U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a solicitation on Thursday for a construction program worth up to $10 billion, a move to build and expand detention space on land the agency owns rather than lease it.

The solicitation begins with eight projects: new “Secure Housing Units” — entire wings of individual cells — at eight of the agency’s Service Processing Centers. Two of those centers closed years ago. A third, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, has never existed.

Each unit is described as a single-story building of 26 cells, two of them wheelchair-accessible, with day rooms, showers, search and storage rooms, a control room and separate exercise yards for men and women. The fencing must block men held in the units from seeing into the women’s yard. The eight units come to 208 cells, priced at $24 million to $42 million apiece, roughly $247 million combined. The $10 billion contract ceiling covers far more than that — the solicitation names 14 more locations where work could later be ordered, from Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay.

Only one of the eight, at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Los Fresnos, Tex., is a funded job. The other seven are what the solicitation calls “scenarios” — priced in full, with a caveat that the government is not committing to build them.

An eighth funded project, at an ICE training site on the Army’s Fort Benning in Georgia, appears in the schedule for bidders’ site visits but not on the list of jobs up for bid.

Over the past year, ICE tried several ways to add detention space quickly. It leaned on a Navy construction program, WEXMAC TITUS, and dropped it after senators pressed the Pentagon to end the arrangement. It bought eleven warehouses for just over $1 billion to convert, and most are now for sale. A federal contractor with direct knowledge of the matter told Project Salt Box in June that the agency was pivoting to new facilities on land it controls. The solicitation posted Thursday calls for construction at government-owned sites and directs the winning company to help ICE find the next parcels to buy.

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Unanswered questions

For a program with a $10 billion ceiling, the solicitation answers few basic questions.

ICE has not chosen a builder. The posting is a request for bids, with proposals due Aug. 14; the agency expects to pick winners by Sept. 25.

The construction dates are blank. The contracts take effect Sept. 30, but that is a paperwork date, and the start and completion dates for each project are left to be filled in later, job by job. The only firm number is an outer limit: 730 calendar days, two years, from the start of design to a finished building.

How many people the units would hold is unstated. Each is drawn as 26 cells — 21 for men, three for women, one accessible cell on each side — but the documents never say whether a cell holds one detainee or two, so the bed count is unfixed. Who would guard or run the units is also absent; this is a contract to construct buildings, not to staff them.

Several of the sites go unexplained. The solicitation lists 14 places where work could be ordered but describes what would be built at only the eight housing units. Three of the 14 — Huntsville, Texas.; Honolulu; and Fort Benning, Ga., an Army post — have no ICE detention facility today, and the document says nothing about what it would put there.

While there are no ICE-owned detention centers in these areas, the agency does regularly hold immigration detainees at U.S. Marshall Service and local law enforcement jails located near the named regions. It is not clear if the construction contract would cover expansion at these sites. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Building at centers that closed

Some of the eight sites are centers ICE runs today — Batavia, N.Y.; El Paso; Florence, Ariz.; and Krome in Florida. Three are not.

Others closed years ago. The El Centro Service Processing Center, in California’s Imperial Valley, shut down in October 2014 and its detainees were moved to a newly built contract facility in Calexico.

The Aguadilla Service Processing Center in Puerto Rico — spelled “Aquadilla” throughout the solicitation — dates to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and last appears in the agency’s own records on a 2005 distribution list, at 505 Gun Road in Ramey. The solicitation prices a new lockup unit at each.

A third has never existed. No Service Processing Center has operated on St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, yet the contract schedule lists a “St. Thomas Service Processing Center” and assigns it the largest price tag of the eight, up to $42 million. Its statement of work drops the label, calling the job only construction “at the St. Thomas campus, U.S. Virgin Islands,” with no address or site identification of any kind.

Identical design at eight sites

The four scenario statements of work reviewed by Project Salt Box — Aguadilla, El Centro, El Paso, and St. Thomas — run about 54,000 words apiece and are identical but for the facility name, the state where the design firm must be licensed and a block of Texas environmental rules that appears only in the El Paso version. The Puerto Rico, California and Virgin Islands documents got no comparable local language.

Each tells bidders to price the work on a soil report for Los Fresnos, Tex.: “Assume the same soil conditions for this site.” The instruction applies equally to El Centro, in one of the country’s most seismically active regions, and to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, both shaken by damaging earthquakes in 2020. The documents do require borings at each site before design begins, by a locally licensed engineer — including, in the Virgin Islands, a firm with at least five similar projects completed “in St. Thomas.”

The soil report was written for none of these projects. It is a July 2023 report by the Army Corps of Engineers’ Fort Worth District, prepared for an earlier design-build solicitation titled “ICE Secure Housing Unit, Port Isabel, Texas,” and built on borings drilled in January 2019 for two adjacent Port Isabel projects, a kitchen building and wastewater plant improvements. The statements of work credit the borings to a firm called Geotechnology Inc., in March 2019; the report itself credits ETTL Engineers & Consultants, in January. Corps concept drawings for the Port Isabel unit, attached to the current solicitation and dated to the previous administration, are marked "CONCEPT NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION," and the spaces for a solicitation number and an issue date are filled with rows of X's.

The Port Isabel details carry through to sites 1,700 miles away. The St. Thomas and Aguadilla documents, like the others, tell the contractor to bring construction traffic in from Memorial Drive — a road on the Port Isabel location in Texas — and to coordinate grass-seed selection with “local SPC personnel” at centers that have no personnel because they are closed or were never built.

Fourteen possible sites

The contract also covers new construction of buildings and real property, demolition, and renovations “inclusive of change of occupancy use” — the building-code term for converting a structure to a new purpose. And it names the places where work can be ordered. One group, labeled “Mega Hub DC, One IDIQ Award,” consists of Aguadilla; Broadview, Ill.; Guantánamo Bay; Huntsville, Tex.; Oakdale, La.; St. Thomas; and Honolulu. A second group of individual awards covers the existing centers plus Fort Benning, the Army post in western Georgia.

The phrase “Mega Hub DC” appears once in the 102-page solicitation and is never defined. Five of the seven locations grouped under it have no ICE-owned detention facility today. Guantánamo Bay, where a presidential memorandum in January 2025 directed the expansion of migrant operations that President Trump said would hold 30,000 people, is a Navy base.

The competition is written for a handful of very large firms. Small businesses are barred from bidding, and every company must prove it can line up $10 billion in bonding — the insurance that guarantees a job gets finished if the builder fails — a bar few American construction firms can clear. As recently as April, ICE had asked bidders to show a fraction of that, $300 million. The workers on the job would need security clearances to handle classified national security information, unusual for a construction contract, and ICE reserves the right to order individual projects verbally.

The document also contradicts itself in ways ICE has not explained. In one place it puts the ceiling at $10 billion; two paragraphs later it caps the total work at $300 million, a difference of more than thirtyfold. One section says a company can win only one contract; another says two. The cover letter counts an initial batch of twelve projects; the schedule prices eight. And one heading still carries the label for a different kind of contract entirely — the multiple-company arrangement that appeared, unexplained, in the notice ICE posted last week.

Scouting the next sites

The contract also puts the builder to work finding the government’s next detention sites. The work statement includes tasks that have nothing to do with pouring concrete: the winning firm is to draw up “site options,” scout properties, and hand ICE a package on each one — price, zoning, who holds the easements, whether the land suits the intended use — “for Government to make decision on sites to be acquired.”

The firm must keep on staff an environmental specialist whose job is winning the federal sign-offs that let a project skip a full environmental study, and whose résumé, the document says, should ideally include work for “federal law enforcement agencies.”

That sign-off — a categorical exclusion, a finding that a project is too minor to warrant deeper environmental review — recurs across ICE’s expansion. Project Salt Box has documented the agency’s use of it at the planned Gilroy, Calif., facility, and a federal judge in Maryland found in April that ICE likely broke the law by cutting environmental corners at a warehouse in Williamsport.

Under this contract, the company preparing the exemption documents would be the company building the project — and, for sites the government has yet to buy, the company that picked and priced the land.

Proposals are due Aug. 14, 30 days after posting. Site visits at Port Isabel and Fort Benning are set for July 29 and 31. ICE anticipates awards by Sept. 25 and an effective date of Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year, with no phase-in period.

Updated July 11, 2026, at 9:53 a.m. ET to include a statement from David Broderick, legal counsel for Project NINJA.

The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court Friday evening that it is reconsidering its decision to abandon plans for an immigration detention facility in a Roxbury, N.J., warehouse — eleven days after government lawyers represented to the same court that the agency no longer intended to convert the building and would sell it.

In a two-page notice filed July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Justice Department attorneys wrote that DHS officials informed them on July 8 that “upon reconsideration, the agency intends to move forward with plans to consider the retrofitting of the Roxbury Township warehouse facility for use as a detention facility.”

The notice states that agency deliberations remained ongoing as of July 10. The parties will file a joint status report on July 17.

The filing walks back a representation the government made on June 29, when the parties submitted a joint status report stating that “Defendants no longer intend to convert the Roxbury Warehouse into an immigration detention facility and intend to sell the warehouse.” According to Friday’s notice, counsel for the government “was authorized to make that representation by authorizing officials within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The notice does not explain what changed between June 29 and July 8, and it does not identify the officials who authorized either position.

The June 29 representation came eleven days after The New York Times reported that ICE planned to dispose of seven of the eleven warehouses it purchased nationwide for detention conversion, with Roxbury among the properties slated for sale or transfer. Friday’s notice does not address whether the disposition plans for the other six properties remain in place.

It is the second time this year the federal government’s stated position on the Roxbury warehouse has changed within a matter of days. In February, a DHS spokesperson confirmed to Gothamist that the agency had purchased the property; the next day, a spokesperson told another outlet that no purchase had occurred, and township officials said they were informed the original statement had been issued without proper approval. Two days after that, Roxbury’s mayor announced that ICE had closed on the building. DHS retracted similar purchase confirmations the same week in Chester, N.Y., and Lebanon, Tenn.

The turnabout comes as ICE has aggressively sought to expand its detention capacity amid a nationwide immigration crackdown surge.

David Broderick, a board member of New Jersey Appleseed and legal counsel for Project NINJA, the residents’ coalition opposing the facility, said in a statement that the government had offered no new facts to explain the change — only that DHS officials had reconsidered. He pointed to the Justice Department’s care in noting that DHS had authorized both the June 29 representation and Friday’s reversal, “in effect saying, ‘Don’t blame us, Judge. We have a crazy client.’”

Whatever the agency ultimately decides, Broderick said, DHS remains bound by the May agreement barring construction at the site until an environmental assessment is complete. In the meantime, he said, public funds are being spent to secure what he called “a $129 million white elephant” while Roxbury goes without the property’s tax revenue.

Broderick noted that the impracticality of converting the warehouse presumably drove the agency’s original decision to sell. “One can’t help but suspect that this is nothing more than a political charade designed to embarrass State and local leaders who declared victory at the time of DOJ’s original filing,” he said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked private contractors Friday morning for at least 5,500 new detention beds across four regions of the country, in facilities that must start holding detainees within 30 days of a contract award. The agency gave the industry just one week to respond.

The request for information, posted to the federal contracting site SAM.gov, seeks detention facilities that contractors would operate near Denver, Miami and Seattle, and in central Pennsylvania. Responses to the notice, which includes a 160-page draft statement of work, are due in just five business days — by July 17 at 4 p.m.

According to procurement documents, ICE plans to award four regional contracts under a flexible structure that lets the agency order detention services as needed rather than committing to a fixed amount upfront. The required minimum capacities include 1,500 beds near Denver, 1,500 near Seattle, 700 near Miami, and 1,800 in Pennsylvania—the largest allocation of the four.

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The mandate requires each facility to be reserved exclusively for ICE. The agency will accept sites built for low- and medium-custody populations, but prefers those capable of handling high-custody detainees.

While contracting documents reviewed by Project Salt Box state that turnkey properties, renovations, and new construction are all eligible, the timeline tells a much different story. In practice, a strict requirement to begin housing detainees within 30 days of an award effectively limits the field to only existing, fully staffed, and functional buildings.

ICE also specified exactly where the detention centers must be located. The Denver facility must be located within 30 driving miles of the field office in Centennial, Colorado. The Miami detention center must be within 50 driving miles of the field office in Plantation, Florida. The Seattle facility must be within 30 driving miles of the field office in Tukwila, Washington. For the Philadelphia field office, the detention center must be located near the airport in State College, Pennsylvania.

Those geographic requirements align precisely with four detention facilities currently operated by the GEO Group that ICE already relies on: the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado, the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Washington and the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania.

