After Ditching Navy Contract, ICE Moves to Bring Detention Construction In-House
A pre-solicitation posted to SAM.gov outlines a new ICE construction contract for agency-owned detention camps, replacing the Navy-run vehicle used for rapid buildouts.
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.
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.
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.
Oh my God! Nazi Germany, here we come.
Fuckers. But not surprised at all. Thank you, Project Saltbox.