ICE Warehouse Concentration Camps Put on Hold as DHS Corruption Spills Into Full View
Back in February, when news broke that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was planning to house 10,000 detainees in the small Georgia town of Social Circle—despite the fact that the mostly Trump-voting residents were vehemently opposed—as part of the broader DHS plan to buy up and convert a bunch of empty warehouses into immigration detention/concentration camps, we noted an odd little disparity. The building in that case, a newly constructed massive warehouse that the town hoped would become a job- and tax-providing hub for Amazon packages or car parts, had been assessed in 2025 at less than $30 million in value. And yet, when the ink was dry, DHS paid $129 million for the site, which doesn’t even include the still-to-come costs of turning an empty warehouse into a prison intended to hold 10,000 immigrant captives. And to look at the shockwaves now reverberating across the Department of Homeland Security following the ouster of previous Secretary Kristi Noem and her replacement with Sen. Markwayne Mullin, including a recently announced investigation by the Office of the Inspector General into how DHS contracts have been awarded in the second Trump administration, it’s perhaps no surprise to see that the department today announced it was putting the entire ICE warehouse campaign on hold as it presumably wonders out loud how all this money has been spent.
The seemingly massive federal overpayments on the acquired warehouses that were intended to be part of the so-called “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative” were almost universal across the properties that were purchased by DHS under the Noem-and-Corey-Lewandowski era. The initiative, supported by the more than $165 billion awarded to DHS via Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, was supposed to be acquiring 16 smaller “processing centers” holding 1,000-1,500 people for shorter average stays and rapid deportations, and eight “large scale” or “mega center” that could hold up to 10,000 detainees each, giving DHS the capability to detain well over 100,000 people in federally operated detention centers on any given day, rather than relying on preexisting jails, prisons or temporary camps. This is the dystopian shit we’re talking about, in the below image.
The only problem: DHS seems to have consistently paid far, far more than any of these buildings seemed to be worth, for reasons unknown, as detailed in recent reporting. In Salt Lake City, the government paid $145 million for a building assessed at $97 million. In Roxbury, NJ, they paid $129 million for a facility assessed at $62 million. All told, the government has purchased 11 warehouses in Arizona, Maryland, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah for a grand total of $1.074 billion. None are yet actually holding detainees.
Perhaps this willy-nilly spending is why the Office of the Inspector General has taken a special interest, in the form of a wide-reaching investigation into just how DHS has been awarding all of its contracts since the start of 2025, including the actions of Noem and Lewandowski in particular. This is in addition, by the way, to an already in-process audit from the Office of the Inspector General in which the man in question, Joseph Cuffari, told Congress at the beginning of this month that Noem’s DHS had “systematically obstructed” the office’s work for months, including denying the Inspector General access to its internal records. Cuffari now says that they’ll be investigating DHS grants and contracts that were potentially awarded “by any means other than full and open competition during fiscal year 2025.” Sounds like bad news for the likes of Noem and former department mouthpiece Tricia McLaughlin! Noem’s insistence in front of Congress that her $220 million TV advertising campaign for DHS (which prominently featured her) had been approved by Trump was one of the things that ultimately led to her sacking, considering that Trump later denied he had approved it. One imagines that the Office of the Inspector General might also be interested in the reports that Corey Lewandowski was demanding direct payments to his own accounts from DHS contractors?
One thing to highlight: even as DHS seeks to examine these as “Noem-era” decisions, sources with direct knowledge of the warehouse scheme all say:
1. ICE-ERO was opposed to the plan from the start — they preferred to buy existing jails
2. Pressure from the WH, specifically Miller, drove the policy— Project Salt Box (@projectsaltbox.com) Apr 1, 2026 at 9:58 AM
As for the ICE warehouses, those expenditures could potentially end up as money that DHS has effectively thrown on a bonfire, now that we’re in the Markwayne Mullin era, if the department ends up blaming all of its discrepancies on Noem/Lewandowski and decides to pivot away from the billions in spending it has already committed to the warehouse plan. And to be certain, there are reasons to think that they might do this, the most obvious of which being that the plan seems to have been executed with maximum incompetence thus far in terms of getting literally any of the local communities on board with the idea of putting ICE detention prisons in their backyards. Lawsuits against the federal government are already pending in three states where local communities are fighting against the presence of a warehouse ICE detention camp. In the aforementioned Social Circle, Georgia, where city officials essentially claimed that the town would be facing an apocalypse of raw sewage in its streets thanks to the water/sewage demands of the facility that its infrastructure could not support, those same officials have amusingly resorted to physically cutting off the water to the facility, which is presumably in the process of being renovated, because no one at DHS would listen to their extremely pressing concerns. And in no fewer than eight other cities, deals to buy warehouses were aborted halfway through when local community demonstrations spooked building owners out of selling to DHS. It certainly doesn’t sound like anyone has thought these things through, so yeah, perhaps it’s best to pause for a moment?
It certainly sounds to us like the incoming Markwayne Mullin is prepared to throw anyone at DHS previously under the bus, in classic Trump administration fashion. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin said he would cooperate with the Office of the Inspector General on anything required of him … presumably including the not-yet-announced at the time investigation that will likely revolve around Noem and Lewandowski. As Mullin said at the time: “I will do everything required of me by law and the policies that you guys give me. There won’t be any gray area with me.”
Why do I get the feeling that even without the new ICE warehouse concentration camps, we’ll still blow past the prior record for immigrant deaths in detention during 2026? Some things, this department will always find time to prioritize.