ICE did not explicitly identify these facilities in the notice, name the GEO Group as a prospective contractor or indicate whether current operators would receive new contracts. Instead, the agency described the notice as market research intended to gather information from potential providers. Contract officers at ICE did not respond for requests for comment in time for publication.

The request comes as the future of several major detention centers remains uncertain. ICE has discussed potentially purchasing multiple GEO-operated facilities, according to reporting by Project Salt Box and public remarks from George Zoley, the private prison company's chief executive. At the same time, the agency is seeking new contracts to continue using its existing footprint.

As written, the RFI outlines plans for an Indefinite Delivery Contract (IDC) award. In federal procurement, an IDC establishes a binding framework with predefined pricing and operational standards, but allows the agency to dynamically order services via task orders as needs arise rather than committing to a fixed, upfront service volume. However, establishing an IDC framework does not prevent the government from executing a parallel property buyout later.

A procurement search built around existing facilities

By design, the listed procurement criteria heavily favor facilities that are already operational.

Prospective contractors face an exhaustive list of hurdles, including proving legal control of the property, securing necessary occupancy approvals, and providing detailed staffing and environmental documentation. ICE is also demanding comprehensive operational blueprints for medical care, transportation, security, attorney visitation, maintenance and on-site immigration court operations.

Under the draft statement of work, dedicated court space is non-negotiable. For a facility housing roughly 1,600 detainees, a bidder must provide five video-equipped courtrooms, judges’ chambers with separate secure entrances and dedicated interview offices for asylum officers.

Rather than simply selecting the lowest bidder, ICE plans to use a “best-value” evaluation model that prioritizes operational readiness and management experience over cost alone.

Though new construction is technically eligible, a strict 30-day window to begin housing detainees effectively disqualifies unbuilt sites. Because a winning bidder must be ready almost immediately, the procurement framework functions as a mirror for the exact detention centers ICE already uses.

Why seek contracts for facilities ICE already uses?

Soliciting new contracts for facilities already under agency control raises an obvious question: Why replicate an existing network?

Driving this sudden push is an impending deadline. All four GEO Group-operated facilities matching the geographic footprints in the notice are running on contracts or operating agreements set to expire between August and October, forcing ICE to act quickly to avoid losing detention capacity.

The Aurora, Broward, Northwest and Moshannon Valley processing centers currently anchor ICE’s regional enforcement network. The new solicitation provides a legal pathway to maintain access to those locations before current agreements lapse.

The focus on central Pennsylvania coincides with recent shifts in the agency’s aviation logistics. Regional flight tracking logs analyzed by JJ in DC at Habeas Flight Watch show a steady stream of ICE charter operations out of University Park Airport near State College, totaling 15 flights in the past 30 days. The flights, typically using Air Wisconsin CRJ-200 passenger jets operating on behalf of the agency's transit network, run a loop connecting to an ICE operational hub in Alexandria, La. Logistical data indicates that roughly three flights a week stay overnight at the airport, suggesting that a charter flight crew may now be basing out of State College.

Gillian Brockell, an independent journalist who tracks ICE flight operations, noted that it is highly unusual for a federal detention charter to lay over in a non-base city, reinforcing indications that the airport is functioning as a base for the agency. Brockell added that ICE also appears to have shifted some regional enforcement roundups from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Harrisburg — a relatively new pattern that may reflect a broader consolidation of aviation logistics toward central Pennsylvania.

The solicitations also overlap with a separate effort by ICE to buy privately operated detention facilities outright. Project Salt Box previously reported that the agency was exploring the purchase of at least 10 turnkey detention sites.

That acquisition strategy materialized earlier this month in California, when the Department of Homeland Security executed a $1.5 billion deal to buy two facilities from CoreCivic, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center — just six months after renewing its operations contract. Under that transaction, the federal government assumed ownership of the infrastructure while CoreCivic retained a management contract to run the facility through December 2029. As that California deal demonstrates, securing or renewing an operational service contract does not prevent the government from buying the underlying real estate.

Two of the centers aligned with the new RFI — the Aurora and Northwest ICE processing centers — were on that initial list of 10 acquisition targets. While ICE has not disclosed whether those buyouts are still active, a federal purchase would fundamentally change the legal status of the properties. Owning the facilities could allow ICE to operate the sites directly or through third-party contractors under a different legal framework than privately owned centers.

That jurisdictional dispute is already playing out in Washington, where state officials have spent years seeking access to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma for health inspections. A federal judge on Thursday ordered the GEO Group to allow state inspectors inside, granting Washington’s request for a preliminary injunction after the company refused access.

The legal push for local oversight coincides with newly released internal agency records. A June 2026 inspection report from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) flagged three safety and medical compliance failures at the Tacoma facility, including delayed comprehensive health assessments and missed welfare checks for detainees on suicide watch. The report also disclosed an ongoing federal investigation into a April 17, 2026, allegation that a female detainee was physically assaulted by medical staff during a seizure

The Tacoma findings underscore the exact friction testing a state's authority to regulate a privately run federal facility.

For ICE, federal ownership could offer a tempting legal shield, potentially insulating these high-stakes facilities from state-level crackdowns on private immigration detention.

Expanding the Regional Footprint

The recent notice arrived just one day after ICE awarded the GEO Group a $528.7 million contract to reactivate the Big Horn detention facility in Hudson, Colorado. The facility, which has sat vacant since 2014, could provide ICE with capacity for more than 1,000 additional detainees once operational, according to a Project Salt Box analysis of agency detention records.

The award follows months of bureaucratic maneuvering over the empty facility. ICE previously entered into a $39 million letter contract with the GEO Group covering six months beginning in April 2025, despite the site remaining entirely empty during that window. A second letter contract followed in December, though its specific terms and pricing were redacted.

The Big Horn contract and the latest RFI highlight the immediate logistical challenge facing ICE: rapidly securing and expanding detention capacity as the agency pushes to increase its overall enforcement footprint in the wake of its abandoned warehouse conversion scheme.

Beyond Colorado, the agency is leveraging alternative procurement channels to scale up capacity in the Southwest. In Marana, Ariz., ICE recently issued a sole-source contract award to Management and Training Corporation to convert a shuttered state prison into an immigration detention center.

A June 2026 Department of Homeland Security environmental notice revealed plans to upgrade that facility’s baseline capacity from 506 to 775 detainees, with provisions for an additional 600 temporary beds. The planned enhancements would push total capacity past 1,300 inside a designated 100-year floodplain.

Whether reviving a mothballed facility in rural Colorado or expanding a prison footprint in an Arizona floodplain the strategy remains uniform. Nationwide, ICE is moving aggressively on multiple procurement tracks to solidify its grip on any facility it can to hold detainees.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to award its own construction contract to expand the detention campuses it owns — and possibly to build new ones — restoring much of the fast-track building capability it lost when it stopped routing work through a Navy logistics program, according to a contracting notice posted Thursday.

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The notice, posted to SAM.gov, the federal contracting portal, describes what it calls a Single Award Construction Contract: a standing arrangement under which ICE would hand individual project assignments, known as task orders, to one firm at fixed prices as needs arise, covering “new construction, renovation, and repair of owned Service Processing Center” facilities — the detention centers the agency owns and runs itself. Its scope extends to “new construction of buildings, facilities, and real property.” Bidding is restricted to large businesses, and ICE says the formal request for bids will post no later than July 17.

The solicitation follows two retreats in ICE’s detention buildout. The agency stopped sending construction work through WEXMAC TITUS, a Navy contracting program built for rapid construction and supply work that the Department of Homeland Security had used to award warehouse retrofit contracts in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., after Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) pressed the Pentagon to end its agreement with DHS.

It is also moving to sell seven of the eleven commercial warehouses it bought for just over $1 billion to convert into detention space, including sites in Romulus, Mich., Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga., Hamburg and Tremont, Pa., Salt Lake City and Roxbury, N.J.

In June, a federal contractor with direct knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of their work, told Project Salt Box that ICE was shifting away from the warehouse conversion strategy and toward greenfield construction — building new facilities on undeveloped land.

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The shift comes as ICE’s warehouse strategy appears to be giving way to other ways of expanding its detention footprint. Earlier this month, the federal government acquired two California immigration detention facilities from CoreCivic for a combined $1.5 billion, with the private prison company expected to continue operating the sites under existing ICE contracts. The purchases marked another move toward federal ownership of detention infrastructure, rather than relying solely on converting commercial properties into detention space.

An in-house contract would give ICE much of what WEXMAC supplied — a standing vehicle for rapid design-build work, in which a single firm both designs and constructs a project — while moving the work fully inside DHS and away from the Pentagon contracting channel that brought additional scrutiny to the warehouse program.

But the parallel is not an entirely exact one. WEXMAC allowed a group of pre-approved contractors to compete for individual projects, while the July 9 notice describes a contract that would place the work with a single firm. But the effect would be similar: moving detention construction away from purchased and leased commercial buildings and onto property ICE already controls — or plans to.

The warehouse purchases drew six federal lawsuits, while the agency’s reliance on commercial properties has exposed its detention expansion plans to legal challenges and local opposition. Those obstacles are largely avoided when the government builds on land it already owns.

The paperwork behind that shift, however, is less clear. The notice sets a single award with an initial one-year term that ICE can extend, carrying forward the structure of a market research notice the agency issued in April seeking “highly flexible construction contracting” from firms able to secure at least $300 million in construction bonding, the insurance-backed guarantee that work gets finished.

That April notice outlined a potentially massive construction vehicle. ICE said it anticipated awarding up to nine contracts that would allow it to assign future construction projects without opening a new competition each time, with a combined maximum ordering limit of $10 billion over five years if all options were exercised. The agency described projects ranging from $100,000 assignments to work reaching the full contract ceiling.

But the accompanying statement of work posted today describes a “MACC Contract,” a multiple-award structure in which several firms would compete for individual construction projects over an initial five-year term. Neither document explains the discrepancy.

Built for the campuses ICE already owns, or the ones it plans to build

Under the work statement, facilities “may include, but are not limited to dorms, administrative buildings, medical clinics, classrooms, training centers, warehouses, roads, firing ranges,” and renovation work runs “up to major building renovations inclusive of change of occupancy use.” That is the building-code term for converting a structure to a new use — turning an administrative building into detention housing, for instance.

The security provisions are written for the Service Processing Centers, a category that includes Krome in Miami, Florence, Ariz., and Batavia, N.Y. Anyone entering “the SPC” must be cleared in advance by the ICE Security Division. If the contractor removes or adds fencing, it has to tie into the campus’s “existing fiber optic perimeter fence detection system” and keep “containment at required levels” the whole time the work is underway.

The work statement makes clear that ICE is not seeking a general construction contractor. The projects must be built to the agency’s detention construction and design standards, including barriers tested to withstand physical assault under methods developed for jails and prisons. Where ICE’s own standards do not address an issue, the document directs contractors to follow the American Correctional Association’s jail standards: “Where the ICE Detention Standards are silent, the ACA Jail Standards must be followed.”

Those requirements extend beyond the buildings themselves. Contract employees who will have “direct contact with Detainees” must undergo additional screening under standards implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which sets requirements for preventing and responding to sexual abuse in detention facilities.

The work statement also hands environmental review to the contractor. The project documentation section assigns “NEPA reviews and document preparation” — reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act — to the builder, and “NEPA Categorical Exclusions, Environmental Assessments, and decisional documents (if applicable)” appear on the deliverables list. A categorical exclusion is the document that declares a project exempt from deeper environmental study.

Project Salt Box reporting has previously found ICE projects where the agency relied on streamlined environmental reviews, including a categorical exclusion for the planned Gilroy, Calif., facility.

That arrangement would place responsibility for preparing those exclusion documents with the same firm tasked with constructing a facility — a notable provision given that states and municipalities have challenged DHS projects over allegations that accelerated environmental reviews failed to adequately assess their impacts.

ICE says additional details will come with the formal solicitation later this month. The agency did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

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Bottom Line Up Front

CBP awards record-setting border wall contract: Customs and Border Protection issued what appears to be the largest border wall construction award in its history to Fisher Sand & Gravel - a whopping $2.5 billion for the Big Bend Texas sector. The agency also awarded a $1.3 billion border wall contract to SLS Federal.

DHS Abandons Warehouse Scheme: As first reported by The New York Times, DHS is planning to sell warehouses in Romulus, Mich.; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga.; Hamburg and Tremont, Pa.; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, N.J.

