answered, at least provisionally, when he granted a preliminary injunction last week: can a federal agency define a project so narrowly that it excludes the very purpose the project is meant to serve?

If courts accept that a building and the operation it houses are legally distinct, the government will have leave to expand detention capacity across the nearly dozen warehouses it has already purchased, with little environmental scrutiny required.

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Federal officials defended a plan to convert a suburban Detroit warehouse into an immigration detention facility in a late-night court filing, as records show the project’s environmental review was completed in a single day — just hours after Michigan filed suit.

In its response, filed minutes before a court deadline, the Department of Homeland Security argued that the selection of detention sites falls within its “broad, discretionary authority” under federal immigration law and should not be subject to court review.

DHS' response to State's request for Preliminary Injunction

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Michigan v. Department of Homeland Security

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The filing also described opposition from some states as putting “U.S. citizens at risk” and pointed to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s prior opposition to ICE detention efforts, noting that she had blocked the sale of a state facility because it did not align with her “values,” framing the legal challenge as an effort to impede immigration enforcement.

Michigan officials argue that federal agencies moved ahead with the purchase and planning of the facility before completing the environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

ICE purchased the Romulus warehouse in early February. In its response, the government acknowledged the site could ultimately be scaled to accommodate as many as 2,000 detainees, though it said it does not currently expect to house more than 500.

State officials have cited concerns about wastewater capacity, traffic and the potential strain on local infrastructure if the facility is converted for detention use.

In its filing, the government said those harms were speculative, describing them as “contingent” on future decisions about how the facility would be used. It also argued that no final agency action had occurred and that plans for the site were still being developed.

Internal environmental review documents describe a more defined project.

NEPA Record of Environmental Consideration, completed 3/24

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Michigan v. Department of Homeland Security

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A Record of Environmental Consideration, or REC, completed on March 24 — more than a month after the property was purchased and the same day Michigan filed its lawsuit — determined that the project qualified for a categorical exclusion, a streamlined form of review used for actions that “normally do not significantly affect the quality of the human environment.”

The document outlines a detention processing center with housing units, recreation areas and support facilities, while stating that the project would involve “no new building additions, footprint expansions, off site construction, or capacity related improvements.”

It also concludes that the facility would not exceed existing infrastructure capacity, even as it notes that the project “may require upsizing or modification of the existing sanitary sewer lateral” and references “possible sewer connection improvements,” with final capacity to be confirmed through later engineering and coordination with local authorities.

Digital signatures show the review was prepared and approved within roughly 30 minutes on the afternoon of March 24.

The environmental determination came nearly a month after the property purchase and within hours of the lawsuit, while the government’s court filing describes the project as still evolving and not yet final.

The REC also states that the proposed action is “not a piece of a larger action” and does not involve “extraordinary circumstances” that would require more detailed environmental review — findings used to support reliance on categorical exclusions.

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Michigan v. Department of Homeland Security

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In its court filing, the government emphasized that additional environmental review is forthcoming, stating that ICE will complete further analysis before undertaking construction or operating the facility.

That position follows an earlier internal determination that the project qualified for a categorical exclusion, a form of review used for actions not expected to have significant environmental effects.

In a separate case involving a warehouse conversion in Williamsport, Md., a federal judge rejected that approach, finding that DHS relied on categorical exclusions to evaluate a project that would substantially change how the facility functioned. The court wrote that the agency had attempted to “shoehorn” the conversion of a cargo warehouse into exclusions meant for minor renovations and real estate transactions, and that the review itself proceeded at a “rocket’s pace.”

In that case, DHS “stacked” multiple categorical exclusions simultaneously — including those for property acquisition and minor facility modifications — to justify bypassing more detailed environmental review. The court found that approach inconsistent with the scale of the project, where the conversion would introduce sustained human occupancy and strain existing infrastructure. Maryland’s request for a preliminary injunction was ultimately granted.

The same categories used in the Maryland case — covering real estate acquisition, minor renovations and limited construction — are also invoked in the Michigan review, where the agency determined that converting the Romulus warehouse into a detention facility would not constitute a meaningful change in use or require expanded environmental analysis.

Michigan is expected to file its reply by April 28.

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Track this case and others at our updated Warehouse Litigation Tracker, live now at https://tracker.projectsaltbox.com.

This morning, ICE launched a market research effort to establish multiple “highly flexible construction contracting vehicle[s] to support mission-critical facility needs.” According to the record on SAM.gov, the agency is considering awarding contracts to several companies to establish a portfolio of single‑award construction contracts (SACC) that would let it rapidly design, build, renovate, and demolish ICE facilities across the country over the next five years.

The scope of work for SACC is broad. It includes, but is not limited to:

• General design and construction management

• Site planning and environmental planning assessments to support ICE compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal and state environmental requirements

• Alteration, modification, and renovation of existing facilities

• Maintenance and repair of existing buildings and infrastructure

• Demolition of structures and facilities

• Engineering analysis and site assessments (for example, geotechnical surveys) to support design‑build of real property assets

• Design‑build renovation and new construction services

Of note, ICE is assigning this work to NAICS code 236220, a federal industry category for commercial and institutional building construction. Using 236220 is a sign that the agency anticipates using these contracts for large-scale, institutional building work, not small projects or repairs.

More, the solicitation specifies that the SACC IDIQs are also intended to “support emergency responses to natural disasters and emergencies.” It’s not clear why ICE — whose core mission is immigration enforcement — would need a construction contracting vehicle that accommodates disaster response, a function that traditionally falls to FEMA.

“Highly flexible construction contracting”

While the RFI notice is brief, it mentions the need for “highly flexible construction contracting” multiple times and stresses that contractors will be expected to manage multiple task orders simultaneously. That flexibility is baked into the contract structure ICE is proposing. By setting up several single‑award, indefinite‑delivery/indefinite‑quantity contracts, the agency won’t have to compete each individual task order — instead, it will have a small bench of pre‑cleared companies it can tap quickly, avoiding both the delays and the oversight that come with a more competitive process.

This would be even faster than what ICE is currently using. DHS has been relying on WEXMAC TITUS, a Navy logistics program originally designed for international expeditionary contracts, to retrofit warehouses into detention facilities domestically. WEXMAC is a multiple‑award contract, which is faster than full and open competition, but still involves bidding among a defined pool of companies. Four firms competed for the Williamsport, Md., warehouse renovation; six bid on the site in Surprise, AZ.

The proposed SACC model might skip even that limited competition and transparency. ICE could pre‑award contracts to a select group of firms and issue task orders directly on an as-needed basis.

And there’s an even bigger strategic shift at play: where WEXMAC TITUS is a Pentagon program pressed into immigration enforcement use — one that Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) have already challenged, demanding the Defense Department end its agreement with DHS — an ICE-owned contracting vehicle would move detention construction back in-house and entirely out of Pentagon oversight — and the scrutiny that has come with it.

A Search for Large, Experienced Construction Firms

In addition to the typical information required in an RFI (business information, point of contact, etc.), ICE specifically asks for a signed letter from a qualified bonding company confirming that the contractor is currently approved for at least $10 million in bonding on any single project and at least $300 million in total bonded work across all projects.

In plain terms, this means that ICE is looking for construction firms whose insurance company will cover them for up to $300 million. This appears to be a way to filter out smaller and mid-sized firms who are unable to get bonding approvals at that scale.

What to Watch Next

ICE is just now entering the market research phase of this initiative. Interested vendors have until May 6th to respond, and from there, the agency will draft a procurement package. Given ICE’s emphasis on speed, it would not be surprising to see an RFP released on this in the coming months.

Once the full solicitation is out, we should get a clearer picture of the work ICE is planning, which locations each contract will cover, and, ideally, which facilities are likely to be prioritized.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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A federal plan to convert a warehouse in Washington County, Md., into an immigration processing facility is on hold under a court injunction, after a federal judge found the project failed to comply with federal environmental review requirements.

But meeting notes from a March 16 briefing between Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and county leaders offer the clearest account to date of how the project was advancing — including how federal officials discussed compensating the county and addressing infrastructure demands, even as key terms remained unsettled.

The briefing came after Washington County Administrator Michelle Gordon sent a list of requests in February to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, outlining local concerns tied to the project, including nearly $380 million in infrastructure demands and its fiscal impact.

In an opinion issued April 17, Judge Adam B. Hurson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland halted the project, describing it as “a crystal-clear example” of federal officials failing to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

Williamsport Warehouse Opinion

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The records, released through the county’s public information portal and reviewed by Project Saltbox, provide a detailed view of how the federal government is structuring financial and operational arrangements with local jurisdictions as it moves to expand detention capacity. In the margin of one page, a handwritten note reads “paused 14 days due to ledigation [sic],” a reference to the temporary restraining order that halted work.

Participants in the March 16 briefing included Dave Venturella, a senior ICE advisor and former executive at the private detention company GEO Group, and Matt Elliston, an assistant director at the agency, along with Ms. Gordon and county commissioners.

3/16 Meeting Notes

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Because federally owned property is exempt from local taxation, the notes outline a proposed workaround: a Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, set at $2 per bed, per day. The figure appears in both typed and handwritten notes. No formal agreement is included, and the documents do not specify how the payment would be calculated — whether based on maximum capacity, operational capacity, or another measure.

At 1,500 beds — a figure cited in leaked ICE documents and as a “surge” ceiling in court filings — the formula would generate about $1.1 million annually. But ICE has referenced smaller configurations elsewhere, as low as about 520 beds, which would reduce the payment to roughly $380,000. The notes do not indicate which figure would apply. The court noted that even conservative estimates suggested the facility could increase the surrounding population by nearly 50 percent.

