Federal immigration officials plan to spend $38.3 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,600 beds, a document released Friday shows, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly purchases warehouses to turn into detention and processing facilities.
Republican New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte posted the document online amid tension over ICE's plans to convert a warehouse in Merrimack into a 500-bed processing center.
It said ICE plans 16 regional processing centers with a population of 1,000 to 1,500 detainees, whose stays would average three to seven days. Another eight large-scale detention centers would be capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees for periods averaging less than 60 days.
The document also refers to the acquisition of 10 existing ''turnkey'' facilities.
Plans call for all of them to be up and running by November as immigration officials roll out a massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by President Donald Trump's recent tax-cutting law.
More than 75,000 immigrants were being detained by ICE as of mid-January, up from 40,000 when Trump took office a year earlier, according to federal data released last week.
The newly released document refers to ''non-traditional facilities'' and comes as ICE has quietly bought at least seven warehouses — some larger than 1 million square feet (92,900 square meters) — in the past few weeks in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Warehouse purchases in six cities were scuttled when buyers decided not to sell under pressure from activists. Several other deals in places like New York are imminent, however.
