Customs and Border Protection awarded contracts today to four companies to collect immigration fines from people the United States has deported, ending a competition that closed earlier this month after an unusually brief bidding period.

Each contract is capped at $9 million and was issued by the same contracting office. The winners are Global Recovery Group, Caduceus, Response AI Solutions and the Baptiste Group.

The agency wants contractors to travel to homes in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, confirm that a deported person lives there and get that person to photograph their own face as proof that a fine notice was delivered, according to solicitation documents reported this month by Project Salt Box. The agency told bidders it had not identified a way for people without a U.S. bank account to pay what they owe, and said the winning contractor would have to propose a solution.

All four companies have held immigration-related federal contracts before.

Global Recovery Group and Response AI Solutions have done skip tracing for the government, locating targets of interest for Immigration and Customs Enforcement removal operations. Global Recovery Group is doing it now under two orders this year that commit about $8.5 million, more than $7 million of which has been paid. Response AI Solutions' skip-tracing order, now completed, was worth $127,920.

Caduceus, the Baptiste Group and Response AI Solutions have done what the government calls “safety verification and wellness checks” on unaccompanied migrant children and former unaccompanied migrant children, the term for those who crossed the border alone and were later released to sponsors in the United States.

Response AI Solutions holds its own child wellness-check order, capped at $243.4 million, with $3.67 million committed so far according to federal contracting records reviewed by Project Salt Box. It has also held a separate ICE contract in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, worth up to $10 million, awarded weeks after federal agents there, during Operation Metro Surge, fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, in January 2026.

The Baptiste Group's history with migrant children predates this contract by several years. Federal contracting records show the same company, identified by its unique entity identifier, received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for residential shelter services for unaccompanied migrant children during the same fiscal years it operated a shelter in Chattanooga, Tenn. That facility's state license was suspended in 2021 after allegations of abuse.

An unannounced inspection that June turned up an allegation of child abuse and a teenager who had escaped, and the state said the children's safety required emergency action. Two staff members were later charged with sexual battery. It was the only such license Tennessee suspended in five years. The company argued in court that it had been singled out for being minority owned and serving children from Central America. It later dropped its appeal and its bid to renew the license, and settled with the state on terms that let it seek a license again.

The company remains an ICE contractor. It holds an order for wellness checks on migrant children that is capped at $291.7 million and runs through June 2027, of which about $2.07 million has been committed so far, the price of a required minimum of 1,000 cases.

ICE has also been considering the Baptiste Group for a larger detention role. Records disclosed through a federal lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union in January showed the agency was weighing the company as an operator for three potential new detention sites: a former migrant children's facility in Greensboro, N.C., that had been shut down in 2024; a second, unidentified Greensboro facility; and a site near Harrisburg, Pa.

Whether the $36 million effort will recover much — if any — money is unclear. CBP has said it identified no way for people without a U.S. bank account to pay, a problem it left for the winning contractors to solve. The agency also said it will not cover a contractor's travel costs and will pay only for people who are actually found, meaning the government could spend close to the full $36 million in fees without collecting a comparable sum in fines.

Customs and Border Protection has not said how it evaluated the bids or whether the fine contracts are connected to the children’s contracts beyond the shared contractors. The agency did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Representatives from Caduceus, Global Recovery Group, Response AI Solutions, and the Baptiste Group could also not be immediately reached for comment.

Bottom Line Up Front

Detention Expansion Drives ICE Spending: With the $1.5 billion purchase of two CoreCivic detention centers in California, plus new detention contracts with The GEO Group for the Big Horn Detention Center in Colorado and the Rivers Detention Center in North Carolina, ICE has pushed the gas pedal on expanding detention capacity. The agency’s spending spree follows months of lawsuits and investigations into its warehouse detention expansion efforts.

CBP Augments Border Wall Construction with Surveillance Tech: For the first time this year, CBP did not award any new border wall construction contracts in July. Instead, the agency shifted toward technology-enabled border enforcement, including new surveillance towers, radar, and mobile x-ray inspection vehicles.