The disparity underscores a broader tension reflected in the documents: while county officials were outlining hundreds of millions of dollars in potential infrastructure needs, the federal proposal described in the meeting notes would provide a fixed daily payment tied to bed count.

The notes describe the facility as a short-term processing site, with stays of three to seven days. That model would mean a steady flow of people moving through the site, increasing demand on local infrastructure. The documents do not specify how the proposed payment would be calculated, including whether it would account for that throughput. It aligns with the agency’s description of a “processing center” in its Detention Reengineering Initiative.

The notes also suggest that individuals would be transferred out of state. One entry states simply that individuals would be transferred to a detention facility in Pennsylvania, without further detail on the purpose or specific destination.

Based on Project Saltbox’s analysis of ICE’s recent acquisitions, Pennsylvania is home to at least one large-scale “mega center” in Tremont designed to hold 7,500 individuals, part of a broader network of massive sites intended to receive transfers from short-term processing locations.

During the call, county officials raised concerns about infrastructure, including water and wastewater capacity, road access and electrical load — constraints later echoed by state regulators, who directed Washington County to revisit its wastewater planning.

In response to questions from Project Saltbox, county officials said federal authorities indicated that the work would be handled by KVG, LLC, a contractor hired to renovate the site. According to the county, KVG is responsible for engineering assessments and construction, including evaluating water and wastewater capacity. The company was awarded a $113 million contract, with a ceiling of $641 million, for conversion work at the warehouse. A stop-work order was issued in early April following a temporary restraining order from Judge Hurson.

County officials said federal authorities indicated that the government would pay fees associated with any additional water or wastewater capacity and cover upgrades to the Wright Road sewage pump station. KVG, they said, would also be responsible for temporary solutions if existing capacity proves insufficient.

The March 16 meeting notes include a similar statement, that “DHS/Vendor will pay for infrastructure upgrades,” but do not provide details on scope, cost or timing, and no formal agreement is included in the record. The statements outline a plan for addressing infrastructure needs, but stop short of documenting enforceable commitments.

An email summarizing the March 16 briefing, sent by Washington County official Michelle Gordon to County Attorney Zachary Kieffer, outlines how the project was expected to operate in practice. The notes describe the site as a short-term processing facility with stays of three to seven days and estimate about 500 individuals “on any given day,” even as capacity targets ranged higher. They indicate that “EMS services [are] not anticipated,” with plans for a “full medical unit on staff” and a private ambulance contract, and note that individuals could be “transferred to [a] detention facility in PA,” without further detail.

The email also references infrastructure changes, including an upgrade to the county air traffic control tower, increased utility demand to accommodate detainee capacity, and anticipated coordination with transportation officials over Interstate 81.

It also draws a comparison between the Williamsport warehouse and a “comparable processing center” in Philipsburg, Pa., a reference to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an existing ICE detention facility.

The note lists attendees including Tim Kaiser, a division chief at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who has appeared in internal Detention Reengineering Initiative materials. Reporting and document metadata reviewed independently by Project Saltbox and WIRED show Kaiser participating in planning documents about the structure and duration of ICE’s proposed detention network, including facilities designed to hold individuals for up to 60 days, linking the Maryland project to a broader system of short-term processing sites feeding into larger detention centers.

The Washington County project is part of a broader push to expand detention capacity through large warehouse conversions. ICE has purchased 11 warehouses across the United States, with planned populations ranging from about 500 to 8,500 beds.

In total, the agency has spent more than $1 billion on warehouse acquisitions, according to Project Saltbox analysis. Using the $2-per-bed, per-day structure outlined in the Maryland notes, a facility at the upper end of that range would generate roughly $6.2 million in PILOT funds annually for the host jurisdiction.

The Maryland records do not indicate whether similar arrangements are being considered elsewhere. But they show how the project was advancing before the injunction, even as key financial and operational terms — including capacity, infrastructure costs and local compensation — remained unsettled.

Emails released this week through a Maryland Public Information Act request show the site at 16220 Wright Road remained in active commercial use planning shortly before its transition into a project now tied to federal immigration enforcement.

Biz Dev Emails

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The records do not identify the prospective tenant. But according to emails, the company was exploring a relocation from central Pennsylvania that could have brought about 75 jobs and more than $10 million in investment.

For several years, emails show, officials in Washington County’s business and economic development office worked with the building’s owner — a real estate arm of the investment platform Fundrise — to attract tenants.

In June 2022, shortly after the purchase, Jonathan Horowitz, a business development official for the county, told a representative of the firm that the county had worked with the previous developer and was seeking to establish “a connection from the building owners to the local government.”

By March 2023, that relationship had deepened. After a meeting with Fundrise representatives, Horowitz sent materials outlining local and state incentive programs and wrote, “I’m looking forward to filling your building up asap!”

Emails show the county also offered to connect the company with officials at the Maryland Department of Commerce and assist in assembling incentive packages to attract tenants.

At the same time, emails show, both the county and the property’s owner were grappling with constraints at the site. Access to the warehouse was a recurring issue, with a planned extension of Wright Road not expected to be completed until 2027 or later. Representatives of the owner pressed county officials about whether the project could be accelerated, describing access as a sticking point in discussions with prospective tenants.

In a January 2024 exchange, a Fundrise asset manager described a potential tenant with four or five employees operating forklifts and asked whether existing restroom facilities would meet code. Gregory E. Cartrette, Washington County’s director of permits and inspections, replied that no additional restrooms would be required.

That exchange reflects the building’s original intended use: a large industrial facility designed for limited on-site staffing.

As late as October 2025, the property remained in active leasing discussions with private tenants. Within six months, it had been acquired by the federal government and then — at least for now — stopped by a federal court.

Fundrise told investors it was not actively marketing the property for sale when it received the unsolicited offer, according to investor communications previously reviewed and reported by Project Salt Box, and said it accepted the bid based on its fiduciary obligations and the buyer’s terms. The account suggests the federal purchase did not emerge from a planned sale process but instead overtook an ongoing effort to lease the building to private tenants.

As Project Salt Box previously reported, on Jan. 12, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security formally initiated a consultation process with local officials, stating that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was proposing to purchase and convert the warehouse into a processing facility. Plans outlined in the letter included interior construction of holding and processing spaces, medical areas and visitor facilities.

Four days later, on Jan. 16, Michelle Gordon, the Washington County administrator, circulated the notice internally to county commissioners, describing it as part of the federal government’s due diligence process. She wrote that, to the county’s knowledge, ICE had not yet completed a purchase or made an offer. State land records indicate the federal government executed purchase documents that same day.

Even as the proposal took shape, Gordon reiterated the county’s legal position, writing that federal actions were outside local control and noting that detention facilities were permitted under the property’s industrial zoning designation.

The transition from commercial leasing to federal use unfolded over the following weeks.

By Feb. 10, amid mounting local opposition, the Washington County Board of County Commissioners adopted a resolution expressing “full, unwavering support” for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The following day, Gordon wrote to federal officials acknowledging that the department had purchased the property and outlining a series of infrastructure needs tied to the project, including sewer capacity upgrades, water supply considerations and transportation improvements. The county also requested federal assistance for projects ranging from pump station upgrades to a proposed widening of Interstate 81.

Those same infrastructure constraints had been raised months earlier in communications between county officials and the property’s owner during efforts to attract commercial tenants.

The emails do not show direct coordination between county officials and federal agencies prior to the purchase. But they document a compressed timeline in which the warehouse shifted from an actively marketed commercial asset — one facing known infrastructure constraints — to a federal project expected to accommodate far higher levels of occupancy.

The same infrastructure constraints the county had identified in earlier communications — first as barriers to commercial use and later in requests for federal assistance — now underpin the state’s case against the warehouse’s use as a detention center. A federal judge this week issued an injunction halting further work at the site pending environmental review, while Maryland officials have ordered Washington County to revise its sewerage plan — a step that could determine whether the project can move forward at all.

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A federal judge on Wednesday halted the government’s effort to convert a warehouse in Washington County, Md., into an immigration detention facility, ruling that work cannot proceed until a full environmental review is completed — a process federal officials said could take years.

The decision, issued by Judge Adam B. Hurson of the U.S. District Court in Maryland, grants the state’s request for a preliminary injunction, blocking the work while the case proceeds.

The ruling extends a series of setbacks. In March, the court temporarily blocked construction at the Williamsport site. The new order keeps those restrictions in place.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in Michigan and New Jersey, where state and local officials are seeking to block the conversion of warehouses into detention facilities on environmental and procedural grounds. The ruling in Maryland could shape how courts evaluate those claims, particularly around environmental review requirements.

Under the injunction in Maryland, Immigration and Customs Enforcement may only carry out limited work, such as maintenance and repairs, but cannot proceed with retrofitting the warehouse for detention use.

At issue are requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates that federal agencies assess environmental impacts before undertaking major projects. Maryland argued that the Department of Homeland Security moved ahead with the purchase and early work without. Documents submitted by ICE lawyers last week in opposition to the injunction show the agency completed and approved its environmental review in a single day, then purchased the property the next.

During the hearing, a lawyer for the federal government acknowledged that completing the review could take years, WBAL reported.

The federal government purchased the 825,000-square-foot warehouse in January for about $102 million and began preparing the site for a facility expected to hold up to 1,500 detainees.

An administrative order issued this week by the Maryland Department of the Environment identified additional limits on the site.

ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER to the Washington County Board of County Commissioners

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The agency found that Washington County’s sewer system is not equipped to support a facility of that scale. The warehouse is currently allocated capacity equivalent to about 400 gallons of wastewater per day — consistent with warehouse use, not a residential facility. The order cites “deficiencies in the County’s water and sewerage plan” and states that infrastructure must be sufficient to “protect the environment, public health, and comfort.”

A pumping station serving the property is already operating near capacity, with more than 99 percent of its available flow allocated.

