The big bloated bill Congress passed last year, which funded DHS with more money than it knows what to do with, enabling ICE to rampage across blue states and cities, is now leading to a warehouse-purchasing craze.
This has gotten some attention, but not nearly enough. It's getting pushback in local areas if it gets notice from residents in time, but when it flies under the radar long enough, it's often too late.
DHS plans to warehouse the people they're rounding up in buildings that were built for logistics in exurban and semi-rural areas. These were structures that should never have been built in the first place by people with too much money that had no place to go, so they built these travesties of late capitalism. The spec-built caverns have been sitting empty, waiting for tenants who — the theory went — wanted to bring semi-trucks-full of stuff no one needs to be drop-shipped to and fro.
These things have been built everywhere in the country. They were in the news here over the past decade or two, going up on the outer edges of the Twin Cities metro in locations where no workers could reach them without a car. Who were they going to employ, some of us wondered, if they pay only low wages? Their typical worker doesn't live nearby (if there even is any housing relatively nearby), when there isn't any transit? But those exurbs wanted to increase their commercial tax base, so they permitted them, one after another.
And most of them have sat empty.
So now we have ICE and DHS buying them up. Here are some facts from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, based on a story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (paywalled):
ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps.
If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight.
Right now Rikers Island, the physically largest jail in the entire United States, is holding under 7,000 people.
ICE's warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation.
The largest federal prison in the nation is Fort Dix, which has a rated capacity of 4,600 people. The largest of these warehouse camps may hold more than twice that number of people.
The federal government hasn't operated a prison camp inside the United States that large since Japanese Internment.
The closest modern historical parallel is the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay for intercepted Cubans and Haitians during the HW Bush and Clinton administrations, where at maximum capacity roughly 12,000 migrants were detained. But those migrants were never in the physical US.
Purchasing and converting these warehouse detention camps will cost the U.S. government billions of dollars. So far ICE has purchased at least half a dozen warehouses at a cost of $70-$110 million each. It'll cost billions more to refit them into detention camps, and hire staff.
In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in:
- Hagerstown, MD: $102 million
- Surprise, AZ: $70 million
- Hamburg, PA: $87 million
- Tremont, PA: $120 million
- San Antonio, TX: $82 million
- El Paso, TX: $123 million
- Social Circle, GA: price unknown
This is unprecedented.
Crucially, many local governments are furious with ICE over these purchases, because they were not consulted or even told. Because they are federal property now, it's taking a commercial property off the tax rolls while likely imposing dramatic additional infrastructure costs.
ICE is likely paying a premium to get the deal through quickly. E.g., in Hamburg, PA, the warehouse was purchased in 2024 for $57.5 million and sold to ICE for $87 million.
The real profit will come with the private prison companies and contractors hired to refurbish and staff these facilities.
As the negotiations over DHS budget continue, please remember: the ICE detention budget alone was exploded in 2025 so it is now 62% greater than the entire Bureau of Prisons. People are not clocking what this infusion of cash to build concentration camps will do to our society.
Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis, author of Copaganda, wrote,
As the negotiations over DHS budget continue, please remember: the ICE detention budget alone was exploded in 2025 so it is now 62% greater than the entire Bureau of Prisons. People are not clocking what this infusion of cash to build concentration camps will do to our society.
Project Salt Box, which is tracking the flow of homeland security procurements and government contracts, has created a warehouse tracker tool so we can see who owns each building. That means people can apply public pressure to prevent the sale of buildings.
How do you stop the sale or lease? As Project Salt Box says:
- Go to city council meetings and SPEAK UP during open comment
- Call your state delegates — local + state pressure is our best bet. The Federal Government won’t save us.
In the Twin Cities, sales or leases have been stopped in suburban Woodbury and Shakopee. There has been news coverage of transactions stopped in red states as well: people do not want these mega people warehouses near them.
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Square footage: If you hear square footage numbers thrown around for these warehouses, it's helpful to keep in mind a few things. Most Americans can visual a football field. That's 57,600 square feet. These warehouses start well over 100,000 square feet and most are at least 400,000 square feet.
According to the warehouse tracker tool, the average size is about 843,000 square feet... about 14.5 football fields. It stops being meaningful at some point.
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