July’s Biggest Contracts

By far, the largest purchases ICE made in July were the 2,560-bed California City Detention Facility in California City and the 1,994-bed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. ICE paid $732.6 million for the California City facility and $739.2 million for the Otay Mesa facility, for a total of roughly $1.5 billion.

The agency also awarded new contracts to The GEO Group for the Big Horn Detention Center in Hudson, Colorado and the Rivers Detention Center in Winton, North Carolina. With the addition of these two facilities, ICE added more than 2,500 beds to its detention capacity.

Another notable July contract award was to Koniag Services to support the 287(g) National Coordination Center that the agency is opening in Nashville, Tennessee. Project Salt Box reported on the center late last year. It will operate around the clock and support more than a thousand 287(g) partner agencies. ICE hopes to have it up and running by the end of September.

At CBP, spending slowed significantly. For the first time this year, CBP spent less than ICE, largely because it did not award any new border wall construction contracts. Instead, CBP focused on surveillance technology. They awarded a $60 million contract to Anduril Industries for surveillance towers, and spent a combined $35 million on x-ray and radar technologies.

Analysis and Trends

Expect More Direct Purchases of Detention Space: The buyout of the two former CoreCivic detention centers will not be the last. Spoiler alert: this report is being written in August, and ICE has already bought two more. After running into legal trouble with its warehouse scheme, ICE has begun pivoting to other methods of acquiring detention space. By directly purchasing these facilities, ICE can invoke federal supremacy in an effort to bypass state and local laws. Critics are also concerned that public ownership could make it harder to scrutinize detention conditions.

Fatal ICE Shootings Force Agency to Act: After ICE officers fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and Johan Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13, the agency moved to expand its use of body-worn cameras. Neither group of agents was wearing cameras during the shootings, leaving major factual disputes to be resolved through officer accounts, witness statements, and limited outside video. ICE spent over $30 million on body cameras in July, after Congress had already appropriated $20 million for body-camera deployment in April. The purchase followed mounting criticism that ICE had not carried out its promise to equip agents nationwide, including after earlier fatal immigration-enforcement shootings in Minneapolis.

CBP Continues Investment in “Smart” Border: CBP’s July spending marks a shift in the agencies spending from physical construction to more surveillance technology. CBP put at least $95 million into surveillance towers, radar, mobile x-ray vehicles, and related detection technology. The $60 million Anduril award is especially notable. It adds to the company’s growing role in border enforcement and demonstrates how CBP’s border enforcement strategy relies on persistent, technology-driven monitoring across large stretches of the border, rather than only physical barriers. These systems can identify and track people and vehicles at a distance, feed information to Border Patrol agents, and extend enforcement infrastructure into areas where new wall construction may be delayed or contested.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. If there are specific procurements, companies, regions, or topics you would like us to cover in future monthly reports, please reach out to us and let us know.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pressing the companies that would build its new detention housing to work faster, cutting its own construction timeline in half and offering higher scores in the competition to bidders who commit to the most aggressive schedule.

Single Award Construction Contract Answers to Offerors

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The condensed timing, first detailed in the agency's Aug. 13 answers to contractors' questions, is the latest glimpse into a program through which ICE intends to build immigrant detention space on land it already owns — the approach it has ostensibly turned to after lawsuits and political pressure stalled earlier efforts to convert warehouses it had purchased for over $1 billion and to route the work through a Navy construction program.

In its written responses, the agency struck the two-year deadline to design and build a secure housing unit — a wing of individual cells — and replaced it with one year, keeping the financial penalties for finishing late. The documents for the program's only funded unit, at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Los Fresnos, Texas, go further, inviting bidders to propose an even shorter "accelerated" schedule — one that would count in their favor and that the government would then hold them to.

In its July 2026 update, TRAC listed a capacity of 1,175 people at Port Isabel. KRGV, a local news station, counted more than a thousand people in custody there during a tour this summer. The Texas Tribune has documented a long record of complaints over conditions and medical care at the facility, and people have died after being held there, among them Adrian Andreas Florian, an 85-year-old German man who died in June after more than seven months hospitalized in ICE custody.