State regulators said wastewater flows from a detention facility would likely exceed the system’s limits, increasing the risk of overflows and environmental contamination.

The order directs the county to revise its water and sewer plan and bars any increase in sewage flow tied to the property until those issues are addressed.

A spokesperson for the Washington County Board of County Commissioners declined to comment, saying the county “does not comment on legal matters.”

While today’s injunction does not resolve the case, it does render the warehouse unusable for detention for the foreseeable future, unless and until the environmental review is completed.

ICE did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the DHS Forecast and an RFI released earlier this year, ICE is expanding its East Coast ground transportation contract to the tune of over $100 million. The current contract, worth $53 million, is held by Paragon Professional Services and primarily serves the Baltimore, Boston, Newark, and New York City areas of responsibility.

Draft Pws

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The new contract will add the Washington, DC area of responsibility and defines the total operating area, which will include: New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, and, in some cases, as far as North Carolina, and Georgia.

The forecast anticipates an RFP release in May and a five-year contract start in September.

What Paragon’s Contract Currently Covers

Under the current contract, Paragon is responsible for providing armed ground transportation and guard services for ICE detainees across several Enforcement and Removal Operations field offices, including New York City, Newark, Baltimore, and Boston. The company supplies its own vehicles and two‑officer teams to move detainees between field offices, contract detention facilities, county jails, airports, hospitals, and processing centers, operating around the clock, seven days a week, including holidays.

In addition to moving people, the contract requires Paragon to furnish armed escorts and stationary guards, for when detainees are in hospitals, at court hearings, or held in field‑office holding rooms.

Paragon began this work in 2023, and the volume of task orders has expanded significantly since then. In the first contract year, ICE issued city‑specific orders totaling roughly $11 million across New York City, Newark, and Baltimore combined. New task orders starting in 2025 amount to more than $17 million in dedicated NYC/Newark work, plus about $17 million more for multi‑field‑office transportation, effectively more than doubling the overall annual spending under this contract.

The new contract is anticipated to be over $20 million a year - at least a 15% increase.

The Routes

As part of the RFI, ICE published anticipated routes for most of the areas of responsibility. These details provide insight into expected daily shuttle patterns, long‑haul transfers, and the volume of officer time and mileage the new contract will support.

Baltimore Area of Responsibility

The Baltimore AOR primarily includes the Baltimore Field Office and Salisbury sub‑office, with frequent short runs to Maryland county jails, USMS in Baltimore and Greenbelt, and nearby airports like BWI. It also includes occasional long‑distance trips to contract facilities and jails in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England, the Carolinas, Ohio, and Massachusetts, plus more sporadic airport moves to regional hubs such as Philadelphia, Newark, Reagan National, Dulles, and Harrisburg.

Baltimore Transportation Routes With Additional Routes

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If this routing plan is any indication, Baltimore will likely see more ICE activity on the ground. The field office and Salisbury sub‑office already run a dense schedule of short‑haul jail and USMS runs across Maryland, moving people around the region several times a week and, on some routes, daily. On top of that, the presence of long‑distance routes suggests Baltimore will continue to serve as a starting point for cross‑state transfers.

Boston Area of Responsibility

The Boston AOR is headquartered at the Burlington Field Office and includes sub-offices in Hartford, Manchester, Scarborough, and Warwick. There will be regular van runs to a network of county jails, contract detention facilities, and airports across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut. Daily shuttles will transport detainees to nearby facilities like Plymouth County, Strafford County, Wyatt, and Cumberland County. Less frequent but much longer trips will go to FCI Berlin, White River Junction, and the Batavia detention center in western New York.

Bos Anticipated Transporation Routes

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The Boston spreadsheet is the most detailed route plan, spelling out one‑way miles, total miles, estimated drive time, officer counts, frequency, and annual miles for each loop. In total, the Boston AOR is planning for about 514,732 miles of ground transport a year, most of it in high‑frequency runs between New England jails and detention sites, with occasional long‑distance trips into upstate New York and northern New England.

Newark Area of Responsibility

The Newark AOR is centered around the Newark Field Office and related addresses like 620 Frelinghuysen Avenue, 970 Broad Street, Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, and Delaney Hall, with a dense cluster of short routes to county jails and medical facilities across northern and central New Jersey. Many of those trips are under an hour’s drive—moving people to and from Hudson, Bergen, Monmouth, Morris, Sussex, Middlesex, and Union County jails, as well as Newark‑area hospitals—on an “as required” or multi‑times‑per‑week basis.

Newark Transportation Routes 06

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In addition to the shorter runs, Newark’s routing plan includes long‑distance trips to Moshannon Valley Processing Center in central Pennsylvania and other out‑of‑state facilities, with single legs stretching roughly 230 to 255 miles one way. This is similar to how the Baltimore AOR will operate, with most movements being local transports and a smaller set of long‑haul runs to contract centers hundreds of miles away.

New York City Area of Responsibility

The New York City AOR revolves around the ERO office at 26 Federal Plaza and sub‑offices in Newburgh and Central Islip, with daily van routes to airports, county jails, and nearby detention centers in New York and New Jersey. Core routes include daily round trips to JFK and LaGuardia airports, Nassau County Correctional Center, Orange County Jail, the Newburgh sub‑office, and Elizabeth CDF.

Nyc Route Paragon

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In addition to those daily shuttles, ICE has again laid out “as required” trips from New York to distant facilities like Moshannon Valley, Farmville, Plymouth County, Harrisburg, and Green Haven, often covering hundreds of miles per run. This follows the same pattern as the Baltimore and Newark AORs. The focus is on shorter local transports, but the plan still builds in ad hoc longer‑distance trips.

Washington, D.C. Area of Responsibility

The Washington (WAS) AOR is newly added under the expanded contract. The draft PWS indicates at least two detention facilities in the Washington Field Office region are “coming on line,” but does not yet provide a route table like the ones for Baltimore, Boston, Newark, and New York. Instead, it requires the contractor to establish hubs supporting the Washington Field Office and to be prepared to move detainees within Virginia, the greater D.C. region, and occasionally to the same network of out‑of‑state contract facilities that appear in the other AORs.

It’s not clear which two Washington‑area detention facilities the draft PWS is referring to. Given the timing, one plausible interpretation is that ICE was referencing proposed projects in Hanover County and at Augusta Correctional Center in Virginia, both of which have since been cancelled after public push-back and state‑level intervention.

In Hanover, DHS sought to buy a 550,000‑square‑foot warehouse in Ashland for an ICE processing and holding facility, a plan that fell through after intense local opposition and the developer’s decision not to proceed with the sale. In Augusta County, records obtained by the ACLU of Virginia through FOIA showed ICE actively considering the shuttered Augusta Correctional Center as a potential detention site, but that effort was blocked when Governor Abigail Spanberger rescinded her predecessor’s directive to sell the prison for detention purposes and state and local officials publicly ruled out its use as an ICE facility.

Other sites flagged in the same ACLU FOIA records, including privately operated facilities in or near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Greensboro, North Carolina, remain under consideration and have not yet been publicly taken off the table.

Another Sign of Detention Expansion

While this is technically “just” a transportation contract (and not even a brand‑new requirement) the bigger contract size, added area of responsibility, and the expanded route network all follow the same trends we have been seeing across DHS procurement: ICE is investing heavily into the infrastructure that makes detention and deportation possible, and it’s doing so in ways that are hard to reverse once they’re in place.

Similar to the warehouse purchases that are moving facilities onto ICE’s books for years, this contract would lock in at least a five‑year term, up from three under the current deal. That longer timeline suggests ICE is treating ground transportation as part of its standard detention infrastructure, funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, rather than as a short‑term or surge service. It adds more vehicles, officers, and routes into the routine operations of multiple field offices, and is structured to keep that capacity in place over time rather than adjusting it significantly from year to year.

Maryland’s top environmental agency issued a binding order on Monday barring Washington County from expanding its sewer system, finding that existing infrastructure cannot handle the waste generated by a proposed federal immigration detention center — and that the county’s sewerage plan, last updated in 2009, is too outdated to evaluate whether it ever could.

The Administrative Order, issued by the Maryland Department of the Environment, was filed the same day in federal court as part of the ongoing lawsuit Maryland brought against federal immigration authorities over their plans to convert a massive warehouse in Williamsport into a detention facility for up to 1,500 immigrants.

The order adds a new legal complication to a project that has faced mounting obstacles since the Department of Homeland Security paid $102.4 million in cash for the 825,620-square-foot warehouse in January — without notifying state or local authorities, filing environmental permits, or contacting the city responsible for supplying the building’s water.

“The sewer pipe will overflow and/or backup,” the order states, describing the consequence of putting the facility into operation. The result, the state warns, would “harm the environment and waters of the State” and “create an immediate health hazard and damage real and personal property.”

The Williamsport warehouse currently receives approximately 800 gallons of water per day — an allocation sized for a small warehouse crew. A detention facility housing 1,500 people, using the per-capita figure from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own planning documents, would require an estimated 209,000 gallons daily.

Nancy Hausrath, Hagerstown’s director of utilities, told her city council last month that she had done the math herself. Hagerstown is the sole water supplier for Williamsport, and her department had not received so much as a phone call from federal authorities. “We have not received any contact,” said Ms. Hausrath.

State environmental officials had projected that the facility would generate more than 187,000 gallons of wastewater daily — more than seven times the load from its prior use as a commercial warehouse. The sewer line serving Wright Road, where the facility sits, was not built for that volume. Monday’s order made those projections binding. The Department of the Environment calculated wastewater flows for both a 1,500-person facility and a smaller, 542-person version — a capacity figure that has not previously appeared in public filings and may reflect a scaled-back federal proposal that emerged during litigation. At either size, the agency found, existing infrastructure “is inadequate to convey wastewater flows.”