The end of the road for WEXMAC: In June testimony, Secretary Markwayne Mullin told House appropriators that ICE has stopped using the Navy’s WEXMAC contract for detention services, shutting off the opaque Defense Department vehicle DHS had relied on to expand detention capacity outside normal civilian procurement methods.

DHS pivots from Warehouses to Existing Facilities

DHS is backing away from its most ambitious warehouse conversion plans and shifting back toward more traditional detention real estate: existing jails, prisons, and private facilities that can be brought online faster and with less upfront political risk. After facing lawsuits, protests, and congressional scrutiny, the department is moving to offload or repurpose at least seven warehouses purchased for mega‑centers, while signaling that future capacity increases will rely on “existing detention space with our state and county partners” and on buying operating facilities from private prison companies.

This week, CoreCivic sold two of California’s largest immigration detention centers to the Department of Homeland Security in a $1.5 billion real estate deal, while retaining the lucrative contracts to keep running them for ICE. DHS purchased the 1,994‑bed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County and the 2,560‑bed California City Detention Facility in Kern County, giving the federal government ownership of the buildings even as CoreCivic continues operations under existing agreements that run into the late 2020s.

CoreCivic expects about $1.1 billion in net proceeds from the sale, which it plans to use mainly to pay down debt and potentially repurchase stock. The deal comes amid broader talks between ICE and major private prison firms about selling additional “turnkey” detention facilities to DHS, a shift away from the now‑stalled warehouse conversion program toward buying and federalizing existing prisons that continue to be operated by the same private vendors.

In parallel, ICE and its contractors are turning to previously closed prisons and long‑dormant sites as the next wave of detention infrastructure. CoreCivic has already reopened shuttered prisons in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee to house immigrant detainees, and is investing in repairs and upgrades at the closed Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota, positioning it as a potential ICE hub that would more than double detention capacity in the state if activated.

ICE Says It Has Stopped Using WEXMAC TITUS

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a House Appropriations subcommittee June 25 that ICE is no longer using the Navy's WEXMAC contract, the Defense Department vehicle DHS relied on to build out detention capacity beyond the disclosure requirements of civilian procurement, according to Federal News Network. As Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) began asking about ICE's use of the contract to buy detention services, Mullin cut in: “We're not using it anymore, just so you know.”

Task orders issued through WEXMAC TITUS are not publicly advertised, a structure DHS used to award the warehouse conversion contracts in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., that remain in federal litigation. The same vehicle gave ICE fast-track access to The GEO Group after its ceiling was raised to $65 billion, and carried surge support for enforcement operations in St. Paul. A May task order to Acquisition Logistics LLC suggested the department intended to keep relying on the contract. In March, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to end the department's support for the arrangement, writing that it was unclear what section of law gave the Pentagon authority to administer detention construction contracts for DHS.

Mullin did not say what will replace WEXMAC for ICE detention purposes. But in April, ICE sought industry input on a set of single-award construction contracts that would let the agency issue detention construction task orders directly, without the limited competition WEXMAC requires and outside Defense Department oversight.

DHS funds investigative contractor network targeting immigrant youth

In late June, DHS and its contractors began building out a nationwide investigative apparatus around immigrant youth placements, with new contracts and job postings that blur the line between child welfare and intelligence work. Under updated performance work statements, contractors are tasked with assessing the “adequacy” and “quality” of minor placements, including probing sponsors or guardians and anyone currently or previously residing at listed addresses. The April modification to the solicitation explicitly expanded that scope to cover people who are no longer minors but were under 18 throughout the period specified in the PWS.

This expansion tracks with a DHS forecast that would give ICE direct access to T‑3 visa applications, a visa category intended for immigrant youth survivors of human trafficking, and with a parallel solicitation for CBP “child caregivers.” These moves combined demonstrate how DHS is building an enforcement‑adjacent pipeline around ostensibly protective programs, tying trafficking‑related claims and child‑focused services into a larger data and investigations architecture.

Who is getting the work

The first award under this structure went to MVM Inc, a firm already known for handling transfers and holding operations for immigrants at Guantánamo Bay. From there, a cluster of companies began actively hiring into these contracts, including SOS International, Savvy Professor dba SVI LLC, Continuity Global Solutions, Alpha Recovery, Delta Point, and others. Open postings describe roles such as “Mission Support Specialist,” “Child Welfare Advocate,” “Youth Counselor,” “Compliance Officer,” and “Field Analyst.”

Many of these titles sound like social services, but the hiring requirements focus on a different set of skills. Experience in investigations and intelligence is often mandatory, while social work is merely “preferred” and bilingual skills are not required. Public bios for company leadership, where available, show deep roots in military intelligence, FBI, defense contracting, security, and other law‑enforcement tracks. Several of the nineteen known companies are newly formed entities with little or no federal contracting history and minimal public information, raising questions about vetting, oversight, and how much of this work will be shielded behind private corporate structures.

Contract values for this emerging network range from roughly $62 million to as high as $3.1 billion. It remains unclear how many subawardees will be brought in, but similar job listings have started appearing at smaller local organizations, including Cayuga Centers, CivTeam, MCHS, and Everstand, suggesting that the operational footprint could spread through community‑based entities that are effectively plugged into a federal investigative framework.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. 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.

Earlier this week, I got the chance to speak about the Trump administration’s failed warehouses-as-immigration-camps scheme with over on Legal AF. We spoke at length about why the plan fell apart, what comes next — and, in no small part, about the work that thousands of you have put in to resist this unjust and inhumane scheme.

Over the past six months, we have worked closely with communities across the country to provide information, documentation, and often proof to help drive decisive action against this unparalleled and unchecked expansion of government authority. Often, our team gets the honor of speaking publicly with the press and legislators and key voices at a national level about the importance of community action. But we know that we are one very small part of a much larger movement, and that there are so many of you out there whose efforts go uncelebrated and unrecognized.

Tonight, as I listen to the fireworks sounding off around Baltimore, I think about what freedom means, and what it is we are celebrating. I had the privilege to serve our nation in the Armed Forces for two decades. I joined shortly after 9/11, at a moment of great national unity and mounting global uncertainty.

One of the lessons I learned from my time in uniform was that no valiant act of rugged individualism or personal excellence counts for much on its own. Instead, the military celebrated and promoted acts of teamwork — often in the form of bridge-building and nurturing strategic relationships — that drew on the expertise and talents of the many over the lone strengths of the one. Those were the skills we valued to win the day.

That lesson predates my service by two centuries. We remember the Declaration of Independence as the work of one man’s pen, though it was drafted by a committee, debated and amended line by line in Congress, and signed by fifty-six delegates who mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

And what that collective effort produced reads less like soaring philosophy than like a bill of particulars: twenty-seven documented grievances against unaccountable power, laid out one by one, because the signers believed that Facts, as they put it, should be submitted to a candid world. One of those grievances accused the King of obstructing the naturalization of foreigners and refusing to encourage their migration to these shores. A government hostile to immigrants was among the abuses the founders considered worth documenting for the world.

Documenting abuses of power, and binding your fate to your neighbors’ while you do it, is the oldest patriotic work there is. When you sent us a record, or flagged a court filing, or read the fine print of a federal lease, you were carrying that work forward.

The signers wrote that promise in a country where nearly a fifth of the people were enslaved, and many of the men who pledged their sacred honor held human beings in bondage themselves. The gap between what the Declaration said and whom it served has been the central American argument ever since, and every narrowing of that gap has come about the same way the document itself did, through people acting together.

Abolitionists built their movement across lines of race and creed, joining free Black organizers with Quaker printers and evangelical congregations. The Reconstruction Congress that wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution, and the later bipartisan coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act, both depended on cross-party support from lawmakers willing to break with their region and party. That correction remains unfinished.

We are at our best when we work together for a common cause and the advancement of our neighbors’ well-being. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all. You — anyone who sent in a document, or shared your expertise with us, or showed up to a town council meeting, or organized protests, or marched in them, or wrote letters to your congresspeople, or researched tedious records and regulations, or asserted your expertise in support of your immigrant neighbors — are that tide. And so many of you doing this work are immigrants and the children of immigrants, defending communities you belong to.

Common cause is different from compromise. The coalitions in this history agreed on a principle and defended it, and they took allies wherever allies stood — which this year included a city council in one of the reddest states in the country, writing an ordinance against a detention center. Unity of that kind gives no ground on what it defends.

The administration has turned away from this scheme after spending $1.07 billion on it. That is proof of the effectiveness of your steadfast labor. Tonight, we celebrate that spirit. It is hard to be patriotic in times like these. But this week gave us one more thing worth celebrating.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara and rejected the executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship. Adam and I talked about the case in our conversation. The judgment was 6 to 3, but on the constitutional question the margin was a single vote. Five justices held that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: every child born on this soil is a citizen, whoever their parents are. A sixth agreed only that the executive order violated a statute, and wrote that Congress remains free to change that statute.

That is the razor’s edge we are dancing on as a nation. The difference between citizenship as a birthright and citizenship as a permission slip came down to one vote.

Justice Jackson’s concurrence (which starts on page 32) is worth reading tonight of all nights, because it recounts the greatest of those corrections: how birthright citizenship was won.

In the decades before the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans, most of them barred from the ballot and the courtroom, organized more than 600 conventions to insist that they were already citizens, born here and owed protection here. Rather than seeking a special rule that covered only themselves, they fought, as Jackson writes, for “the shared humanity of all people,” and their organizing gave the Constitution what she calls its anticaste engine, a guarantee that now shelters every child born in this country.

The Court’s precedent here is itself an immigrant’s story. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents during the era of Chinese exclusion, and when the government barred him from returning to his own country after a trip abroad, he fought the case to the Supreme Court and won. His victory in 1898 settled that the children of immigrants are citizens, and this week’s decision held that line.

Jackson also offers a clear warning in this moment: quoting Douglass’s insistence that “nations should have memories,” she writes that the distortion of historical facts “may be an even greater threat” than the fading of memory itself.

As you stared down warehouses in your communities, how many of our countrymen had forgotten Manzanar, Topaz, and Gila River, where the government confined Japanese Americans behind wire on land that, in Gila River's case, it took from a tribe that objected? At Crystal City, Texas, the government interned entire families, including more than two thousand Japanese Latin Americans whom the United States had seized from their homes in Peru and elsewhere and shipped here, some to be traded to Japan in hostage exchanges.

Fewer still remember the confinements that came before them. The Army marched the Navajo three hundred miles to Bosque Redondo and held them there for four years. Plains Indian prisoners were shipped across the country to Fort Marion, a stone fortress in Florida, and the officer who ran that prison went on to found Carlisle, the model for hundreds of boarding schools built to hold Native children apart from their families and their languages.

Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated at Angel Island, in the same bay where Wong Kim Ark was born.

And then there is Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which held Geronimo’s Apache as prisoners of war for a generation, held Japanese American men in 1942, and in 2019 was proposed as a detention site for migrant children, until survivors of the wartime camps stood at its gates and said no.

This spring brought a counterexample from the same state. The Choctaw Nation, whose people the federal government marched to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears nearly two centuries ago, purchased the vacant warehouse in Durant that ICE had been eyeing as a detention site, on the same stretch of road as the tribe's own headquarters, childcare center, and elder services. The purchase took the property off the federal market and with it, by our analysis, an estimated 8,500 detention beds. A people that remembered federal confinement made sure it would not happen on that ground.

That is why I call unity in our common pursuit an inheritance. The Court described citizenship as “the right to have rights.” Douglass called it “the glorious birthright of our common humanity.” It was secured by ordinary people who linked their fate to their neighbors’ — freed men and women, the children of immigrants, citizens who refused to let the promise shrink — and it survived this week by a single vote because the memory of their work has yet to be erased.

It will stay secured the same way it was won.

Adam and I ended our conversation on what comes next, and I will close here the way I closed there: “Beyond this July 4th, and beyond this administration, democracy is constantly under threat so long as we let those forces continue to have a foothold. We’re not out of the woods yet. So continue to build those community bonds. Continue to be strong. Show up. Protest. File FOIA requests. Write letters. Whatever it is you bring to the fight, do it, because it is a winning fight so long as you stay engaged.”

Tonight we celebrate the brave patriots who came before us, who laid the bricks of social justice and common decency, toward a more perfect union, just as we celebrate our wins this year toward the same. Living up to that American birthright is the hard work worth doing.

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

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The scope of this acquisition is to provide real estate title abstract, escrow and settlement services of properties in Florence, AZ, Krome, FL, and Batavia, NY. These properties are required to meet operational requirements for modernizing and enhancing immigration detention and enforcement capabilities for ICE. The existing processing centers in these locations will be expanded to enable additional administrative, medical, training and detention facilities and space.

