DHS to spend $38 billion turning warehouses into ICE detention centers

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into immigrant detention centers, according to documents shared late Thursday by New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte.

Ayotte said in a statement that she received the documents in response to an inquiry about the economic impact on the town of Merrimack, where $158 million will be spent to retrofit a warehouse into a holding facility.

According to an overview of the plan, first reported by the Washington Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to purchase and convert 16 buildings into processing centers. Those facilities would hold between 1,000 and 1,500 detainees for up to a week.

An additional eight large-scale detention centers will be used as base camps for deportations and will reportedly hold as many as 10,000 migrants for up to 60 days.

“The new model is designed to strategically increase bed capacity to 92,600 beds,” the documents read. “For ICE to sustain the anticipated increase in enforcement operations and arrests in 2026, an increase in detention capacity will be a necessary downstream requirement.”

Congress appears ready to approve the funding through the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and ICE plans to have the detention centers up and running by the end of November.

Ayotte published the documents amid tension over the plans in Merrimack and after interim ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a Senate hearing on Thursday that he’d “worked with Gov. Ayotte” on the economic impact of the project. The Republican governor previously denied knowing an ICE center was coming to Merrimack, according to the New Hampshire Bulletin.

“After my office inquired about the economic impact study following today’s Senate hearing, DHS has now for the first time distributed the document,” Ayotte said in a statement. “Once the document was received, we immediately shared it with the Town of Merrimack.”

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services letter sent to Ayotte estimated the Merrimack Processing Site would “support a total of 1,252 jobs during retrofit” and create up to 265 positions for people in New Hampshire once it’s complete.

The newly released documents come as ICE has quietly bought at least seven warehouses in the past few weeks in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas. Several other deals in states like New York are said to be forthcoming.

With News Wire Services