Until Washington County submits a comprehensive revision of its sewerage plan and receives state approval, it may not “allocate, authorize, or facilitate any increase in sewage flow” and may not “install, modify, or extend any portion of the sewerage system.”

In March, Judge Brendan A. Hurson of the Federal District Court in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order halting all construction at the property for 14 days, finding that Maryland was likely to succeed in its argument that ICE had violated federal environmental law. Judge Hurson noted that the only environmental review he could identify was a brief floodplain notice posted to a Department of Homeland Security website — and that a renovation contract worth more than $100 million was awarded just one day after that comment period closed.

At the same time, six portable restroom trailer units and two water tanker trucks arrived at the Wright Road property. These types of units operate independently of municipal infrastructure, suggesting that federal contractors might be preparing to work around the water and sewer gap rather than resolve it. Whether portable sanitation units fall within the scope of the restraining order is unclear.

Washington County commissioners knew about the infrastructure shortfall before they voted unanimously to support the project. The day after approving the resolution, County Administrator Michelle Gordon wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to detail what local officials had already identified: the pump station serving the Wright Road property had nearly exhausted its capacity, and the work required to accommodate the facility would cost between $750,000 and $1 million and would need to begin, she wrote, “rather quickly.” The letter also asked Ms. Noem to help secure $300 million to $350 million in federal funding to widen Interstate 81 and $25 million to $30 million to upgrade the county’s regional airport — requests the county tied directly to its cooperation on the detention facility. The county did not raise its infrastructure concerns publicly. In an internal email sent the day the warehouse was purchased, Ms. Gordon had told commissioners that federal supremacy meant the project was “exempt from all State and Local regulations, code and laws.”

Some local officials had recently expressed optimism that ICE was reconsidering its plans, citing a court filing in which the agency said it would not proceed with construction without further environmental review. But ICE made that statement in a brief aimed at defeating a preliminary injunction — arguing there was no imminent harm to halt. The same filing described plans to retrofit the warehouse for an initial capacity of roughly 540 detainees.

Monday’s filing by the office of Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown appeared intended, in part, to press that point before the court. The notice accompanying the Administrative Order told Judge Hurson that the new findings “underscore the inadequacy of existing infrastructure to support the proposed detention facility and the harms that would flow to the State from exceeding the capacity of that infrastructure.”

Stormwater from the Wright Road property drains into Semple Run, which feeds Conococheague Creek, which empties into the Potomac River and eventually the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland has spent tens of millions of dollars restoring the Potomac watershed and has committed to reintroducing 50 million native mussels to the river by 2040. Three state agency secretaries warned in a March letter that sewage overflows from the facility would not stay on the property.

The case is pending before Judge Hurson in Federal District Court in Maryland.

Ever Alvarenga Rios was on his way to work on April 2 when, according to his attorneys, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle struck his van from behind on South Haven Street in the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore, Md.

He was taken to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where he remained in ICE custody for four days, with federal agents restricting his ability to leave and maintaining supervision while he received medical care.

When he was discharged and transferred Sunday night to a downtown Baltimore holding facility, his attorneys say, he had not received follow-up care.

Eight days later, they say, that has not changed. His attorneys say he was transferred Thursday afternoon to the Elizabeth Detention facility in Elizabeth, N.J..

Clarissa Lindsey, an attorney representing Mr. Alvarenga Rios, visited him Thursday.

“I asked him if there had been a doctor that had seen him, a nurse, anyone of any sort of medical capacity,” Ms. Lindsey said. “He has seen no one.”

Medical Care and Access to Counsel

Mr. Alvarenga Rios, 32, came to the United States from Honduras in 2014 and has lived in Baltimore for more than a decade. He owns a hardwood floor restoration business and is active in his church community. His wife, Lurbin Vazquez, said he left Honduras after facing gang violence. An immigration judge issued a final order of removal in 2018, which ICE said it was enforcing at the time of the incident, when, Ms. Lindsey said, agents crashed into his van.

His legal team says he suffered bruising and abrasions to his face, forehead, hands, abdomen and shoulder, along with an ACL sprain requiring orthopedic follow-up within two to three weeks. Some of his wounds remain open, they said.

Ms. Lindsey said she could not determine which injuries resulted from the crash and which may have occurred during the arrest. During his hospitalization, she said, her only communication with him was a brief phone call with ICE agents present.

Her attempts to visit him in the hospital were denied, she said, with shifting explanations that included medical stabilization, paperwork issues and a policy barring legal access. A Baltimore City council member who attempted to visit was also turned away.

ICE’s acting Baltimore Field Office Director, Vernon Liggins, said claims that Mr. Alvarenga Rios had been denied access to counsel or family were “completely false.”

But Ms. Lindsey disputed that characterization, saying she and others were repeatedly denied access during his hospitalization.

“The Constitution guarantees that every person in the United States is entitled to due process of law,” she said. “Denying access to counsel at such a critical stage not only undermines our client’s rights, but also impairs the fact-finding process that is most effective immediately after an incident occurs.”

Since his discharge, his attorneys say, he has not been evaluated by any medical provider.

He has received only Tylenol, administered by detention officers, and has not been given the antibiotic ointment prescribed at discharge.

“I have no faith in any medical care to treat his injuries at any detention center,” Ms. Lindsey said, adding that his knee injury will likely require extensive rehabilitation.

The company involved in guarding Mr. Alvarenga Rios during his hospitalization, Paragon Professional Services, plays a key role in ICE’s detention system. The firm is the recipient of a $53 million federal contract to provide detainee transportation across the Northeast and beyond, linking the Baltimore field office to facilities in states as far away as Maine and North Carolina.

That network allows detainees to be moved across state lines quickly and with little notice — and has already come into play in Mr. Alvarenga Rios’s case, his attorneys said.

In one recent case, Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, a Maryland woman whose lawyers say she is a U.S. citizen, was transferred between facilities in multiple states during a 25-day detention, according to reporting by The Washington Post. Her attorneys told Project Salt Box the transfers made communication with her difficult.

Ms. Lindsey said Mr. Alvarenga Rios’s transfer to New Jersey could complicate access to counsel and continuity of care.

ICE did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

ICE Vehicle Collisions are “reckless”

The exact circumstances of the crash that led to Mr. Alvarenga Rios’s arrest remain in dispute. But similar vehicle-related encounters have occurred in immigration operations across the United States in recent months.

In one case in Chicago, federal officials accused a driver, Marimar Martinez, of ramming agents’ vehicles during an enforcement operation. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent then shot her multiple times. Martinez, a U.S. citizen, was charged with assaulting federal officers, but the Justice Department later dropped all charges. Defense attorneys said video and other evidence suggested the federal agents may have caused the collision.

And in Newark, N.J., a recent ICE pursuit led to a multi-vehicle crash involving several cars, including one carrying children, prompting local officials to call the agency’s tactics “reckless.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Vasquez, his wife, has begun speaking publicly about his condition. In his first call after the arrest, she said, he asked her to ensure his employees were paid. In a later call, she said he told her: “My love, I’m strong, because I know that you’re doing everything possible for me to get out of here.”

In an update posted to the Eldridge Crandell Instagram account Thursday morning, Ms. Lindsey said the collision used to carry out the arrest was a “dangerous” tactic that “put the greater community and their safety at risk.”

Meanwhile, students and staff affiliated with Johns Hopkins have also begun raising concerns about his condition. Among them is Natalie Wang, a medical student involved in organizing outreach to elected officials and hospital leadership, urging his release on medical grounds.

“In school, we are taught that we have a personal and professional duty to affirm human dignity and alleviate suffering,” Ms. Wang said. “Ever’s case shows what happens when that obligation is not met — from the way he was detained to the care he has received since. He has not been given the medications he was discharged with or the follow-up care he needs to recover, putting him at risk of infection and further complications. We are urging Baltimoreans to contact their elected officials in support of his release.”

A digital flyer circulating among Hopkins-affiliated students calls for officials to intervene and describes his arrest as an “assault.”

Dr. Kate Sugarman, a family physician who has spent more than two decades reviewing medical records inside ICE detention facilities and now works with Doctors for Camp Closure and the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said, “Not only did ICE cause serious injuries to Ever, but he is now not receiving the medical care he needs to recover.”

“Without proper wound care, hygiene, and follow-up treatment, he is at risk of infection, complications from head trauma, and potentially life-threatening issues like blood clots,” Dr. Sugarman said.

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The project involves the 825,000-square-foot warehouse on a 54-acre site between Hagerstown and Williamsport that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert into a detention and processing center.

Record of Environmental Consideration

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The Maryland site is one of at least 11 warehouses the federal government has purchased across the country as part of a multibillion-dollar plan to expand immigration detention capacity. The program, launched under the previous Homeland Security secretary, called for rapidly acquiring and converting large industrial buildings into detention centers. The new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, has since paused additional warehouse purchases and ordered a review of the contracts and proposals associated with the program.

Agency records filed in federal court show the project listed as “In Preparation,” “Environmental Review,” “Senior Environmental Review,” “Proponent Review,” and “Project Approved” all on Jan. 15, 2026. Digital signatures show the final approval was completed at 4:49 p.m. The property was purchased the next day for $102.4 million, according to the deed filed in Washington County.

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ICE later awarded a contract to retrofit the building on March 6. A federal judge temporarily blocked construction five days later after the state of Maryland sued, arguing that the project required a more extensive environmental review.

In court filings this week, the government said it complied with the National Environmental Policy Act by conducting an environmental review before buying the property. The agency said the project qualified for a streamlined review known as a categorical exclusion and argued that converting the warehouse into a detention facility “will not change the functional use of the property” and would have environmental impacts that are “minor and consistent with what would reasonably be expected in the area.”