Even as it pressed for speed, the agency refused the construction methods that could reasonably deliver it, ruling out any project start before a design is finished, rejecting the purchase of materials or the off-site fabrication of components during the design phase, and declining to credit the modular or prefabricated approaches that let builders move quickly.

The answers, which also pushed the bid deadline to Aug. 31, cleared up contradictions Project Salt Box identified when the solicitation was first posted in July. The agency said the program could be worth as much as $10 billion, not the $300 million figure that appears elsewhere in the same document, and that one company could win as many as two of the contracts. It also lowered the financial bar to compete, cutting the guarantee that a job will be finished if the builder fails — called a bond — from $10 billion to $2 billion.

Outside one grouping the solicitation labels “Mega Hub DC,” ICE has split the work by region, with each contract covering a separate geographic area. That grouping includes seven sites into a single contract.

According to the contracting documents, one company would build all of them — “concurrently,” as ICE put it — in Broadview, Ill., outside Chicago; Oakdale, La.; Huntsville, Texas; Honolulu; Aguadilla, P.R.; St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Five of the seven have no ICE-owned detention facility today.

At Guantánamo, a presidential memorandum in January 2025 ordered the migrant operations center expanded to full capacity, a buildup the Trump Administration said would hold 30,000 people.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to collect immigration debt from people its sister agency, ICE, has deported. Before bidding on the overseas collection contract closed on Friday, companies asked the agency how it would work. CBP's answers show it could not say how the people it is chasing are supposed to pay, or who would be allowed to handle their personal information.

The answers came in a question-and-answer document CBP posted to SAM.gov on Thursday, the day before bids were due.

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According to the original request for quotes, any outstanding immigration fines must be paid through a federal website, Pay.gov, that only accepts money from a U.S. bank account. Most people who have been deported do not have one and cannot open one.

A bidder asked what those people are supposed to do. CBP said it “has not identified or anticipates offering any alternative payment mechanisms,” and that whoever wins the contract will have to propose a fix.

The second question CBP left open was who gets to see a deported person’s private information. To find someone in Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, a company would hand its workers there that person’s name and last known address. Those workers could be foreign nationals hired abroad.

The three countries are a starting point. CBP said it could add more later by amending the contract, with new pricing negotiated then.

A bidder asked whether foreign workers abroad can be given that information, and how they would be vetted, since U.S. background checks often cannot reach people living in other countries. CBP said it would answer “at its earliest opportunity.” It posted that response the day before bids were due and did not answer the question.

CBP also refused a bidder’s request for more than three business days to submit a bid.

The people being pursued are the same ones the government said it would let off the hook. DHS has promised to forgive these fines for immigrants who self-deport using its CBP Home app. This contract is CBP reversing course in part, targeting people who have already left the U.S.

“Going after folks who are abroad is going to undermine their purported promise to forgive these fines once someone has left the country,” Charles Moore, a senior attorney at Public Justice, told WIRED, which reviewed the contract documents separately.

The contract calls the work “physical observation.” In practice, CBP confirmed, it means going to a deported person's home in another country and confirming they live there. The agency said it will not pay for any of that travel.

The contract is capped at $9 million over two years, which CBP said it will not raise. A company is paid only for the people it reaches, not the ones it cannot find.

To prove it delivered the notice to the right person, a contractor does not need that person's signature. A photo will do — a selfie from the person, sent back with the number that identifies the debt.

In practice, that means someone the contractor hires would need to reach a specific deported person, in Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, and get them to photograph their own face and return it, along with the paperwork tracking what they owe. The person whose selfie proves the delivery is the same person being pursued for the debt.

Bidding closed Friday. As of Tuesday, CBP has posted no contract award.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is looking to hire a private company to find people the United States has already deported and collect unpaid immigration fines from them in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. It has given prospective bidders three business days to respond.

The solicitation was posted Tuesday morning and gives contractors until 2 p.m. Friday to submit quotes. It would set up one or more open-ended contracts for what CBP calls tracing and payment recovery services. These services include debt collection carried out overseas, in which a contractor locates each person, confirms the address, and hand-delivers a printed notice describing what they owe the U.S. government.

