Introducing the next step in tracking ICE's detention expansion

The Project Salt Box tracker now covers warehouses, private detention centers, and new construction.

A year ago, tracking the federal government’s detention expansion mostly meant tracking warehouses. Project Salt Box built a tracker to follow the purchases, beginning with the Williamsport, Md., warehouse we reported on in January.

@msnowProject Salt Box has been tracking the government’s buying spree for its new archipelago of huge, legal, black-site immigration prisons all over America.” MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow highlights the work of Project Salt Box, a Baltimore-based volunteer group tracking the rapid expansion of ICE facilities across the country. #news #ICE #immigration

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But that is no longer the whole story.

Over the past year, the government’s expansion of immigration jail space has accelerated quickly and changed shape.

ICE spent $1.07 billion on 11 warehouses, then moved to sell seven of them after lawsuits, community opposition and a Government Accountability Office finding that it had spent more than $20 million it cannot recover.

In their place, the Department of Homeland Security has bought existing private prisons and signed contracts to build new secure units on federal land it already owns.

Tracking this expansion is critical to understanding where billions of federal dollars are going, which communities are affected and how ICE's approach is changing.

So we expanded the tracker.

Warehouses

This streamlined and improved version of our original tracker follows the 11 warehouses ICE bought — and nearly two dozen canceled by community pushback — with the current status of each site.

Private detention center purchases

This new page tracks the government’s purchases of existing detention centers from private prison companies. So far, the government has spent $3.16 billion on five facilities from CoreCivic and GEO Group.

New construction

New to the tracker, this page monitors contracts awarded to build on land ICE already owns. Six contracts awarded in September account for nearly $8 billion of a program with a $10 billion limit. Those figures are ceilings, not spending, and ICE has not yet ordered work under them.

We redesigned the pages to make them easier to use. Immigration detention has never been higher, and the government is spending billions of dollars to add more space to drive more arrests.

It is our hope that reporters, researchers, local officials, and residents can use these tools to understand what is being bought and built, who is being paid and where.

If you know of a purchase, contract or site we have not listed, email projectsaltbox@proton.me.