Defendants’ Response in Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction (Dkt. No. 15)

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That argument depends on a technical definition of “functional use” that focuses on environmental footprint rather than how the building is used. Because the site already supports vehicle traffic, lighting and wastewater, the government argued that housing detainees there would not significantly change its environmental impact. In practical terms, however, the project would convert a warehouse designed for storing and shipping goods into a secure, 24-hour residential facility with dormitories, medical care, kitchens, laundry and recreation yards — a level of continuous occupancy and infrastructure demand more similar to an institution than a distribution center. Facilities the agency classifies as processing centers can include dormitories, medical units and secure housing inside converted warehouses.

But local infrastructure data reviewed by Project Salt Box suggests the change in use could be substantial. The warehouse currently has four toilets, two water fountains and an 800-gallon-per-day water allocation. A facility housing 1,500 people would require roughly 200,000 gallons of water per day, according to local utility estimates. The city’s utilities director said her department had received “no application, no inquiry, no phone call” from the federal government about increasing water capacity for the site.

The state of Maryland has argued in court that operating a secure, 24-hour residential detention facility would place significantly different demands on water, sewer and local infrastructure than a distribution warehouse and should require a more extensive environmental review.

The government has asked the court to evaluate the project based on a facility designed to hold about 540 detainees and said Maryland’s concerns rely on “speculation about future actions that are not part of the Project.”

But in the same filings, the agency said the facility “could ultimately house 1,500 detainees” — a number consistent with internal ICE documents leaked earlier this year — and that it is now “reconsidering the precise scope” of the project and will conduct additional environmental analysis before making a final decision.

Environmental review documents also show the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified several endangered or threatened species known or expected to live in the broader area and told the agency it was still required to determine whether the project “may have effects” on those species. In its review, ICE concluded the project would have “no effect,” writing that it would survey the area before exterior work began and halt construction if any protected species were found.

The dispute is nominally about environmental law, but the case has increasingly focused on timing and scope — when the government committed to the project, what size facility was analyzed, and whether the environmental review reflected a final plan or one that is still changing. The underlying question is whether the environmental review was used to inform a decision, as the law intends, or to justify a decision that had already been made.

A hearing in the case, brought by the Maryland attorney general, is scheduled for Wednesday, April 15, at 10 a.m. at the federal courthouse on Lombard Street in Baltimore, where a judge will consider whether to extend the halt on construction.

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The Department of Homeland Security has temporarily paused its bid to acquire nearly two dozen industrial warehouses across the country, the Associated Press reported Tuesday — a move that comes as newly-confirmed Secretary Markwayne Mullin inherits a department still reeling from the turbulent tenure of his predecessor, Kristi Noem.

When asked about the pause, an anonymous DHS official offered the kind of anodyne response that bureaucracies reach for in moments of transition. The AP’s Rebecca Santana, who has covered the department throughout the tumult of the past year, quoted the official as saying: “As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals.”

But as Project Salt Box has previously reported, career officials inside ERO have long viewed the warehouse program as operationally unworkable — and have said so, repeatedly, to political leadership. Those warnings, according to sources familiar with the internal deliberations, have fallen on deaf ears. The driving rationale from the White House, one source told us in February, has never been operational. It has been theatrical. Mr. Miller, the source said, wanted people to suffer — “cruelty as the policy.” Complaints about livability and humane conditions were beside the point.

Mr. Mullin has already made one consequential break with his predecessor. Ms. Noem’s requirement that she personally approve every DHS contract above $100,000 — which one senior official mordantly described as “spending $55 billion $100,000 at a time” — paralyzed the department’s normal contracting operations and drove agencies toward military contract vehicles never designed for domestic detention. Federal News Network reported in March that Mr. Mullin, during his confirmation hearing, called the policy “micromanaging” and pledged to revoke it immediately.

Whether that signals a broader willingness to push back on the warehouse program, or simply a more efficient path to executing it, remains to be seen.

The warehouse purchases — part of what the administration has branded the Detention Reengineering Initiative — have drawn opposition from communities and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including in reliably Republican areas where local resistance has stalled the initiative’s timeline.

One source with direct knowledge of the initiative told me that Noem’s departure has reshuffled the internal politics around the warehouses considerably. The Enforcement and Removal Operations arm of ICE — the agency actually tasked with running the facilities — has grown increasingly resistant to the program.

But Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and his principal Homeland Security advisor, is pressing hard to keep it alive. The administration has already spent more than $1 billion on warehouse purchases alone; up to an additional $900 million is obligated for retrofitting just two of the facilities in the coming weeks, according to federal procurement records. One of those projects is now on hold after a district court judge issued and subsequently extended a temporary restraining order in a case brought by the Maryland Attorney General, who alleges the agency failed to follow federal environmental and procedural law in acquiring the site. Two similar lawsuits in other states make the same allegations.

Complicating the issue further is the fierce internal politics now roiling Trump’s homeland security apparatus. Mullin, a hardline Trump loyalist, will likely face pressure to back Miller’s vision for the warehouses — and my source believes he may well do so. “But it will be a battle,” that source said.

Making that battle harder to predict is Tom Homan, the administration’s Border Czar, who, despite public remarks to the contrary, reportedly has little use for Mullin in private — just as he had little use for Noem. With Miller pushing from the White House and Homan an uncertain ally at best, Mullin enters the job without a clear power base on the issue that is likely to define his tenure.

The pause and the internal fighting arrive at a particularly fraught moment. As we reported yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jamie Raskin — joined by a coalition of 45 lawmakers — have launched an investigation into the contractors and real estate firms behind the warehouse purchases and conversions. Congress is currently on spring break, a fact that has drawn its own criticism as a partial government shutdown — now in its 48th day, the longest in American history — grinds on, with ICE funding among the unresolved questions at its center. The agency has faced mounting scrutiny over detention conditions and its enforcement operations in cities across the country.

The pause in warehouse acquisitions may feel like a victory. It is not — or at least, not yet. With eleven properties now in its portfolio, and the cost of purchasing, converting, and operating these facilities growing into the billions, the stakes could not be higher. “If it weren't for Miller pushing, this would be dead by now,” the source told me. A new DHS secretary may not be the obstacle many wish it were.

What has changed is the terrain: a record-long shutdown starving the agency of increased funding, lawsuits stacking up in federal courts, a congressional investigation widening, and a department whose own rank-and-file, by multiple accounts, wants no part of this. The conditions for stopping this program may never be better than they are right now.

My source put it plainly: this is the time for people to make noise.

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Bottom Line Up Front

Border Wall Spending is Picking Up: After spending roughly $2 billion a month on new border contracts in January and February, CBP more than doubled that pace in March alone. To date, CBP has committed about 40% of the more than $40 billion it was allocated for border wall construction under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with nearly half of those obligations made this month.

Warehouse Purchases Are on Pause: Of the purchased warehouses that Project Salt Box is tracking, only one was bought in March - the Gardner Logistics Center in Salt Lake City. Notably, the purchase of this warehouse occurred after an earlier warehouse sale in the region was cancelled, suggesting that ICE may be considering sites in other cities where previous deals have been blocked. That said, just yesterday, AP News reported that warehouse purchases are on pause as DHS scrutinizes all contracts signed under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Warehouse Conversions Have Started: KVG LLC and GardaWorld Federal Services were awarded contracts to renovate warehouses in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Az. into detention centers. ICE plans to spend over $1B on the conversion of those two sites. Construction on the Maryland warehouse paused almost as quickly as it started, after the state attorney general sued and a judge issued a temporary halt on the project.

March’s Biggest Contracts

Barnard Construction, Spencer Construction, and Fisher Sand & Gravel together secured nearly $6 billion in contracts to build sections of the border wall along southern Texas. Barnard Construction received three separate awards for projects in Del Rio, Big Bend, and Hudspeth County. Fisher Sand & Gravel’s contract also covers work in the Big Bend region, while Spencer Construction will handle construction near Rio Grande City. Granite Construction and Southwest Valley Contractors were each awarded half a billion dollars for work on the Laredo Valley border wall.

In other border projects, Spencer and Cochrane USA were awarded a collective $1 billion for an experimental water-borne barrier in the Rio Grande Valley. These are part of 536 miles of buoys that the federal government plans to stretch from the Gulf of Mexico deep into South Texas. According to reporting by myRGV in partnership with Inside Climate News, DHS has not made any environmental assessment or flood modeling for the border buoys available to the public, and experts have criticized the secrecy surrounding the project, warning that the buoys could intensify flooding and change the river channel.

Within ICE, most of the big money has gone to warehouse conversion contracts with KVG and Gardaworld Federal Services, which together top $1 billion. The other major award is a sole‑source deal with Amentum Services to run Camp East Montana, worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Analysis and Trends

ICE Continues Arming Up on Tactical Gear: While the majority of the agency’s budget has been spent on detention space, operations, and transportation, ICE has been steadily bulking up on tactical gear this year. In March, they spent millions of dollars on weapon suppressors, gas masks, and mobile security camera trailers. We have also seen a steady stream of purchases for red dot optic sights, body armor, ammunition, and tasers. These purchases are likely tied to the recruitment and hiring spree ICE is undergoing, as the agency moves to equip more than 10,000 newly added officers and agents and expand its capacity for large-scale operations.

Decreased Competition in Procurement: As we reported over the weekend, ICE has been increasingly turning to sole-source contracts over competitive bidding processes. In the last month alone, there have been only two competitive RFPs posted on SAM.gov. In that same period, ICE awarded at least ten sole-source contracts, including a $1 billion contract to Amentum Services to take over the detention and facility management of Camp East Montana.