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The document, a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition numbered J&A-26-0143, discloses a sole-source, $240,000 contract awarded June 2 to First American Title Insurance Co. of Santa Ana, Calif., for title abstract, escrow and settlement services tied to the three sites.

ICE's Office of Acquisition Management, the agency's contracting arm, issued the award on behalf of its real estate division, the Office of Asset and Facilities Management. The $240,000 contract is split into two parts: a four-month base period worth $60,000, plus an eight-month option for additional service ICE can exercise later for $180,000. ICE did not post the justification publicly until July 1, a month after the award.

While the justification does not name any specific parcel, seller or acreage at any of the three locations, it does state that the existing processing centers “will be expanded to enable additional administrative, medical, training and detention facilities and space.”

ICE's justification cites "unusual and compelling urgency" as grounds for bypassing competitive bidding, attributing the accelerated timeline to seller-imposed deadlines and the timing of the property selection process rather than to any delay by the contracting office. It defines that urgency as the risk of losing the properties outright: without an immediate award, sellers could walk away from negotiations, accept competing offers, or raise the price, and any resulting delay could push back construction and other mission plans tied to the sites.

The filing adds that a market search conducted from April 7 through May 7 concluded that First American was the only vendor able to perform the work within that timeframe. Records on USAspending.gov show ICE previously contracted with the company for a $25,000 purchase order covering title and escrow services at an undisclosed location, issued in October 2025 and also on behalf of the Office of Asset and Facilities Management.

Florence, Ariz.

At the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, owned & operated by CoreCivic under contract with ICE, a Haitian asylum seeker named Emmanuel Damas died this year after what fellow detainees described as repeated, unaddressed requests for treatment of a tooth infection.

Arizona Reps. Greg Stanton, Yassamin Ansari and Adelita Grijalva, all Democrats, have called for an independent investigation, and Ansari has said detainees told her Damas was not taken to a hospital until others protested outside his cell, according to KJZZ. CoreCivic has referred questions about the death to ICE.

In Marana, roughly an hour from Florence, Pima County supervisors have passed a resolution opposing a separate, proposed ICE detention facility, and local advocacy groups have organized against it, according to AZ Luminaria.

Krome, Fla.

The Krome North Service Processing Center in western Miami-Dade County is owned by ICE and operated under contract by Akima Global Services. It opened in 1980 and was designed to hold roughly 600 people, a capacity its population has repeatedly exceeded over the past year, with detainees and attorneys describing men sleeping on floors, near toilets and on buses for hours while awaiting processing, according to reporting by WPTV and CBS Miami.

ICE contracted with Akima Global Services to erect a tent structure on the facility grounds to house an additional 250 men in April 2025.

Last month, ICE evacuated Krome because of nearby wildfires, relocating detainees to other sites in Florida and elsewhere. ICE has said some of its facilities are experiencing temporary overcrowding and that it is working to manage capacity through detainee transfers and expedited case processing.

Batavia, N.Y.

The Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, also known as the Buffalo Service Processing Center, is government-owned and operated under contract by Akima Global Services. It has housed more detainees than its stated capacity of 650 beds for much of the past year. Federal data compiled by TRAC Immigration showed the facility’s population reached 745 in February, an increase of 200 people over the prior year, according to WHAM. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office has said it has been monitoring conditions at the facility and has pressed ICE to address crowding.

ICE and First American Title Insurance Co. did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Arizona and the Department of Homeland Security asked a federal judge Monday to approve an order pausing litigation over a Surprise, Ariz., warehouse the government has been moving to convert into an immigration detention facility. The order has no legal effect unless and until U.S. District Judge Susan M. Brnovich signs it. No hearing has been scheduled.

Proposed Stipulated Order for Surprise, Ariz. Warehouse

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The proposed order, filed jointly by the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, would head off a preliminary injunction motion Arizona said in the filing it intends to bring against DHS, ICE, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons over the property at 13290 West Sweetwater Avenue.

Arizona sued in April, arguing the agencies were moving to convert the site without completing environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Under the terms the parties have asked the court to adopt, DHS would agree not to detain anyone at the facility or take steps to physically convert it until it completes a formal environmental assessment and issues a decision document, or a full environmental impact statement if one is deemed necessary. That commitment extends to construction obligations under a contract the filing describes only as “consolidated,” according to the filing, which does not name the contractor or disclose its value.

The proposed order also lists a series of exceptions to that pause. DHS would still be permitted to continue security upgrades including fencing, cameras, lighting, and guard shacks, along with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical maintenance, pest control, custodial work, and interior demolition to reconfigure office space for what the filing calls administrative, security, property-management, or environmental-review support purposes. That work cannot be used for detainee housing, intake, medical, kitchen, or visitation space, according to the filing, though contract administration and procurement work may continue.

Once DHS delivers a final environmental assessment to Arizona, the state would have 10 days to decide whether to press forward with a preliminary injunction motion. If it does, DHS would need to hold off on conversion work for another 21 days, or until a judge rules otherwise. DHS would also be required to file status reports with the court every 60 days until the environmental review concludes.

Arizona’s underlying lawsuit remains active regardless of the outcome, though a ruling on the merits would be deferred, with the case’s next steps tied to a timeline set by DHS itself.

Similar NEPA-based challenges to ICE facility conversions are pending in New Jersey and Michigan, where a federal judge is weighing claims over a proposed detention facility in Romulus.

Project Salt Box's tracking of the 11 warehouses DHS purchased this year for detention use shows seven now slated for sale or transfer to other federal agencies, based on reporting from The New York Times. Of the remaining four, Surprise and a warehouse near Williamsport, Md., have awarded contracts but are currently blocked by litigation. A third, in Socorro, Texas, is being converted into a smaller ICE training and office campus rather than the 8,500-bed detention center originally planned, though it will still include some privately run detention, according to El Paso Matters, which cited Rep. Veronica Escobar's account of a meeting with acting ICE Director David Venturella. DHS has not disclosed active plans for the fourth.

Neither DHS nor the Arizona Attorney General’s office responded immediately to requests for comment beyond the filing.

The General Services Administration signed the lease June 24 under solicitation 2NY0894, the procurement it opened in 2024, and posted the award the next day. The deal provides ICE with 42,377 rentable square feet, the most the solicitation allowed. Ten of the 15 years are firm.

GSA does not usually name tenants in its sensitive law enforcement lease awards. Its property inventory, though, lists 800 Corporate Blvd as a “new lease for DHS ICE.”

That link was first made earlier this year, when a file briefly posted to the government’s contracting portal appeared under the name “2NY0894 ICE Newburgh,” on a solicitation that called for a sally port big enough for detainee buses and vans, secured parking and small-arms storage, under Level III security standards.

ICE did not provide comment in time for publication.

Leverage Enterprises registered as a federal contractor in 2023. Commercial construction is its main line of work by its own filing, which also lists real estate leasing among its registrations. The company lists itself as a minority- and service-disabled veteran-owned small business.

Federal records show that Leverage Enterprise has one prior contract for Customs and Border Protection offices in Arizona.

The building is a single-tenant warehouse of about 60,143 square feet, on 10 acres near Stewart International Airport and built in 2001. Newburgh property records list National Realty & Development Corp. as an owner of the Northeast Business Center, the complex that sits at 800 Corporate Blvd, and the company markets the building among its office listings. A representative for National Realty did not respond to a request for comment.

Planning documents for the solicitation estimated the interior buildout at about $343 a square foot, $282.58 above GSA’s standard allowance, and near $12 million across the minimum space sought.

ICE has run into resistance elsewhere in the Hudson Valley. The agency backed off a plan earlier this year to put a detention center for as many as 1,500 people in a former Pep Boys warehouse in Chester, N.Y., after more than 30,000 people signed a petition against it, telling State Assemblymember Brian Maher it would not go ahead “at this time.”

ICE already maintains a 9,074 square foot office at 15 Governor Drive in Newburgh. That location has housed the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor since 2015. The new lease is more than four times that size.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has awarded a nearly $200 million contract to a Virginia company that has never held a federal contract before. According to federal contracting records reviewed by Project Salt Box, Savvy Professor LLC was hired on June 17 to help find and check on unaccompanied migrant children released to sponsors nationwide.

It is the first order under a much larger, open-ended agreement the agency set up with Savvy Professor, and it requires the company to handle at least 1,000 cases, each one a child it is paid to locate and check on. The government classifies the work as investigation services.

The figures attached to the deal describe different things. The $1.6 billion is a ceiling, the most ICE could pay the company if it keeps ordering work up to that limit over the contract’s life. The agency buys the work in batches, and this first order is estimated at nearly $200 million. Of that, about $4.7 million has been set aside so far, the money the government has formally committed to pay as the work is done.

The order is part of a much larger federal effort, the Unaccompanied Alien Children Safety Verification Initiative, or SVI, that the Department of Homeland Security launched in November and describes as a way to protect children placed with sponsors from abuse and trafficking. The children, who arrived in the country without a parent or guardian, were placed with sponsors — usually relatives — while their immigration cases proceed.

In March, ICE asked private companies to help check on an estimated 100,000 of these children. On March 16, ICE modified an $801.8 million contract with MVM, Inc. to include the SVI as part of its core responsibilities.

ICE has since awarded these kinds of open-ended contracts to 18 companies, with ceilings reaching $3.1 billion and a combined potential value above $20 billion. The administration says the checks confirm that a child is safe, in school and not being exploited.

However, an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian indicates the operations are meant to deport the children or build criminal cases against them or their sponsors.

Savvy Professor does business as SIVS LLC and lists its address as a private residence on Old Mill Lane in Spotsylvania, Va. At the same address, it holds a federal license to sell firearms under the name SIVS Tactical Solutions, according to corporate registration records reviewed by Project Salt Box.

SIVS LLC’s owner, Todd Thompson, describes himself on LinkedIn as a “medically retired FBI Cyber Tech” whose prior work included “providing technical support to FBI field casework” and “conducting FBI child exploitation investigations.”

At the time of publication, visitors to the company’s website encountered a browser security warning because the site presented an expired certificate issued to *.hostingplatform.com rather than to sivs.us.

Those who chose to proceed were redirected to a password-protected Shopify storefront, sivsllc.myshopify.com, where a page titled “SIVS Tactical Solutions” instructed visitors to text “PW” to 540.308.9595 — the same number Mr. Thompson used in social media recruitment posts — for access.

In a Facebook post on April 4, Mr. Thompson wrote that he had “recently started a private investigation firm” and had bid on a government contract “to help track down unaccompanied minors,” and said he would hire case managers and “mission support specialists” willing to travel.

He described the work as well suited to retired law enforcement officers and first responders, and wrote that “husband/wife teams are encouraged to apply.” Mr. Thompson told interested applicants to text him for more information.

Less than two months later, the federal government awarded his firm nearly $200 million.

Mr. Thompson did not respond to emailed questions about the company or his background in time for publication.

SIVS advertised at least three positions related to the contract, including a full-time case manager in Spotsylvania and a contract child protection case manager in Orlando, both listed as remote roles. The postings drew 36 and 27 applicants respectively before applications were closed.

In practice, the listings described supervisory, investigative, and compliance functions. Case managers were responsible for real-time quality control during home visits and address verifications, including use of standardized checklists, documentation requirements, and immediate escalation procedures for suspected abuse, neglect, or trafficking concerns. They would also coordinate directly with local law enforcement and Child Protective Services when cases required intervention or protective custody determinations.

Neither role required an existing investigator’s license, with the company stating it would support selected hires in obtaining certification. Workers would be required to front travel costs and be reimbursed later under the contract structure.

Compensation across postings varied, with ranges between $50,000 and $100,000 annually depending on role and listing version. One mission support specialist posting listed duties including maintaining case files, purchasing gift cards and groceries for families, and using commercial and public databases to identify the current addresses and occupants associated with a child’s location. Preferred qualifications included “Spanish language skills (or strong proficiency with Google Translate).”

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The lease covers 7240 Holsclaw Road, on unincorporated land in south Santa Clara County, about 11 miles south of an ICE field office in Morgan Hill, Calif. A review of federal contract records shows the agency awarded it in January 2025 to ECG 6 LLC, which shares a Beverly Hills address with Elmwood Capital Group, at a total contract value of $26.5 million for 18,700 rentable square feet over a term of 20 years, 15 of them firm. County property records show Elmwood acquired the Holsclaw Road parcel weeks after the award.

