Politics

ICE Is on a $45 Billion Building Spree. Can Small Towns Support These New Migrant Warehouses?

The government is selling the policy with the same arguments you’d expect for subsidized factories or sports stadiums.

Joe Lancaster | 4.21.2026 12:00 PM

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In his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump pledged to crack down on illegal immigration: "All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came." The administration set a minimum goal of 3,000 deportations per day.

There was a problem. At the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated or contracted with more than 200 disparate facilities across the country, from federal detention centers to county jails, and it had the resources to detain only about 41,000 people at a time. To reach its daily deportation goal, the government would have to scale up its capacity. So this year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone on a real estate shopping spree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on warehouses across the country. The plan: to transform them into detention centers for undocumented migrants.

It is inhumane to store human beings—people who in many cases have not been convicted or even accused of anything more serious than civil immigration violations—in warehouses like so much freight. It is also far too costly, both in tax dollars spent and in harms imposed on the communities where these holding centers are being built.

Congress Gave ICE $45 Billion To Build Detention Centers

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave ICE the money to hire 10,000 new immigration officers, plus $45 billion for "single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity." A Homeland Security press release announced that this funding "provides ICE with enough detention capacity to maintain an average daily population of 100,000 illegal aliens and secures 80,000 new ICE beds."

The department immediately started buying up industrial warehouses across America. According to DHS documents, the plan is to streamline operations to 34 dedicated facilities with a total detainee capacity of 92,600. This would include "the acquisition and renovation of eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites." The processing sites would hold up to 1,500 detainees for a few days at a time. A blueprint in a DHS report shows elaborate centers with kitchens, cafeterias, laundry facilities, gun ranges, and housing for up to 10,000 detainees. Homeland Security claims these will be ready for use November 30.

The administration doesn't like to call these facilities warehouses. They "are not warehouses—they are detention facilities," recently departed DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Washington Post in January. An ICE spokesperson tells Reason that "these will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards." But no matter how they dress it up, ICE acquired industrial properties with empty warehouses designed to store and transport freight, with the intent to use them for storing and transporting people.

It's not like ICE's "regular detention standards" are anything to be proud of. There have been numerous reports across the country of inhumane conditions in ICE facilities. In just 50 days at Camp East Montana, a detention center at Fort Bliss, Texas, "migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention," The Washington Post reported in September. Three detainees at the camp died within six weeks, and the Associated Press reported that the staff were taking "bets…over which detainee would be next to die by suicide." In March, officials shut down access to Camp East Montana after 14 detainees tested positive for measles, before announcing a new contractor would take over.

It's also worth noting that as of February 7, 2026, about 74 percent of the people held in ICE custody—50,259 out of 68,289 detainees—had no criminal convictions, despite Trump's repeated pledge to go after the "worst of the worst." David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, similarly found that of all the people ICE detained from October 1 through November 15, 2025, only 5 percent had been convicted of a violent crime, 73 percent had no criminal convictions of any kind, and 47........

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