Immigration and Customs Enforcement finalized the purchase of a 520,000-square-foot warehouse in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in February 2026. The agency paid US$87 million for the warehouse, intended for development into a detention center.

The purchase of the facility is part of a national push by ICE to build more detention facilities. The push is frustrating local communities that are concerned about such purchases.

Currently, there are roughly 220 facilities being used to detain immigrants nationwide. The detention funding provided to ICE – $3.4 billion in the most recent budget for the Department of Homeland Security – has historically been spent on contracts with detention providers.

The “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” a 2026 initiative by ICE to overhaul its detention system, aims to transform 24 large, vacant warehouses into immigration detention facilities. The plan calls for 16 regional processing centers, each designed to hold hundreds of detainees, and eight larger facilities with significantly greater capacity. ICE is relying almost entirely on private contractors to rapidly expand detention capacity nationwide. These contracts, backed by a $45 billion congressional budget, give private prison contractors a significant amount of revenue for use of these facilities.

Warehouses already slated for conversion have been identified in Surprise, Arizona; Social Circle, Georgia; Hagerstown, Maryland;........

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