The occupying agency is withheld from the leasing file under a law-enforcement exemption. The agency requirements package attached to the solicitation is a 104-page Immigration and Customs Enforcement cabling standard marked “For Official Use Only,” carrying the seals of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

San José Spotlight, which first reported the project in May, later obtained blueprints dated Sept. 17, 2025, that show detention areas, holding rooms and detainee processing at the property.

Project Salt Box today obtained ten pages of GSA leasing, environmental and procurement records through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in May, providing new details about how the agency evaluated and advanced the project.

Among the records is a GSA Form 4002 signed Dec. 26, 2024, in which the agency claimed an automatic categorical exclusion, the tier of review under the National Environmental Policy Act that requires neither an environmental assessment nor an impact statement. The category the agency selected covers the acquisition of space within an existing structure where there is no change in the general type of use and only minimal change from the previous occupancy level. While the “Agency” field is redacted in the GSA files, a search of federal contracting databases for the project number, “8CA3614,” shows ICE as the primary federal agency behind the project.

The form lists the existing building on Holsclaw Road as 24,000 square feet, built in 1982, within a 1-percent-annual-chance floodplain, the designation formerly called a 100-year floodplain. It records the action as not a critical action, which the form defines as any activity for which even a slight chance of flooding would be too great a risk.

To lease within that floodplain, the agency prepared a Justification for No Practicable Alternatives. A review of the document shows the General Services Administration posted the requirement on the federal contracting site in October 2022, placed it on hold for a lack of agency funds, reposted it in 2024, and received no additional offers; one property met the requirements. A floodplain memorandum approved by the acting Region 9 commissioner of the Public Buildings Service found no practicable alternative to the floodplain and no impact from the lease.

The leasing records also show the environmental determination came after years of procurement activity tied to the same requirement. Documents state GSA first posted the solicitation in 2022 under the Biden administration, suspended it because of a lack of agency funding, and later reposted it after funds became available. In a separate floodplain justification, the agency said it reviewed commercial listings, advertised the requirement twice and concluded that only one property satisfied the government's specifications.

San José Spotlight has reported that the procurement began in 2020, under the first Trump administration, as a search for detention space and continued through the Biden administration under a solicitation that shares the current contract's identification number. GSA documents show the agency posted the requirement publicly in 2022, suspended it for a lack of funding, reposted it in 2024 and awarded the lease in January 2025.

A review of the leasing file shows the tenant-improvement allowance was $61.22 per occupiable square foot, about $1.04 million, with a separate security allowance of $204,000. The solicitation disclosed that the government anticipated the buildout would exceed that allowance by roughly $182 per square foot, an overage of about $3.1 million before relocation costs. The same documents set the facility’s security level at II — a standard security level comparable with other federal law enforcement offices — on a four-level federal scale and listed a further package of agency requirements “containing sensitive information,” available only to bidders who requested it from the contracting officer.

California and Santa Clara County sued the federal government on June 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking to block construction on the grounds that the lease and the work underway are a major federal action that required an environmental assessment or impact statement the government never produced. The complaint also cites the Immigration and Nationality Act, California’s Williamson Act and federal consultation requirements, and describes the site as likely to become an Enforcement and Removal Operations office, a category designed for administrative use and short-term holding. Santa Cruz County has joined the suit, and Monterey County and the Gilroy City Council have passed measures opposing the project.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told San José Spotlight in May: “We have no new detention centers to announce at this time.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be planning a $400 million detention facility in Hammond, La., with a construction start date of Sept. 1, according to a project entry in ConstructConnect, a subscription database that construction companies use to find and bid on upcoming work.

The project, which is not publicly available, was described in screenshots provided to Project Salt Box by a reader. It names ICE and the Department of Homeland Security as the project’s owners.

The entry describes the project as the remodeling of a mixed-use development to include a detention facility, a medical facility, and multi-residential development. Its status is listed as conceptual, and the record was last updated May 5.

Six companies have registered interest in the Hammond facility: Diamond Scaffold Services of Bogalusa, Road Warriors Construction of New Orleans, Stone Mountain Access Systems of Atlanta, and Security Constructors of Oklahoma City, each listed as an interested subcontractor; and Economy Brick Sales of Gonzales and HRM Concrete of Baton Rouge, listed as interested suppliers. None responded to a list of questions about the project, and the database does not indicate that any has submitted a bid.

Neither the $400 million figure nor the Sept. 1 start date appears in any public government record, and ConstructConnect, which compiles project data from permits and industry contacts, may have estimated them.

Neither DHS nor the General Services Administration have posted contract solicitations to SAM.gov, the federal system agencies use to advertise contracts and solicit competitive bids. But it has awarded other detention contracts without one, using a Navy contracting vehicle called WEXMAC TITUS under which pre-approved contractors bid on and are awarded work through a non-public system closed to other firms.

Hammond Mayor Pete Panepinto said in late December that no federal agency had contacted the city. “No one from ICE, DHS, or any other entity has reached out to me about such a facility,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that he would share information if that changed. Mr. Panepinto’s office did not respond to a list of questions sent by Project Salt Box.

Permit records showed no construction on that scale as of late December. Hammond, the largest city in Tangipahoa Parish, sits about 45 miles east of Baton Rouge and 45 miles northwest of New Orleans, with a population of roughly 21,000 at the 2020 census. The largest new commercial project permitted by the parish government in the preceding three months measured 7,541 square feet, according to parish reports reviewed by The Times-Picayune.

The prospect of a facility in Hammond has circulated in local Facebook groups since at least the spring, where residents have speculated about possible sites and raised concerns about the effect on water, electricity, and city infrastructure. Some have pointed to vacant warehouses near the Hammond Northshore Regional Airport, though no record reviewed by Project Salt Box identifies a site.

Hammond has appeared in ICE’s plans before. A draft solicitation reported by The Washington Post in December described seven large warehouse detention centers nationwide, including one in Hammond holding up to 9,000 detainees, as part of a plan to detain more than 80,000 people at a time. The draft required each facility to begin accepting detainees 30 to 60 days after construction starts; a Sept. 1 start would put the first detainees inside by October or November.

DHS has identified more than 20 potential locations for warehouse detention facilities, according to a spreadsheet verified by NBC News in November 2025, and members of Congress investigating the program’s contracts have put its planned cost at $38.3 billion in public funds. A second Louisiana site, a 250,000-square-foot former Conn’s HomePlus warehouse in Port Allen, is as a proposed location for a smaller facility holding roughly 500 detainees.

But in recent weeks, ICE has moved away from the warehouse purchases. The agency bought eleven warehouses for the program before pausing new acquisitions after Markwayne Mullin became secretary in March. On June 18, The New York Times reported that ICE planned to offload seven of them, purchased for more than $700 million, by transferring them to other federal agencies or selling them. The seven are in Romulus, Mich.; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga.; Hamburg and Tremont, Pa.; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, N.J. It is unclear if this retreat from the warehouse strategy would impact the proposed project in Hammond.

ICE has awarded construction contracts to refit only two of the eleven, in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., and neither is on the list of those to be offloaded. The Hammond project is in neither group; the entry describes a remodeling of an existing development, and no record shows ICE has purchased property there.

More than four months after the mayor’s statement, the entry’s location field still read “To Be Determined, Hammond, LA 70401.”

You do not need to be a journalist, a lawyer, or an advocacy organization to file a request. Any person can request federal records under FOIA. State sunshine laws vary, but most extend broad public access rights — and in some states, residents who live in a jurisdiction have legal standing that out-of-state requesters do not.

Readers who file requests and share what they find are a direct part of how Project Salt Box tracks and documents ICE's expanding detention footprint across the country.

What these laws cover

The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, requires most executive branch agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection — to release records upon request unless a specific statutory exemption applies. The nine exemptions cover areas including classified national security information, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, and certain law enforcement records. Agencies cite these exemptions often, and most can be appealed.

State public records laws govern state and local agencies: county governments, planning departments, fire marshals’ offices, city councils, and public utilities. For example, Maryland’s Public Information Act, codified at Md. Code, Gen. Prov. § 4-101 et seq., requires agencies to respond within 30 days and mandates that the first two hours of search and preparation time be provided at no charge.

Before you write a request

Check existing FOIA reading rooms and disclosure libraries first. Many agencies are required to post frequently requested records online. DHS maintains a public reading room and ICE posts responsive documents at ice.gov/foia/library. A document already posted is available immediately; submitting a new request for it delays your access and consumes agency processing time. MuckRock, a nonprofit platform that facilitates records requests, maintains a searchable archive of records obtained by other requesters across thousands of agencies — check it before you start.

Then narrow your request before you write it. FOIA and its state equivalents do not require agencies to answer questions or conduct research on your behalf — they require agencies to search for and produce records. A request asking what an agency’s plans are for a particular facility will likely come back as not describing an identifiable record. Before drafting, identify the specific document types you want — contracts, correspondence, permits, inspection reports — and pair each with a named party, a facility address or contract number, and a defined date range. The narrower the request, the faster it tends to move and the less it is likely to cost.

You can submit the same request to multiple components of a large agency if you are not certain which one holds the records. ICE and CBP are separate components of DHS, and records about a facility may exist in one, the other, or both.

Submitting your request

Most federal agencies and many state agencies accept requests through online portals, which confirm receipt and assign a tracking number. The national FOIA portal at foia.gov allows you to submit requests to most federal agencies, track their status, and receive productions electronically. As of early 2026, DHS and ICE no longer accept requests by mail; requests must go through foia.gov or the ICE FOIA portal. CBP uses a separate SecureRelease portal. The Department of Justice maintains a directory of federal agency FOIA contacts with submission links for agencies that operate their own systems.

For state agencies, your state attorney general’s office typically maintains a directory of agency public records contacts. Many county and municipal agencies accept email submissions; some still require written requests by mail. When in doubt, call the agency’s main public affairs line and ask where to send a records request.

Keep a copy of every request you submit, the confirmation of receipt, and all subsequent correspondence. Response deadlines run from the date the agency acknowledges receipt, not from the date you submitted it.

Writing the request

A records request can be written plainly, but it needs to be precise. Every request should include your name and contact information, a description of the specific records you want, a reference to the Freedom of Information Act by name, and a fee waiver request. If you have grounds for expedited processing, include that as well.

When describing the records, be concrete. Name the facility, the contractor or agency, the document type, and the date range. Requests that describe a broad topic rather than specific records — “all documents related to ICE detention in [state]” — will likely be rejected outright. Specific requests move faster and cost less.

Requesting a fee waiver

FOIA authorizes agencies to charge fees for search time, duplication, and review. If you are requesting records for a noncommercial public interest purpose, you can ask the agency to waive those fees — and you do not need to be a journalist or affiliated with a news organization to do so.

The request should explain what you are looking for, why it matters to the public, and that you have no commercial interest in the records. Keep it short. Agencies receive boilerplate fee waiver language constantly; a clear, specific explanation of your purpose carries more weight.

If your fee waiver is denied, you can appeal that denial separately from any appeal of a withheld record.

Requesting expedited processing

Federal FOIA allows requesters to ask for faster processing when delay would harm the public’s ability to get timely information about what the government is doing. To qualify, you generally need to show that you are sharing information with the public and that there is a specific, time-sensitive reason the records are needed now. A general claim that the public should know is not sufficient; a pending construction start, an imminent facility opening, or an active legal proceeding are.

Appealing

If an agency withholds records in whole or in part, denies your fee waiver, or fails to respond within the 20 business day statutory deadline, you have the right to appeal. Federal appeals go to the agency’s FOIA Appeals Officer. Your letter should identify the request by its tracking number, describe what was withheld or what deadline was missed, and explain why you believe the response was wrong. You do not need a lawyer to write one.

If an administrative appeal is denied, you may file suit in federal district court. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the National Freedom of Information Coalition offer free guidance on that process.

At the state level, appeal mechanisms vary. Some states have an open government ombudsman who can intervene; others require suit in state court. Your state attorney general’s office can direct you to the applicable process.

How to submit a request through the SecureRelease portal

ICE and CBP process FOIA requests through the federal SecureRelease portal, accessible through foia.gov. The portal walks you through six steps.

Step 1: Agency and component. Select “Department of Homeland Security” from the agency dropdown, then select “U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement” from the component dropdown. The portal will display ICE’s contact information and any active processing notices — check these before proceeding, as they may flag delays. As of February 2026, ICE has noted delays across most FOIA offices.

Step 2: Contact information. The portal will ask what type of requester you are. Select “All Other” unless you are filing on behalf of a news organization or educational institution — your requester category affects what fees may apply. Fill in your name, mailing address, email, and phone number. This information is collected separately from your request, so you do not need to include it in the request text itself.