Avoiding Scrutiny and Environmental Law: DHS is applying the same playbook it used for warehouse purchases to both traditional border wall construction and its new floating “river wall” projects on the Rio Grande: move fast, invoke emergency or waiver authorities, and limit opportunities for public pushback. In Texas, the department has plans for hundreds of miles of floating buoy barriers while also advancing new wall segments in remote areas like Big Bend, where it has threatened the use of eminent domain to seize private land and has rushed or curtailed environmental review.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. This is the third monthly report from Project Salt Box. If there are specific procurements, companies, regions, or topics you would like us to cover in future monthly reports, please reach out to us and let us know.

Michigan and the City of Romulus asked a federal judge on Tuesday to immediately freeze construction and detention operations at a suburban Detroit warehouse the Trump administration is converting into an immigration detention center, escalating a lawsuit filed one week ago into the most consequential test yet of the state’s effort to block the project.

The motion for a preliminary injunction, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, asks Judge Jonathan J.C. Grey to halt all physical changes to the 249,000-square-foot facility on Cogswell Street in Romulus and prohibit the detention of any individuals there while the litigation proceeds. Plaintiffs also asked the court to require the government to file a status report within 48 hours of any order describing the steps it has taken to comply.

The filing came with an unusual procedural wrinkle: the Department of Justice has not yet assigned counsel to the case.

Michigan’s lawyers said they made reasonable efforts to confer with government attorneys before filing, as local rules require, but were repeatedly told that DOJ was still working on attorney assignment. They ultimately served the motion by certified mail to newly-appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The failure to assign counsel may be indicative of a strain that runs deeper than just this case. The Justice Department has lost an estimated 5,500 employees since the start of the Trump administration — attorneys, agents, immigration judges — and has refilled a fraction of those positions, with top law school graduates largely no longer applying, according to reporting by the ABA Journal.

To redirect resources toward immigration enforcement, the department quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in its first six months under Attorney General Pam Bondi — including more than 900 cases of federal program and procurement fraud, and three times as many environmental crimes cases as the prior administration, according to a ProPublica analysis published Tuesday.

The resulting shortage has been measurable in near-real-time. For example, Trump-appointed US attorneys in Texas, Louisiana, and Massachusetts filed court declarations warning that immigration habeas petitions had created a “tsunami’ of new litigation overwhelming their offices — in the Western District of Texas, such cases made up more than 75 percent of all new civil filings in January. The strain spilled into public view in a Minneapolis courtroom in February, when a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge that ICE officials simply don't respond when prosecutors try to get them to comply with court orders. “The system sucks. This job sucks,” she said, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. She was removed from her post shortly after.

“If they're having a hard time staffing Minnesota, and they try this in other jurisdictions, where are the prosecutors going to come from?” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and Loyola Law School professor, asked Bloomberg Law in February.

To be sure, the warehouse cases likely involves a different bench of lawyers in a different part of the Justice Department. But the underlying condition is the same: aggressive federal expansion that has outpaced and overwhelmed the lawyers meant to answer for it in court.

Infrastructure Lacking at Romulus Warehouse

The motion’s most detailed arguments concern the physical limits of the Romulus site — constraints that state and city officials say make the project not merely unlawful but unworkable.

The department purchased the Romulus warehouse on or around February 4 for $34.7 million as part of its Detention Reengineering Initiative, a program backed by roughly $45 billion in congressional appropriations aimed at converting industrial facilities into immigration detention centers nationwide. Federal officials have said the site would house up to 500 people in immigration custody awaiting processing.

The warehouse is connected to the city’s sewer system by a six-inch line designed for low-volume industrial use, capable of handling 0.26 cubic feet per second of wastewater. A detention center for 500 people and staff would generate flows as high as 2.30 cubic feet per second — nearly nine times the line’s design capacity, according to a declaration from the city’s public works director. The 15-inch city main under Cogswell Street, which also serves surrounding residential neighborhoods, has a total capacity of 3.0 cubic feet per second. Overflows, the motion argues, would reach a 118-acre wetland conservation easement held by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy on land adjacent to the property.

The traffic situation is similarly constrained. Cogswell Street is a three-lane road — two travel lanes and a center turn lane — that the city owns and maintains. The warehouse has a single point of entry from a major road, with no associated turning lanes. City officials say the roadway cannot support the volume of staff, contractors, transport vehicles, and emergency services a facility of this size would generate.

The government’s own public notice, issued in late February, disclosed plans to install 3,800 linear feet of perimeter security fencing. Michigan’s environmental officials say that fencing, if placed across the regulated floodway that crosses the property, would require a state permit — one that has not been applied for — and a hydraulic model demonstrating it would not increase flooding on upstream properties. The site flooded last year. Portions of the property lie within a 100-year floodplain, a 500-year floodplain, and a regulated floodway.

A Third Front In Procedural Suits

The Michigan filing is the third legal challenge to the administration’s warehouse detention program, and the first to combine floodplain and wetland concerns with the procedural arguments that have anchored the earlier cases.

In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Brendan A. Hurson has frozen construction on a planned 1,500-bed facility in Williamsport since early March, and extended that freeze last week through at least April 16. A hearing on a longer-lasting injunction is scheduled for the week of April 13 — the first time the government will be required to substantively defend the program in open court. Michigan’s lawyers cited Judge Hurson’s preliminary findings repeatedly in Tuesday’s brief, treating them as a roadmap.

New Jersey and the Township of Roxbury filed their own suit last week, challenging a 470,000-square-foot warehouse in Roxbury that the government purchased for $129.3 million. That complaint goes further than Maryland’s on the law, arguing not only that DHS violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, but that the site itself is unsuitable for detention under the Immigration and Nationality Act — a claim Michigan also makes. New Jersey’s brief noted the warehouse currently has four toilets. State jail standards for a 1,500-person facility would require at least 94 showers, 125 toilets, and 125 wash basins.

Michigan’s case tracks the New Jersey theory closely. The state argues that before acquiring the Romulus warehouse, ICE was required by the INA to first consider whether existing correctional facilities — including several closed Michigan prisons under state control — could meet its needs. According to a declaration from a Michigan Department of Corrections official, federal officials never made contact.

What Happens Next

No hearing date has been set. Judge Grey will need to schedule one, and the government will first need to get lawyers on the case. That timeline is uncertain — a fact that may itself inform how quickly the court acts on Michigan’s request for emergency relief.

The April 13 Maryland hearing now carries significant weight beyond that case alone. If Judge Hurson issues a preliminary injunction, the administration will face a choice between initiating the environmental review process the court has said was likely required or seeking a stay from the Fourth Circuit.

A ruling either way could arrive just as the Michigan and New Jersey cases are finding their footing — and as the legal infrastructure of the entire detention expansion program is being stress-tested for the first time.

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When Democratic lawmakers this week opened an investigation into the private companies helping build the federal government’s rapidly expanding immigration detention network, they named the obvious targets: CoreCivic and The GEO Group, the country’s largest private prison operators, and some lesser-known newcomers to the immigration detention arena — KVG LLC and GardaWorld, the contractors retrofitting warehouses into detention facilities. They also named PNK LLC — seller of the Social Circle, Ga., warehouse — and the Gosin Group, which represented Newmark affiliated properties in Oklahoma City.

Those companies deserve that scrutiny. Meanwhile, a broad-scope analysis of federal real estate records, contracting data and government financial disclosures shows that the financial beneficiaries of the detention expansion extend well beyond the firms Congress named — reaching into commercial real estate investment vehicles, industrial property funds and holding companies that sold warehouses to the federal government at prices that bore little relationship to what those properties were previously worth.

And those numbers are striking. Across more than a dozen warehouse acquisitions, ICE paid prices that exceeded both prior property valuations and recent market comparables at nearly every site. In Salt Lake City, the agency paid $145 million for a property previously valued at $97 million. In Social Circle, Ga., it paid $129 million for a property previously valued at $29 million. In Socorro, Texas, a property carried on the books at $11 million sold for $123 million.

The sellers who captured those gains are largely unknown to the public. El Paso Logistics II LLC, which sold the Socorro warehouse, realized an estimated profit of more than 1,000 percent. CRP/AI Oakwood Owner LLC recorded an estimated gain of 16,900 percent. The Rockefeller Group realized roughly 496 percent. These are not the detention contractors that congressional investigators have focused on. They are the landlords who cashed out.

The real estate firm whose name appears most frequently across the warehouse transactions is CBRE, which reporting has linked to brokerage roles in deals including the El Paso, Surprise and Romulus sites.

Steven Kelley, the former CEO and Vice-Chairman of DoD logistics provider J&J Worldwide Federal — which was acquired by CBRE last summer — left the company in August 2025 to establish SK2 LLC. That small firm was granted a nearly $6 million contract earlier this year for its services in brokering the warehouse deals on behalf of DHS.

Fundrise — the investment platform whose vehicle sold the Williamsport, Md., warehouse to ICE for $102 million — even alluded to the “largest real estate brokerage firm in the country” as negotiating the deal on behalf of ICE in an email to an investor earlier this month. CBRE matches that description. Why Fundrise described CBRE and not SK2 is not clear. Fundrise did not respond to a request for comment.

Financial disclosure records obtained by ProPublica during the first year of the Trump administration show that CBRE stock is among the most widely held equities among administration officials — appearing in the portfolios of more than two dozen appointees, including Thomas Homan, the administration’s border czar; Energy Secretary Christopher Wright; and Edward Forst, the administrator of the General Services Administration, the agency that oversees federal real property. Robert T. Law, the DHS Undersecretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans — one of the officials with the most direct role in the detention expansion — also disclosed holdings in a CBRE real estate fund.

Federal ethics rules require officials to recuse themselves from matters that could directly affect their financial interests. But those rules were built for a normal procurement environment — not one in which a single firm is potentially involved in billions of dollars of real estate transactions moving on timelines sometimes measured in days. Whether recusal was required, or sought, for any of these transactions is not publicly known.

