Follow the Money - March 2026: CBP Spends Over $7.5B on Border Wall

Project Salt Box's monthly report on ICE and CBP procurement activities

Bottom Line Up Front

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

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

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

March’s Biggest Contracts

Screenshot from CBP’s interactive “Smart Wall Map”

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

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

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

Analysis and Trends

Paul Goyette from Chicago, USA, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

About this Report

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