Step 3: Request details. Select “FOIA Request” as the request type. The portal then presents a single open text field labeled “Request Description.” This is where you paste your request language. The portal instructs you to be as specific as possible — name the document types, the parties involved, the location, and the date range. If you have submitted related requests previously, note the prior request ID here as well.

Step 4: Additional information. The portal will ask for a “Request Designation.” Select “Other (I am not requesting records about a person).” The remaining fields on this screen — alien number, date of birth, SEVIS number — are for people requesting records about themselves or a specific individual. Leave them blank.

Step 5: Fees. Check the “Request Fee Waiver” box. A text field will appear asking you to justify your fee waiver request — paste your fee waiver language here. The portal also asks for the maximum amount you are willing to pay in fees if the waiver is denied. Entering $25 is a reasonable starting point; you can adjust this based on your situation.

Step 6: Expedited processing. If you are requesting expedited processing, check the box and paste your justification in the text field that appears. If you are not requesting expedited processing, leave this step blank. Complete the reCAPTCHA and click “Submit Request.”

Resident advantages

The case for crowdsourcing records requests is fundamentally geographic. Fire marshal inspection reports, county building permit applications, zoning variance records, local emergency management correspondence, utility connection permits, and tax assessment filings exist only within state and local systems. A federal FOIA request to ICE cannot reach a city’s internal correspondence about a facility, a county assessor’s chain of title, or a local planning department’s site review. Those records require a state or local request, and a local resident is often better positioned to know they exist and to identify the right agency.

In five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and Virginia — that advantage is also a legal one. Those states limit public records requests to their own residents by statute, meaning a news organization headquartered elsewhere may have no standing to file at all. Kentucky imposes a similar residency requirement, with narrow exceptions for registered out-of-state business entities and certain news media organizations. New Jersey and New Hampshire have statutory language that could be read the same way, though neither state currently enforces it as a bar to out-of-state requesters. In any of these states, a local resident filing on their own behalf has access that an outside organization cannot replicate.

Cost is another variable worth understanding before you file. For instance, California’s Public Records Act does not include a statutory fee waiver — if an agency declines to reduce costs at its own discretion, you have limited recourse.

The practical workaround is showing up in person: viewing records at a California agency’s office is free, and you may be permitted to photograph or scan pages with your own device at no charge. Agencies may only bill the direct cost of duplication for copies they produce themselves, and cannot charge for staff time spent searching or reviewing records. A local resident who can walk into an office has a meaningful cost advantage over a remote requester ordering copies by mail.

Elected officials and local agency heads answer to constituents, not to outside organizations. A records request from someone who lives in a jurisdiction lands differently than one from a national outlet headquartered elsewhere — particularly in smaller counties and municipalities where officials are directly accessible. A national organization also has limited capacity to file simultaneously across dozens of jurisdictions. Residents who live near a facility, know which local agencies received correspondence, and can appear at a county office are doing something no national organization can replicate at scale.

Share what you find

Project Salt Box is an all-volunteer investigative nonprofit covering federal immigration detention contracting and homeland security spending. We want to hear from readers who have obtained records through public information requests or have knowledge of federal contracting in their communities.

If you obtain records and would like to share them, or have a tip related to ICE detention expansion, you can reach us at projectsaltbox@pm.me.

We do not identify sources without their permission.

A starting-point records request

Most federal and state agencies now accept records requests through online portals, which collect your contact information separately. The following is the text you will need to paste or type into the request field. Replace the bracketed sections with your own information.

I am requesting copies of the following records under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552:

[Describe the records you want. Be as specific as you can: name the document type, the agency or company involved, the location or address if relevant, and the date range.]

Example: “All contracts and lease agreements between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and [company name] related to the property located at [address], from [start date] to the present.”

I am requesting a fee waiver under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). I am seeking these records to understand how public funds are being spent and intend to share what I find with the public. I have no commercial interest in these records. If my fee waiver request is denied and fees are expected to exceed $25, please notify me before processing so I can decide how to proceed.

If any portion of this request is denied, please identify the specific exemption claimed and provide information on how to appeal that decision.

A few notes on using this template

The description of the records is the only part that requires real thought. Everything else is standard language that agencies expect to see. If your description is too broad, the agency will either reject the request outright or return an estimate for a search that costs more than you want to pay — which is why narrowing your request before you file matters.

The $25 threshold in the fee notification line is a reasonable ceiling for most requests, but you can raise or lower it based on your situation.

For state and local requests, replace the statutory citation (5 U.S.C. § 552) with the name of your state’s public records law. MuckRock’s state-by-state guides can tell you what it’s called and how to cite it. The structure — describe what you want, ask for a fee waiver, ask for an explanation of anything withheld — works in virtually every state system.

Resources

Finding and submitting requests

• FOIA.gov — The federal government’s central records request portal. Submit requests to most federal agencies, track status, and receive productions in one place.

• ICE FOIA Portal — ICE’s dedicated submission portal for immigration enforcement records.

• CBP SecureRelease Portal — Customs and Border Protection’s separate submission system.

• MuckRock — A nonprofit platform for filing, tracking, and sharing public records requests. Includes a searchable archive of records obtained by other requesters and state-by-state guides to local public records laws.

Reading rooms and existing disclosures

• DHS FOIA Library — Previously released DHS records available for immediate download.

• ICE FOIA Library — ICE’s public reading room, updated regularly with new productions.

State public records laws

• Reporters Committee Open Government Guide — State-by-state legal reference on public records laws, written by attorneys in each jurisdiction. The most authoritative resource if you hit a specific legal obstacle.

• Right on Transparency — State Residency Requirements — A summary of which states restrict records requests to their own residents, with statutory citations.

• Ballotpedia — Who Can Make Public Records Requests by State — A plain-language summary of requester eligibility rules in all 50 states.

Legal help and appeals

• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — Free legal resources and attorney referrals for journalists and members of the public facing FOIA disputes.

• National Freedom of Information Coalition — A network of state-level press freedom and open government organizations. A good starting point if your dispute involves a state or local agency.

Note: This guide is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Public records laws vary by jurisdiction and are subject to change. If you have questions about your rights under a specific state or federal records law, consult an attorney or contact one of the legal resources listed above.

Yesterday, ICE announced its plans to reopen a detention facility that has been closed since 2010. The Prairie Correctional Facility - soon to be called the Prairie Detention Facility - is owned by private prison company CoreCivic. At capacity, the facility will hold 1,600 male and female detainees, with an initial 150 detainees the first week and 250 additional every week thereafter.

Citing their need for an “increase [in] bed capacity to meet the administration’s interior enforcement and border decompression goals” ICE plans to award the comprehensive detention services contract to CoreCivic, given the company owns, and has historically operated, the facility.

Comprehensive Detention Services

Prairie Pws 6 2 2026

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The Prairie facility has been closed for over 15 years, and the contract requires CoreCivic to plan, manage, and complete all renovations necessary to ensure it meets the most current National Detention Standards. Once the facility is approved for operation, CoreCivic will be responsible for every aspect of running it, including security/guards, housing, meals, and transportation.

Medical care is also built into the contract at a significant level. CoreCivic will have to provide 24/7 on-site health care including intake screening, comprehensive health assessments, sick call, mental health services, dental care, prescription medications, and emergency response coordination. The facility must also support disability accommodations and suicide prevention procedures.

Oversight Under Tight Control

The contract gives ICE near‑total control over who can see inside the facility, including members of Congress and their staff. A dedicated access section makes clear that ICE, not CoreCivic or local officials, decides who may enter secure areas, when tours occur, and what visitors are allowed to observe.

Even when congressional offices or committees request information, they cannot go directly to the contractor - the PWS requires CoreCivic to route all data, records, and responses through ICE, which then decides what to share and when. While this may be standard language in detention contracts, it comes as members of Congress are actively fighting DHS in court just to exercise their statutory right to conduct unannounced inspections of ICE facilities. In the last year alone, lawmakers have been denied entry to multiple detention centers and have sued the Trump administration over new policies that impose advance‑notice requirements and effectively block real‑time oversight of conditions on the ground.

An Unclear Timeline

CoreCivic has a maximum 90‑day “transition‑in” period after award to complete renovations, with detainee intake beginning on day 91 and ramping up by 150 people the first week and 250 more each week thereafter until the facility hits 1,600 beds. The same section requires a detailed mobilization plan and a government‑approved operations schedule, but it does not say when ICE actually intends to award the contract or when that 90‑day clock will start.

The only public marker is the June 19, 2026 response date on ICE’s sole‑source justification notice on SAM.gov. That document explains why ICE plans to give the deal directly to CoreCivic, but it does not include an anticipated award date, construction schedule, or projected opening for detainee intake. Meanwhile, the PWS’ Deliverables section gives ICE up to 30 business days to accept or comment on draft plans, and another 15 business days for CoreCivic to revise, meaning key milestones could sit in back‑and‑forth for weeks without any public indication of when Prairie will actually begin detaining people.

Reopening Prairie Fits into Broader Strategy

ICE’s move to reopen Prairie fits into a broader strategy to rapidly expand detention capacity by leaning on private prison infrastructure that already exists. The agency has faced mounting local opposition to its plan to convert warehouses into large detention hubs, particularly in urban areas where zoning fights, environmental review, and organizing by immigrant rights groups can slow or kill projects.

Reopening shuttered prisons like Prairie offers ICE a faster, often quieter path to increasing detention bedspace. The facility already has a carceral footprint, is located in a rural community familiar with prison operations, and can be brought online through a single, sole‑source contract with a company that has run it before.

ICE and CoreCivic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bottom Line Up Front

Spending Increases following April dip: After a quieter April, DHS detention and enforcement contracting activity picked back up in May, with both total obligations and the size of individual awards trending higher. The rebound was driven largely by large border wall contracts and sizable modifications to existing ICE agreements.

Work Resumes at Surprise, Az. Warehouse: The stop work order on the GardaWorld contract was rescinded on May 6 and since then, the company has ramped up its recruitment efforts, claiming they are “currently building a pipeline…with an expected start date of later this year.”

ICE Continues use of Navy Contract: A May task order issued to Acquisition Logistics LLC is the first on WEXMAC TITUS since Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s transition in. The award indicates that DHS intends to keep relying on this Defense Department contract structure, despite ongoing criticism from transparency advocates and members of Congress.

USCIS Reaches new Year‑to‑Date Spending Peak: USCIS posted its highest monthly obligations so far this year in May, more than doubling its April spending from about $55 million to roughly $230 million - a 317% increase.

May’s Biggest Contracts

Since we started this report back in January, the largest contracts each month have been related to border wall construction, and May was no exception. Southwest Valley Constructors received the month’s largest award - a $1.7 billion award funding more border wall construction in the Big Bend sector of Texas. This is the second-largest border wall contract in CBP history (the largest was issued to Fisher Sand & Gravel back in January). Fisher Sand & Gravel and Sundt Construction also secured wall construction awards, each valued in the hundreds of millions.

The majority of the over $450 million in funds obligated by ICE was spent in modifications to existing contracts, not on new ones. For example, CSI Aviation, the company who runs ICE deportation flights, was awarded an additional $119 million. The GEO Group and CoreCivic also received continued funding through their existing detention and transportation contracts, collectively netting over $104 million.

One new ICE contract of note was the $25 million award to Bi2 Technologies for 1,570 iris scanners. As we reported earlier this month, these scanners are in addition to the 200 ICE bought in September of last year, and are part of a sweeping expansion of biometric and data-analysis tools across federal law enforcement. The agency also awarded yet another task order on the Navy’s WEXMAC TITUS contract, this time to Acquisition Logistics LLC for detention and ground transportation services in the Los Angeles, Ca. area of responsibility.

Over at USCIS, the agency had its highest spending month to date this year. Half of that spend went to one company - Amentum Services. The agency spent $116 million funding another year of the company’s contract to support operations collecting applicant biometric and biographical data.

Analysis and Trends

Warehouse Work Continues, Despite Lawsuits: Contracting activity in May shows that work has restarted at the Surprise, Arizona warehouse, even as lawsuits from the state attorney general and local opponents move forward in federal court. DHS’s decision to resume construction there tracks with reporting that, while the department has paused purchases of new warehouse sites, it appears to be concentrating its efforts in states and localities where it expects less sustained resistance.

