ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses

The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.

Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says. Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation.

The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.

The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes. ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by The Post. A formal request for bids could follow soon after that.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said she “cannot confirm” The Post’s reporting and declined to answer questions about the warehouse plan.

NBC and Bloomberg News previously reported on ICE’s internal discussions about using warehouses as detention centers. The full scope of the project, the locations of the facilities and other details contained in the solicitation have not been previously disclosed or reported.

The warehouse plan would be the next step in President Donald Trump’s campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, which began with a scramble to expand the nation’s immigrant detention system, the largest in the world. Armed with $45 billion Congress set aside for locking up immigrants, his administration this year revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.

The new facilities will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process and promote the safety, dignity and respect for all in ICE custody,” the solicitation said.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

Commercial real estate experts say concentrating detainees in warehouses would create its own logistical problems. Such structures are designed for storage and shipping, not human habitation. They tend to be poorly ventilated and lack precise temperature controls - and, because they are typically located far from residential areas, they may not have access to the plumbing and sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.

“It’s dehumanizing,” said Tania Wolf, an advocate with the National Immigration Project who is based in New Orleans - about one hour south from the site of a planned warehouse in Hammond, La. “You’re treating people, for lack of a better term, like cattle.”

ICE plans to heavily modify the structures to include intake areas, housing units with showers and restrooms, a kitchen, dining areas, a medical unit, indoor and outdoor recreation areas, a law library, and administrative offices, according to the solicitation. Some of the facilities will include special housing designed for families in custody.

If the government leased a warehouse in Stafford, it would need to comply with the city’s zoning laws and building codes, said Pamela Yeung, one of seven supervisors on Stafford’s Democrat-led board.

“Immigration policy is federal, but its impacts are local,” Yeung said in an emailed statement. “Any facility of this scale would affect infrastructure, public safety, and social services.”

ICE held more than 68,000 people at the beginning of this month, agency data shows, the highest number on record. Nearly half, or 48 percent of these people, have no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, ICE data show.

Some administration officials have complained about the complexity of the current detention system. A 2015 government watchdog report found that deportation flights often leave the country with empty seats because of the logistical difficulty of bringing enough people eligible for deportation to an airplane at the same time.

The government already awarded one $30 million contract for help with “due diligence services and concept design” for the new facilities, procurement records show.That award fueled a public backlash among members of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, a Kansas tribe that said a business connected to the tribe had acted against their wishes in pursuing the contract.

The business that won the award, KPB Services LLC, could not be reached at phone numbers listed for the company online.

The biggest newly proposed warehouse would hold up to 10,000 detainees in Stafford, an industrial area 40 miles south of Washington. A facility with capacity for up to 9,500 people is planned for Hutchins, near Dallas; and another with space for 9,000 in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge.Currently, ICE’s biggest facility is a makeshift tent encampment built this summer at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in Texas. It now holds around 3,000 people but was expected to have a capacity of 5,000 by year’s end.

The warehouse solicitation document names nine active detention centers as part of the project’s final phase, suggesting that at least those facilities would continue to be used. The plan does not mention whether other existing facilities would be phased out.

It does not give a timeline for beginning work on the project but says the facilities must begin accepting detainees 30 to 60 calendar days after the start of construction.

Staffing facilities of this size is likely to be a challenge, said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden. Prospective workers will need medical or other specialized training and will have to pass federal security clearances, he said.

“We can always find more warehouses,” Houser said. The ability to operate the facilities safely, he said, is “always limited by staffing.”

- - -