The Fundrise connection is even more direct, and has investors among administration officials as well. Morgan Dewitt, a special assistant to the president for personnel at the White House, has a spouse who holds Fundrise fund investments. Peter Lamelas, the ambassador to Argentina, disclosed holdings across at least nine Fundrise funds. Arjun Mody, the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, holds both Fundrise and CBRE investments.

None of this establishes that any official influenced any transaction on behalf of their portfolio. Financial disclosures exist precisely to surface these overlaps, and most of the holdings are modest. But the breadth of the connections — CBRE stock held by the border czar, the GSA administrator, the DHS policy undersecretary and the president himself; Fundrise funds held by a White House personnel official as the Williamsport deal closed — is precisely what oversight is designed to scrutinize. Congress has not yet examined it.

A separate inquiry sent last week by Ms. Warren and Senator Jeanne Shaheen to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth highlights a much different but no less crucial dimension to ICE’s push: the contracting mechanisms enabling the projects.

In that letter, the senators raised concerns about the use of a Navy contracting vehicle known as WEXMAC TITUS, originally built to support military logistics abroad. The contract was modified last year to cover detention and custody support inside the United States, its spending ceiling was raised by 550 percent to $65 billion, and 23 new companies were added to its vendor pool — among them The GEO Group. Because work issued through WEXMAC TITUS is not publicly advertised, neither Congress nor the public has meaningful visibility into how contractors are selected, what work they might perform, or what standards they are ultimately held to.

The agency has compounded that opacity through its reliance on sole-source contracts — awards made without competitive bidding. As my colleague Em Knepp reported yesterday, in the past month alone, ICE posted only two competitive solicitations on SAM.gov while awarding at least ten contracts without competition, more than half of them justified on the grounds that only one vendor could do the work. One such award, worth roughly $1.2 billion, went to Amentum Services to manage Camp East Montana, a facility previously cited for serious problems. Amentum had been working there as a subcontractor when its predecessor’s contract was terminated. ICE then handed the same company a larger, noncompetitive contract.

The speed of the acquisitions has been matched by a systematic avoidance of required reviews. In Maryland, ICE executed the $102 million deed for the Williamsport warehouse just four days after initiating required historic preservation consultation, without waiting for a response, and notified county officials only days before the sale closed; the state attorney general has since filed suit seeking relief, and a judge recently extended a temporary block on the project. In Michigan, federal officials never directly contacted local leaders about a site in Romulus that sits within a mile of an elementary school on flood-prone land, prompting the state to sue to halt the conversion. And in New Jersey, the agency did not assess whether the building met basic standards for detention use before completing the purchase, and the state attorney general has filed a similar lawsuit seeking to block the project.

The Warren-Raskin investigation is a legitimate and much-needed exercise of congressional oversight. The letters are pointed, the questions are the right ones, and the named companies should be made to answer them. But as currently scoped, the inquiry focuses on a small cross-section of the contractors and operators enabling these facilities. The sellers who profited from the acquisitions, the brokers who facilitated them, and the officials whose financial disclosures overlap with both remain yet unchallenged.

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DHS is spending massive amounts of taxpayer dollars on recruitment, spyware, border wall construction, and new detention facilities, but the mechanisms through which the agency spends its money are largely unknown – likely because the federal procurement process is incredibly complex. Laws governing federal procurement are scattered across the U.S. Code, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), and agency-specific supplements.

As DHS – and ICE in particular – races through billions in public money with steadily decreasing transparency, it is critical for activists, attorneys, public officials, and anyone concerned with accountability to understand at least the basic rules that are supposed to govern how the agency spends their taxpayer-funded budget.

Competitive vs. Non-Competitive Purchases

When the government wants to buy something over a certain dollar threshold (typically in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of purchase), it is generally required to use a competitive procurement process. This involves issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP), allowing interested vendors to bid on the work, evaluating those proposals against stated criteria, and selecting a winning offer. Project Salt Box has reported on several competitive procurements, including the recent Safety Verification Initiative. Those RFPs were posted on SAM.gov, the main public website the federal government uses to advertise open competitive contract opportunities, although agencies can also compete work through pre‑established contract vehicles. This competitive process is meant to promote fairness, accountability, and transparency in how taxpayer money is spent.

As with most rules, there are exceptions to competitive purchasing. In certain circumstances, agencies can issue a “sole-source” contract to a company, effectively bypassing the RFP process. These circumstances include, but are not limited to:

• Only one responsible source exists (proprietary, patented, or unique product/service)

• Vendor holds unique data rights, software, or IP that others cannot legally/technically use

• Urgent and compelling need (true emergency where delay for competition would harm the mission)

• Disaster or crisis response where there is not enough time for competition

• National security considerations that limit who can perform

• Highly specialized consulting or technical work where the expertise is one-of-a-kind

While sole-sourced contracts limit competitive bidding, they are built into the legal procurement system, and in many cases, they are genuinely necessary. During a major hurricane or wildfire, for example, the government cannot wait out a months‑long bidding process just to get temporary housing, emergency communications gear, or debris removal underway; it needs contractor support in days, not weeks. Or, an agency might rely on a proprietary climate‑modeling system to predict flood risks, or a specialized air‑traffic control software to manage flights safely, where only one company owns the code and has the expertise to update or support it. There are many legitimate reasons to sole-source a contract, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – there are ways to exploit the system.

How ICE is Pushing the Boundaries:

Lately, ICE has been increasingly turning to sole-source contracts over competitive bidding processes. In the last month alone, there have been only two competitive RFPs posted on SAM.gov. In that same period, ICE awarded at least ten sole-source contracts. Of those, over half were justified by the reasoning that “only one responsible source exists” to carry out the work, including an award to Amentum Services to take over the detention and facility management of Camp East Montana. The value of that contract is roughly $1.2 billion. In its justification document, ICE stated that “the proprietary nature of the facility’s infrastructure, including housing units, generators, and food service equipment, precludes competition as no other vendor possesses the necessary rights or operational control to provide uninterrupted services at this location.”

Amentum Services had previously worked at Camp East Montana as a subcontractor to Acquisition Logistics, the prime contractor whose contract was terminated after widely reported concerns about conditions at the facility. Given Amentum’s size, capabilities, and role on the ground, it is likely that they were performing much of the day‑to‑day operations even before the Acquisition Logistics’ contract was pulled. In effect, the government is now awarding a new sole‑source contract to the same large company that was already deeply involved in running a facility cited for serious problems, rather than opening the work to broader competition.

Another contract was awarded to IMPLAN, a company with economic modeling software that is likely being used for the agency’s economic impact analyses of their warehouse purchases. ICE cited “unusual and compelling circumstances” to avoid a competitive procurement and stated that “the urgency of this requirement is such that adhering to normal competitive procedures would result in unacceptable delays.” Meanwhile, several state Attorneys General are arguing that ICE is moving so fast on the warehouse build‑outs that it is skirting basic legal safeguards, including required environmental reviews and public input.

ICE’s use of sole‑source contracts is not illegal. The agency is operating within the federal procurement framework laid out in the FAR. At the same time, its reduced reliance on competitive procurement raises legitimate questions about how often, and how well, those exceptions are being scrutinized. When an agency repeatedly awards large, noncompetitive contracts — including awards exceeding $1 billion — it warrants closer examination from watchdogs, lawmakers, and the public.

Contract Vehicles

SAM.gov is the main public website for federal RFPs, but a lot of contracting actions happen through separate “contract vehicles.” A contract vehicle is basically a pre-approved list of vendors. The government runs a big competition up front that any company can participate in, picks a subset of companies who win the ability to bid on future work, and then sends work opportunities only to that group. Later, when agencies have specific projects, they issue RFPs (often called task orders) only to the pre‑selected pool, and those vendors compete amongst themselves instead of against the entire market.

The exact number of contract vehicles being used by the government is unknown, but it is in the hundreds, if not thousands. They vary in size, from major government-wide vehicles with thousands of pre-approved vendors, to smaller agency-specific contracts that only include a handful of companies. All contract vehicles have a defined scope, meaning they can only be used to buy certain types of work. Some vehicles are IT‑focused, some cover logistics, and others have broader “professional services” scopes. The idea is that an agency can move faster by buying from a pre‑vetted group of companies it already knows are qualified to do that specific kind of work.

How ICE is Pushing the Boundaries:

Like most government agencies, ICE uses a wide range of contract vehicles to buy goods and services. Among others, the agency uses an NIH-administered, government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC) called CIO-SP3 to procure IT services and solutions, a GSA contract vehicle called OASIS+ to buy consulting, financial, and other professional services, and a NASA-administered vehicle called SEWP to buy IT equipment. This is common and even best practice in government procurement. Contract vehicles offer a streamlined way for the government to buy what they need, while still allowing for competitive bidding.

Where the agency is raising eyebrows — and concerns — is in its recent use of a Navy contracting vehicle known as WEXMAC TITUS. Originally established to provide rapid‑deployment logistics and base support services for military operations overseas, WEXMAC TITUS was modified last year to do four big things: expand its scope to work inside the continental United States; explicitly cover detention‑ and custody‑style support services, such as facility management, transport, and infrastructure setup; raise the contract’s ceiling by 550% to $65 billion (up from the original $10 billion ceiling); and on‑ramp 23 new companies in January, including The GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison and immigration detention operators.

ICE has already used WEXMAC TITUS to award two warehouse conversion contracts for the recently acquired sites in Williamsport, MD and Surprise, AZ. KVG, LLC and Gardaworld Federal Services were awarded construction contracts valued at $641 million and $704 million, respectively. Because of the closed nature of contract vehicles, the public – including Congress – has little-to-no visibility into these contracts. From publicly available data, we know that each of the warehouse conversion contracts were competed amongst the WEXMAC TITUS companies and that six companies bid on the Surprise, AZ contract, with four bidding on the Williamsport work.