ICE Spending Increased Over 200% from April: April was the slowest month of ICE contracting so far this year in both total obligations and the size of individual awards, reflecting a brief transition period as Secretary Markwayne Mullin reviewed inherited contracts and warehouse plans. The more than 200 percent jump in ICE spending from April to May suggests that this pause is over and that the agency has returned to an aggressive pace of obligations, leaning heavily on existing detention, transportation, and surveillance vendors to ramp up operations.

Continued Investment in Biometric Data Collection: May’s contracts show that DHS is deepening its reliance on biometric systems across multiple components. ICE’s $25 million award to BI2 Technologies for 1,570 additional iris scanners points to a rapid build‑out of biometric screening as standard infrastructure in detention and enforcement operations. At the same time, USCIS devoted roughly half of its May spending to Amentum Services to keep collecting applicants’ biometric and biographical data for another year, signaling that large‑scale identity collection remains a priority across DHS.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. 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 environmental assessment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened this week for its plan to convert the Williamsport, Md., warehouse into a detention facility describes interior modifications designed to accommodate up to 1,500 people and the installation of a 750,000-gallon on-site domestic water storage tank, with a booster-pump system the notice says is intended to limit the facility’s impact on the local distribution system. Comments are due July 1.

26 0601 Crsco Nepa Ice Scopting Hagerstown Md

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That 1,500 figure is the same capacity ICE distanced itself from in court throughout the spring. In filings opposing Maryland’s lawsuit, the agency told the U.S. District Court that initial plans called for 542 detainees and that it had done the environmental and technical work appropriate to a facility of that size — a number it has now repeated across four federal cases.

In April, Rep. April McClain Delaney, whose district includes the area, said the agency was reconsidering the scope of the 1,500-bed plan; the assessment posted today seems to backtrack that reconsideration. The June 1 assessment matches the original capacity that appeared in internal agency documents leaked late last year and in the state’s complaint.

ICE has described the site publicly as a short-term processing facility. The notice lists up to six secure recreation yards, two cafeterias, a kitchen, three multi-purpose rooms, a health services room and laundry facilities, with staff amenities that may include training rooms and even an indoor firing range.

The warehouse as currently configured has four toilets, two water fountains and a municipal allocation of roughly 800 gallons a day. A facility for 1,500 people would require about 209,000 gallons a day, using the per-capita figure drawn from ICE’s own planning documents. A 750,000-gallon tank would let the facility store water on site rather than draw it in real time from Hagerstown, the sole water supplier for Williamsport, which would otherwise have to approve a large increase in the allocation through a process requiring a formal application, an engineering review and full upfront payment for the work.

The notice also describes a three-phase sewer and water plan that may include expanding the off-site lift station and procuring additional capacity from Washington County, steps that run against a state order barring any increase in sewage flow tied to the property, issued because a pumping station serving the site is operating at more than 99 percent of its allocated capacity.

Apart from the tank, ICE’s notice catalogs the extent of the ground disturbance the project would require: trenching and mechanical excavation for the waterline and sanitary sewer, fiber-optic and telecommunication cabling, new freestanding light poles, a new generator, piers for recreational-area awnings and basketball hoops, perimeter security fencing and a prefabricated guard shack.

The new assessment exists because Judge Brendan A. Hurson granted Maryland a preliminary injunction on April 15, barring any retrofitting of the warehouse and limiting work to maintenance and security measures until the review is complete, after finding that the agency had likely failed to assess the project’s environmental consequences as federal law requires.

The only environmental review ICE conducted before buying the warehouse was completed and approved in a single day, the day before the purchase closed. A government lawyer told the court the review now underway could take years.

DHS bought the 825,620-square-foot warehouse on Jan. 16 for $102.4 million in cash. Federal spending records show a renovation contract awarded to KVG LLC of Gettysburg, Pa., worth $113 million, with options that could raise it to $642 million over three years and bring total federal spending on the site to at least $215 million.

In the notice opening the review, which asks the public to identify the project’s potential environmental effects, DHS writes that it “is not aware of any potential for significant environmental impacts.”

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The fire department responsible for both sides of the street says no one has asked it how that would work.

In a written response on June 1, the fire marshal of the Surprise Fire-Medical Department, Steven D. Faraclas, said his department had never been given a plan for how the detention center would handle a chemical accident across the street. Neither the Department of Homeland Security, nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nor the private contractor hired to run the facility had contacted the department about emergency planning or the chemical site next door. Asked whether any of them had been in touch, Faraclas wrote: “Not at this time.”

The chemical facility, run by the Rinchem Company, has operated at 13255 W. Sweetwater Avenue since early 2024, according to state hazardous-materials filings reviewed by Project Salt Box. The filings identify Surprise Fire-Medical as the responding fire department and list dozens of hazardous substances on site, including chlorine, ammonia, fluorine and large amounts of hydrogen chloride — a gas that becomes a choking, corrosive cloud when it is released.

In recently-posted job advertisements for the Surprise site, GardaWorld Federal Services — the company ICE contracted to fit-out and operate the facility — warns that “employees may be exposed to extreme cold or hot weather conditions, fumes, or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, and loud noise.”

Companies that store hazardous chemicals in large quantities must tell regulators how far a dangerous release could spread. In Rinchem’s filing, the company modeled what regulators call an “alternative release scenario”: a realistic accident, not the worst possible case, in which a broken seam or manifold at its outdoor container yard releases 20,000 pounds of hydrogen chloride gas over 10 minutes. The Environmental Protection Agency’s risk model shows a toxic cloud from such a breach could travel as far as 2.7 miles, across an area where 73,642 people live. The detention center across the street, the surrounding neighborhoods and several schools all fall within that distance.

Northwest Valley Indivisible, a nonpartisan civic group in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, raised the issue with Surprise officials on May 29, submitting a public safety briefing based on Rinchem’s EPA filings and offsite consequence data.

The group asked the city to press DHS, ICE and GardaWorld for answers on evacuation, shelter-in-place planning, emergency coordination and chemical-detection systems before the facility opens.

Lynne Gehling of Northwest Valley Indivisible, who provided Project Salt Box with Rinchem records obtained through state hazardous-materials filings and an EPA Risk Management Plan reading-room review, said the unanswered questions pointed to a basic failure of due diligence.

“Did a single person at DHS or ICE look across the street and see one of the largest hazardous chemical warehouse in the Valley before they spent $70 million to lock people up with no way out?” Gehling said. “Did anyone do any due diligence on this location at all? We keep asking. They keep not answering. Surprise residents deserve better.”

In its letter, the group asked officials to demand answers on “how 542 non-evacuable detainees will be protected in a toxic release event,” whether the county emergency planning committee and Surprise Fire-Medical Department had reviewed Rinchem’s risk plan against the detention center’s operations, and “what chemical detection and HVAC isolation systems will be in place before opening.” The group called them “public safety questions with straightforward regulatory answers — or they should be.”

The city of Surprise could not be reached for comment in time for publication.

The questions may extend beyond the 542-detainee figure cited by Northwest Valley Indivisible. ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative describes regional processing centers like Surprise as short-term staging sites that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees for three to seven days before transfer or removal, according to records released by New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s office.

The Arizona attorney general raised a more expansive version of the same concern in its lawsuit against DHS, arguing that the Surprise warehouse was built for industrial distribution, not human detention, and that placing a captive population across from a hazardous-materials warehouse could strain the city’s ability to protect public health and provide emergency services during an accident.

ICE has made at least one site-specific environmental notice public. In February, the agency issued a floodplain notice saying the 24.46-acre property sits in a moderate flood-hazard zone and that ICE had reviewed alternatives before deciding to acquire, renovate and occupy the warehouse as a “temporary detainee dormitory.” The notice said the site was largely paved, already served by roads, utilities and drainage infrastructure, and would require only “minor adjustments” for operations. It did not mention Rinchem, the chemical storage facility across the street, or the evacuation of a detained population during a chemical release.

As of publication, ICE had not filed its response to the state’s complaint. In other warehouse cases, DHS responses have included records of environmental consideration that Project Salt Box previously reported were completed on compressed timelines and relied on categorical exclusions rather than fuller environmental assessments, including at the proposed detention site in Roxbury, N.J.

That narrow record leaves unanswered the broader public-safety question raised by the warehouse’s location — namely, how would emergency officials protect hundreds, if not thousands, of locked detainees during a chemical release, industrial fire, hazardous-materials crash, smoke event or other fast-moving emergency.

Two major chemical emergencies struck the West in the same week. In Longview, Wash., a tank containing roughly 900,000 gallons of “white liquor,” a caustic chemical mixture used in paper production, imploded at a Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility on May 26, killing 11 workers, USA Today reported. Days earlier in Garden Grove, Calif., about 50,000 residents were evacuated after a tank holding 6,500 gallons of methyl methacrylate became unstable at a GKN Aerospace facility, according to ABC7 Los Angeles.

When the evacuation order came in Garden Grove, residents could, for the most part, get in their cars and leave. People held in a locked detention center would depend on a plan — and on staff, contractors and emergency responders — to evacuate, shelter in place or move them out of danger.

A general emergency plan already exists for the Rinchem facility, Faraclas said, and his department has reviewed it. But that plan covers the chemical company alone. The detention center, he said, “would prepare its own general emergency or evacuation plan” — a separate document, not yet written, that the operator would produce on its own.

Asked what it would take to protect people who cannot evacuate themselves if an accident occurred, Faraclas said his department would coordinate with the facility’s managers at the time. “No such conversation has taken place at this time,” he wrote. He said the department is responsible for emergency planning in the area and that the work is “ongoing.”

A chemical release could also draw a federal response through Regional Response Team 9, a multiagency coordination group co-chaired by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard that supports preparedness and response to oil and hazardous-substance spills on land in Arizona, California and Nevada. But the local agency with immediate responsibility for the corridor, Surprise Fire-Medical, said no such conversation has taken place.

Asked about the gap the fire marshal described, a DHS spokesperson did not address the specific questions. The spokesperson said the agency was reviewing its policies and pointed to the homeland security secretary’s pledge to “work with community leaders” and “be good partners.”

The spokesperson then attacked critics of the project. “Let’s be honest about this. This isn’t about the environment,” the spokesperson said. “It’s about trying to stop President Trump from making America safe again.” Critics, the spokesperson added, were “feigning concern” because they wanted immigrants in the country illegally “to stay forever and vote here.”

On the question of environmental review, the spokesperson said ICE had “carefully evaluated” the site before buying it to limit harm to “protected species, sensitive natural resources, and valued cultural resources.” The statement did not mention Rinchem, the schools within the modeled hazard zone, Surprise Fire-Medical or the detained population that would be unable to leave on its own.

GardaWorld referred all questions to DHS. Rinchem did not respond to an emailed list of questions from Project Salt Box.

The federal government bought the 418,000-square-foot warehouse on Jan. 23 for $70 million in cash, according to county property records, and later awarded GardaWorld a contract worth $313 million to convert and operate it — a deal that could exceed $700 million if extended through 2029, Project Salt Box previously reported. The Surprise warehouse is one of 11 that ICE has bought around the country as it builds a new network of detention sites, purchases Project Salt Box has tracked since January.

The Surprise project is part of a nationwide warehouse detention expansion that has drawn legal challenges in Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan, Arizona and Social Circle, Ga. State and local officials have argued that DHS moved ahead without completing the environmental review required under federal law. In Maryland, a federal judge halted one warehouse conversion in April; at a hearing, the judge asked whether the government’s review could pass “the laugh test.” DHS has said in court that it conducted the review the law required. Work on the Surprise contract was stopped under federal orders the same month.

Unlike the city of Romulus, Mich., which joined the Michigan attorney general in suing the Trump administration over a proposed detention site there, the city of Surprise has not joined its state’s lawsuit. When the purchase became public in late January, the city said it had not been told about the sale or the building’s intended use. It has since negotiated a $300,000 annual payment from DHS and a promise to cover the cost of police, fire and medical response — an arrangement whose details, as of late spring, had not been settled.

The only agency with the authority to respond to a chemical emergency on West Sweetwater Avenue is the Surprise Fire-Medical Department. It has not been asked to plan for the people who would soon be held across the street from the chemicals.

“Our department would work in conjunction with their facility managers if such an accident were to occur,” Faraclas wrote. “No such conversation has taken place at this time.”

The Department of Homeland Security has begun identifying several of the eleven warehouses it bought this year to detain immigrants for possible sale, NBC News reported Friday, and is weighing the same for the deportation planes it acquired over the period, among them a Boeing 737 Max 8. No final decisions have been made.

The buildings were purchased under former Secretary Kristi Noem as part of a plan to detain as many as 100,000 immigrants at one time, a push backed by a $45 billion congressional appropriation in 2025. Department officials now say they no longer need that capacity, according to NBC.

