DHS Pauses Warehouse Purchases as Internal Revolt, Legal Challenges, and Political Infighting Cloud the Program's Future

Career officials call it unworkable. Communities are suing to stop it. Congress is investigating. And Stephen Miller is still pushing.

Illustration: Michael Wriston. Photos: Wikimedia Commons. Blueprint: ICE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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