Outside of that, we are in the dark. It is unclear what the exact scope of work is, what subcontractors are assisting, how the government evaluated and selected KVG and Gardaworld, and what quality and performance standards they will be held to. Without transparency into deliverables, oversight mechanisms, or accountability provisions, lawmakers and the taxpaying public have no way to assess whether these massive detention construction efforts comply with procurement law, human rights obligations, environmental and safety regulations, or basic standards of fiscal responsibility.

It is also unclear how WEXMAC TITUS was authorized to include the United States as an area of performance and how detention and custody-support services were added to its scope. In a recent letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen raised their concerns about the use of WEXMAC. “It is unclear whether there is any other section of law that provides DoD with contracting authority for this arrangement with DHS,” they state. The letter continues, “DoD should not be allowing DHS to use the WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS contract vehicle to bypass federal acquisition procedures and fast-track the construction of migrant detention facilities throughout the United States.” The senators conclude with a detailed list of questions seeking clarification on the legal authority and approval process behind the arrangement, the subcontractors and oversight mechanisms involved, the handling of costs, reimbursements, and human rights safeguards, and the extent of Navy and DoD involvement in site selection, management, and compliance with congressional reporting requirements.

Secretary Hegseth has until April 13 to respond.

Real Property Purchases

Real property (land, buildings, warehouses, prisons) does not fall under the same laws as buying goods and services. Instead of the FAR, real estate purchases are governed by a different set of laws and regulations centered on Title 40 of the U.S. Code and the government’s real property rules. The General Services Administration (GSA) is the primary landlord for civilian agencies. If an agency needs space, the default is that it first tells GSA what it needs, then GSA scouts sites, orders appraisals, negotiates with owners, checks the title, and either buys the building or signs a lease for the agency to use.

This centralization of real estate purchase and management under GSA is meant to ensure that the government is buying legitimate property, avoiding unnecessary space (thus wasting taxpayer money), estimating long‑term costs, presenting budgets to Congress for approval and oversight, and evaluating the broader environmental and community impacts of new facilities before purchase.

In most cases, agencies are supposed to go through GSA, but there are some important exceptions where they are permitted to buy property themselves. Certain agencies have their own real estate authority written into statute—Defense, Veterans Affairs, or parts of Homeland Security—and can acquire or build facilities directly when Congress has clearly given them that power. Agencies can also sometimes operate under delegated authority from GSA, which lets them handle specific projects or types of property on their own while still being bound by the broader federal real property rules.

In practice, that means an agency like DHS can argue it has the power to buy and control facilities (e.g. detention sites) when it can point to a mission‑specific statute and dedicated funding, even if it is stepping outside the usual GSA‑managed route.

How ICE is Pushing the Boundaries:

DHS can sometimes buy or control its own property, but it is still supposed to operate inside a formal real property system. The department has a Real Property Management Manual that requires components like ICE to justify new facilities through capital planning, use or request GSA support where possible, document why a particular site is needed, and complete environmental and historic‑preservation review before large, long‑term projects. Even when DHS acts under its own or delegated authority, the manual is meant to keep decisions about land and buildings tied to mission need, long‑term cost, and community impact.

Separately, under immigration law (8 U.S.C. § 1231) DHS has the authority to detain certain people with final removal orders and “arrange for appropriate places of detention.” The law goes on to say that when suitable government or rental space is unavailable, it may “acquire land and … acquire, build, remodel, repair, and operate facilities” for detention. The statute also says DHS should consider using existing prisons, jails, or comparable facilities before building new ones. In other words, Congress has given DHS both a detention mandate and explicit authority to obtain facilities for that purpose—but it has not erased the expectation that DHS should still follow its own real property policies and broader federal safeguards when it chooses where and how to do that.

The recent lawsuits in Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey highlight how DHS is using its detention mandate to skirt required review and public process. The Maryland lawsuit points out that ICE executed a $102 million deed for the Williamsport warehouse “just four days after initiating NHPA consultation, and without awaiting any response” from the state historic‑preservation office, and that county officials were notified only days before the sale.

Maryland Lawsuit

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Michigan’s complaint over the Romulus site highlights that federal officials “have not directly communicated with local leaders,” that the warehouse is within a mile of an elementary school and on a flood‑prone site, and asks the court to vacate the decision and enjoin any conversion or operation as a detention center.

Michigan Lawsuit

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New Jersey argues that DHS never meaningfully considered whether the building is an “appropriate place of detention” given limited water, sewage, and public safety capacity, while also failing to comply with NEPA, the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, and the AP.

New Jersey Lawsuit

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These lawsuits allege that DHS is using a broad detention statute to justify buying and converting warehouses, but it is not following the real property procedures required by its own manual and by federal law. They argue there has been no serious alternatives analysis, no genuine environmental and community review, and little to no advance engagement with the states and towns that will be living next to these “appropriate places of detention.”

Through sole‑source contracts, opaque contract vehicles like WEXMAC TITUS, and aggressive real property acquisitions, ICE is turning narrow exceptions in federal procurement rules into its standard way of doing business. On an individual basis, these actions are within the confines of federal procurement, but together they suggest a deliberate strategy to move billions of dollars and build new detention infrastructure with as little scrutiny as possible.

A new amicus brief in Maryland’s lawsuit over the planned ICE detention center in Washington County offers an account of what the Williamsport project means for the people who have to live with it. The filing comes from Hagerstown City Councilmembers Caroline Anderson, Erika Bell, and Tiara Burnett; Washington County Delegate Matt Schindler; Hagerstown Rapid Response; the Hagerstown Area Religious Council (HARC); the Washington County NAACP branch; the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights; and the ACLU of Maryland. The brief also includes an exhibit from more than 50 local doctors and nurses and a declaration from HARC’s executive director on health and community impacts.

57591903 V1 Brief

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57591904 V1 Appendix

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57591906 V1 Exhibit B

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DHS bypassed NEPA, leaving locals in the dark

The brief’s first section addresses one of the core issues with the Williamsport site. DHS moved to convert an 825,620‑square‑foot warehouse into a regional ICE processing center without a meaningful National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review. Amici tell the court that there are still no public plans for the inside of the facility, no public explanation of how the warehouse will be rebuilt from a low‑occupancy logistics space into a high‑turnover detention center, and no operations plan that answers basic questions about sewage, stormwater, emergency services, or lighting.

In the absence of any substantive plans, local officials and residents have been left to piece together DHS’s intentions using a national Detention Reengineering Initiative document and a bare‑bones floodplain notice, which describe Williamsport as a regional processing center for up to 1,500 people at a time, cycling through in three‑ to seven‑day stays. The brief points out that even that number could be low, citing the Social Circle, Georgia proposal, where similar warehouse square footage is tied to projected populations of 7,500 to 10,000 people. Amici frame this as the kind of opaque, high‑impact decision‑making NEPA is meant to stop: building out detention capacity first and only confronting the consequences for surrounding communities after the fact.

A warehouse‑turned‑detention hub will overwhelm local infrastructure

The second major theme of the brief focuses on the lack of infrastructure in the region to support a large-scale detention center. Amici warn about the strain a detention center would put on local water infrastructure. According to the brief, DHS plans to move an estimated 78,000 to 182,500 people through the site each year, even though Hagerstown’s 1928‑era water plant is already fragile and operating at maximum pressure, with less than a day of backup supply if the plant fails. The warehouse’s current allocation is 800 gallons per day, while city staff estimate the detention center would need 75,000–150,000 gallons daily—at least 100 times more—and DHS has not applied for additional water allocation.

The brief also highlights how the project may impact Williamsport’s effort to brand itself as a small tourism town built around its history and the C&O Canal. The mayor reports that existing and prospective businesses are already asking whether they should stay or come at all, and warns the facility “is going to hurt the town’s efforts for years to come.”

Separately, I‑81 and I‑70 are already overburdened, with widening of I‑81 not scheduled until 2027. Detention traffic, including buses, vans, and staff vehicles, will worsen congestion, air quality, and crash risk and could strain the small regional airport that serves the area.

Health care, EMS, and mental health systems are already at capacity

57591905 V1 Exhibit A

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The brief includes an open letter from Washington County health care providers that walks through patterns already documented at existing ICE facilities. In the letter, the providers cite DHS’s inspector general, who in 2024 found broad noncompliance with medical care and environmental health standards at existing detention centers, including chronic sanitation problems in bathrooms and housing units. They argue that as the detained population has nearly doubled, overcrowding, food quality, temperature control, and access to sinks and toilets have deteriorated further, with some facilities reporting overflowing toilets and floors flooded with feces‑ and urine‑contaminated water. Local clinicians warn that ICE facilities generate heavy EMS and 911 call volumes, which in Washington County would fall on just eight volunteer paramedics and an ER that already struggles with wait times. They emphasize that a 1,500‑bed site will strain an already overextended system and put both detained people and county residents at risk.

Putting the whole story in front of the court

Maryland’s lawsuit has focused on DHS’s use of warehouse conversions and fast‑track contracting to rapidly build out detention space, the agency’s efforts to sidestep NEPA and local land‑use processes, and growing resistance from local communities.

This brief pulls those issues into a single record for the judge, using DHS planning documents and floodplain notices alongside evidence from Williamsport and other detention hubs to show how a seemingly technical “reuse” decision impacts local infrastructure, planning, and civil rights issues. Amici tell the court that unless construction is paused now, the project will move ahead without the environmental review and public input NEPA requires, locking in a detention center with harmful impacts that cannot be undone.