That position is in stark contrast with statements from elsewhere in the administration’s immigration apparatus. Earlier this year, the border czar, Tom Homan, said mass deportations were still coming. “You haven't seen shit yet,” he said.

DHS paid just over $1 billion for the eleven properties. A review of state tax and land records and commercial sales data shows the government paid above the most recent valuation at every one of the sites and above recent market comparables at most of them.

In Socorro, Texas, ICE paid $123 million for a property last valued at about $11 million. In Flowery Branch, Ga., it paid $68 million for a site previously valued at $400,000. The city of Social Circle, Ga., has sued, alleging the agency paid more than five times the property's assessed value. The last warehouse ICE bought before then-Secretary Noem’s firing was in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was purchased for $145.4 million — a markup of 49 percent above its last appraised value, according to tax assessor records.

Many of the buildings had sat empty for years before the government bought them. In Williamsport, Md., the agency awarded a $113 million retrofit contract within weeks of the January purchase, and in Surprise, Ariz., it committed more than $300 million to the same work. A DHS memo set a deadline of November 30, 2026, to open the new facilities nationwide.

The road to offloading any one of these facilities might not be an easy one.

The first obstacle to a potential sale lies in court. Local and state governments in five states have sued to block the conversions, arguing that the buildings are industrial shells unfit to hold people and that DHS bought them without the environmental review federal law requires. Until those cases are resolved — or the parties settle — some of the sites cannot change hands

The litigation has already produced one concrete result. In April, a federal judge in Maryland froze work on the 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Williamsport, finding that DHS had not taken the “hard look” at environmental consequences that the National Environmental Policy Act requires. New Jersey’s complaint over a building bought for about $129 million, roughly twice its assessed value, called it “a logistics center fit for Amazon Prime packages, not people,” with four toilets for a planned 1,500 detainees.

Even cleared for sale, the buildings are unlikely to recover what they cost. The markups that the government paid in rushing to buy the warehouses set the floor for any loss, and a private buyer has little reason to pay what the government did for warehouses that had sat empty for years before ICE acquired them. The DHS inspector general is already auditing whether the purchases met the need for detention space cost-effectively.

The agency that would handle a sale is short-staffed for it. The General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service lost about a third of its staff over the past year, and the private brokers it hired to speed disposals had not closed a single sale as of this spring, the Government Accountability Office found.

A sale also has to clear a prior claim to the buildings themselves. Under Title V of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, once federal property is declared surplus, organizations that serve homeless people can acquire it at no cost before it can be sold. The GSA’s accelerated-disposal program acknowledges that those screenings come first.

Whether that claim applies would depend on a finding by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that a property is suitable for housing people. That is unlikely to apply to the warehouses.

The same features the states are litigating, among them the lack of plumbing for large numbers of occupants, are the features that would weigh against such a finding. A building found unsuitable for the homeless moves toward sale rather than transfer.

The change in plans followed a change in leadership. The purchases were made under Noem, and the review of whether to reverse them began after Markwayne Mullin took over the department in March. Trump had said he wanted a “softer touch” on enforcement after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens during operations in Minneapolis in January.

Asked about the possible sales, a DHS spokesperson told NBC that the department is “assessing all our resources, including aircraft, to maximize efficiency” and described Mullin as focused on “being the best possible steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said the secretary wanted to work with the communities that had opposed the facilities. DHS did not respond to Project Salt Box’s emailed request for comment in time for publication

Eric Taylor, the Social Circle city manager, told NBC he was glad to hear the agency might drop the warehouse his town had sued to stop, but wanted the change from DHS in writing. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.

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The map is one page of a White House site that casts unauthorized immigrants as extraterrestrials who “walk among us”. The page opens with a scrolling crawl about a secret the government supposedly kept for sixty years and an invasion carried out under cover of darkness, then gives way to the map and a link to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line.

A White House official described it to Fox News Digital as a first-of-its-kind effort to draw attention to the previous administration’s border record. Every other city opens the same panel — a total, a date range, the charges, the countries of origin, a gang indicator.

The map offers no way to see the records behind those numbers. There is no file to download and no breakdown within a city; the data can be read only one place at a time, and every figure arrives pre-totaled. The charges and the gang line are listed beside the Baltimore total of 2,202 with no count for how many of those arrests fall under either.

The most complete public accounting of ICE arrests does not come from the agency, whose published enforcement statistics are aggregate and lag by a quarter. The individual-level records are obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the Deportation Data Project, a research effort run out of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, whose most recent release covers ICE actions through early March 2026.

A review of those records for the Baltimore area of responsibility, which covers the entire state of Maryland, counts 6,343 arrests recorded after Jan. 20, 2025 and running through early March 2026.

The records assign each arrest to one of the three criminality categories ICE itself uses. In 1,648 cases the person had a prior criminal conviction. In 834 the person had charges pending but no conviction. The remaining 3,861 (just over 60 percent of the total) were classified as immigration violators with neither a conviction nor a pending charge. In all, 4,695 of the 6,343 — close to 75 percent —had no criminal conviction of any kind.

The same tilt appears in the figures ICE publishes about its own detention system, which it releases under a reporting requirement Congress attached to its appropriations.

In the national data the agency posted in April, 17,589 of the 60,311 people then in custody — fewer than three in ten — had a criminal conviction. Another 18,731 had charges pending, and the largest group, 23,991, or about 40 percent, were classified as immigration violators with neither a conviction nor a charge against them.

FY26 Immigration Detention Statistics

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Current as of 4/9/2026 Source: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/detention/FY26_detentionStats_04092026.xlsx

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A Cato Institute review of ICE data reached a similar conclusion for arrests, finding that nearly three in four people booked into custody since October had no conviction and that 5 percent had a violent one. People with pending charges may never be convicted; the charges are often minor, and a person deported before trial will not see the case resolved.

The gang affiliation line is a single green check, presented as a “yes.” The map attaches no count to it, no definition of what qualifies, and no record a reader can inspect; nothing shows how the determination was made, on what evidence, or to how many of the 2,202 it applies.

Asked whether the check indicates that everyone counted in Baltimore was arrested on a gang-related charge, ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

A review of the national statistics provided by ICE show only 12 mentions of the word “gang” out of 395,367 records since Jan. 20, 2025.

The available national figures that can be checked are small. An American Immigration Council analysis of last year’s removals from ICE detention put suspected gang members at about 2 percent and known or suspected terrorists at 0.4 percent.

The charge list reads the same way. It reproduces ICE’s full catalog of offense categories, arson through weapons offenses, beside the total, without recording how many arrests fall under any single category or how many under none. So does the country-of-origin list, which names every nationality that appears at least once — the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain among them — without a figure for how many arrests came from any one country.

The distance between a list of charges and a count of convictions follows from a definition the administration adopted at its outset. Asked at her first briefing of the term how many of the people ICE had arrested had criminal records, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that anyone who entered the country unlawfully already met the standard, a position that treats unlawful presence itself as the crime. “If they broke our nation’s laws, yes, they are a criminal,” she said, and returned to the point a moment later: they are all criminals as far as this administration goes.

Price Modern LLC, a Baltimore office furniture dealer, received $95.7 million in federal contract obligations across fiscal years 2025 and 2026, according to Project Salt Box’s review of federal spending records. Nearly half of that total, $48.9 million, came from records tied to ICE office expansion under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the reconciliation measure that funded the administration’s immigration enforcement buildout.

Almost all of those expansion-related obligations went to two firms based in or near Baltimore, and almost all of that went to one in particular. Price Modern accounted for the great majority of the ICE office fit-out obligations reviewed by Project Salt Box.

MOI, Inc., another Baltimore-based commercial interiors firm, accounted for $287,570 in the same subset.

Vendors in Richmond, Va.; Alexandria, Va.; Clearwater, Fla.; Florence, Ariz.; and Zion, Ill., together accounted for about $296,200, or roughly 0.6 percent of the total reviewed.

Baltimore furniture vendors accounted for the other 99.4 percent.

The expansion-related records covered office furniture, workspace design, furniture installation, storage and workplace support services across 56 listed performance locations in 27 states and Puerto Rico. In federal contracting, an obligation is money the government has committed to spend; the records reviewed by Project Salt Box include new awards and later modifications to them. The $48.9 million figure refers to the ICE expansion-related subset, not all federal work the companies performed during the two fiscal years.

The two largest Price Modern awards in that subset were orders under a broader government purchasing agreement, totaling about $40.2 million. Both award descriptions tied the furniture purchases to Enforcement and Removal Operations officers hired under the reconciliation bill.

The largest listed place of performance was Baltimore, where Price Modern had $42.5 million in obligations across 92 award actions and 79 unique awards in the expansion-related subset.

Other listed locations included Elkridge, Md.; Brunswick, Ga.; Milwaukee; Dallas; East Boston; Washington, D.C.; Baton Rouge; New Orleans; Mesa, Ariz.; San Diego; Wilmington, Del.; and Huntsville, Ala. The listed place of performance does not necessarily mean all work occurred in that city, because office furniture contracts can include procurement, design, delivery, storage, installation and project support for offices in other locations.

Price Modern’s ICE work

Price Modern’s ICE work first appeared in Project Salt Box’s review of federal procurement records last fall, when DHS began posting awards tied to furniture and office fit-outs for the agency. The company’s role later drew scrutiny in Baltimore, where residents called the firm to object after it signed a $25.8 million deal in February to supply furniture to ICE offices around the country.

In reporting earlier this year, the Baltimore Sun described Price Modern as a more than century-old dealer in the city’s Remington neighborhood and reported comments from its president, Brent Matthews, who said the company employs 200 people, has done business with the federal government for 40 years, and draws about half its annual revenue from federal contracts.

“Across seven presidential administrations, we have had no role in policy or political decisions,” Matthews told The Sun. “We understand and respect that team members and others may hold differing views. Our responsibility is to do our work professionally by providing furniture and design services to our clients.”

The newspaper also reported that Price Modern has held a Homeland Security blanket purchase agreement for 14 years, has worked with nine DHS agencies and 96 federal agencies overall, and that ICE contracts account for more than half the value of its federal contracts since 2008.

Federal spending records reviewed by Project Salt Box show DHS is Price Modern’s largest federal customer, accounting for roughly 86 percent of the company’s listed federal obligations since 2008. That work has been driven largely by ICE, which accounts for approximately $45 million in furniture contracts over the period, or about 76 percent of the company’s listed federal obligations. The next largest agencies in the records were the Department of Transportation, at $4.27 million; the Defense Department, at $1.19 million; and the Executive Office of the President, at $1.03 million.

Within the FY2025 and FY2026 reconciliation-linked records, Price Modern appeared in obligations tied to 54 performance locations, covering office furniture, workspace design, furniture installation, storage and workplace support services. Several listed locations showed $0 obligations in the transaction-level data; those entries generally reflect award actions that did not add new funding at the time, such as administrative updates, corrections or changes to an existing award, and remain in the records as part of the award history.

Price Modern did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

MOI’s ICE contracts

MOI, Inc. has received three ICE-related contracts since 2024, two of them recent. The earliest, awarded under the Biden administration, obligated $796,768 for furniture services for Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations. The two more recent awards, obligated in fiscal year 2026, procured furniture, associated services and design work for ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor — the agency’s in-house legal division, which handles immigration court proceedings and enforcement litigation — and together totaled $278,768.

MOI is a worker-owned commercial interiors company with roots in Baltimore dating to 1983, when it was founded as Maryland Office Interiors. DHS accounts for 64 percent of MOI’s listed federal obligations, according to a review of federal spending records; the Secret Service is its largest DHS sub-agency customer, followed by Customs and Border Protection.

Office infrastructure and ICE expansion

The office fit-out records are one part of a logistics expansion Project Salt Box has tracked across ICE’s real estate and workplace needs since 2025. In recent months, ICE has appeared in federal records tied to traditional office leases, law-enforcement office space and a nationwide co-working space solicitation, including a search for 65,000 square feet in San Antonio, plans in Newburgh, N.Y., disclosed through a deleted filename, and as many as 90 flexible office locations sought through a single solicitation.

In April, the Associated Press reported that ICE added 12,000 new officers and special agents earlier this year.

Price Modern’s federal work in FY2025 and FY2026 extended beyond the reconciliation-linked ICE office records. But within the expansion subset, two Baltimore-area firms supplied nearly all the obligations tied to ICE office furniture, design, installation, storage and workplace support, with Price Modern accounting for almost the entire total.