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A review of the solicitation shows CBP estimates $423 million in unpaid penalties and fees across the Department of Homeland Security as of July 2026, and counts 66,387 people who owe civil fines to CBP and have since been removed from the country.

The fines are civil penalties the government imposes on people who stay after a deportation order or fail to leave under a voluntary departure agreement. The daily charge for defying a removal order, set at $500 in 1996 and adjusted for inflation, now amounts to $998 a day. DHS has applied it retroactively for as long as five years — enough to produce individual debts exceeding $1.8 million.

The department restarted the fines in June 2025 after years of dormancy and later cut the notice period and the window to appeal.

CBP already pays three private collection agencies to chase that debt. As of July 2026, those agencies have not located a single person outside the United States, and CBP has no collectors working abroad.

Skip-tracing is the work of finding people who don't necessarily want to be found — a search built on public records, online records, and government databases, and one that began in the private debt-collection industry.

Under the second Trump administration, DHS has spent roughly $118.45 million on skip-tracing services to find people inside the country, according to federal budget records reviewed by Project Salt Box. A so-called “skip trace” search depends on access to a variety of data sources, including motor vehicle, utility, credit and employment data the government does not have abroad. The new contract asks a company to run a harder version of this service in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.

The people a contractor would be sent to find were deported to one of three countries where extortion is among the most common and fastest-growing crimes. In Mexico, reported cases nearly doubled between 2016 and 2025, and the Global Organized Crime Index ranks the country among the world’s top five for extortion and racketeering, alongside Honduras. Officials estimate the true number is far higher, since almost no victims come forward. Much of the extortion is tied to organized crime, but a government anti-corruption operation has also produced the arrests of more than 70 local officials, some convicted of running extortion themselves. In Guatemala, the homicide rate rose to 17.4 per 100,000 people in 2025, a climb analysts attribute to renewed gang violence. Many of them left for the United States to escape conditions like these.

The CBP “payment recovery service” contract would send a private collector to find them in the countries they fled and demand payment — in effect, the government pursuing, for money, the same people it paid to send away.

To confirm it has found the right person, the document says a contractor may submit photographs of the home, utility bills, employment records, or a death certificate.

Payment must be collected through pay.gov, which the document says requires a U.S.-based bank account. Human Rights Watch, in a report on people deported from the United States to Mexico, documented that U.S. authorities confiscated the phones and identification of many of those it interviewed before removal, leaving them unable to open bank accounts or reach money they already had.

Quotes are due Friday at 2 p.m. CBP’s solicitation estimates an ordering period beginning Aug. 14 and running two years, with individual assignments issued as work arises.

CBP has not said how many contractors it intends to select, or whether it will award a contract at all.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a solicitation on Thursday for a construction program worth up to $10 billion, a move to build and expand detention space on land the agency owns rather than lease it.

The solicitation begins with eight projects: new “Secure Housing Units” — entire wings of individual cells — at eight of the agency’s Service Processing Centers. Two of those centers closed years ago. A third, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, has never existed.

Each unit is described as a single-story building of 26 cells, two of them wheelchair-accessible, with day rooms, showers, search and storage rooms, a control room and separate exercise yards for men and women. The fencing must block men held in the units from seeing into the women’s yard. The eight units come to 208 cells, priced at $24 million to $42 million apiece, roughly $247 million combined. The $10 billion contract ceiling covers far more than that — the solicitation names 14 more locations where work could later be ordered, from Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay.

Only one of the eight, at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Los Fresnos, Tex., is a funded job. The other seven are what the solicitation calls “scenarios” — priced in full, with a caveat that the government is not committing to build them.

An eighth funded project, at an ICE training site on the Army’s Fort Benning in Georgia, appears in the schedule for bidders’ site visits but not on the list of jobs up for bid.

Over the past year, ICE tried several ways to add detention space quickly. It leaned on a Navy construction program, WEXMAC TITUS, and dropped it after senators pressed the Pentagon to end the arrangement. It bought eleven warehouses for just over $1 billion to convert, and most are now for sale. A federal contractor with direct knowledge of the matter told Project Salt Box in June that the agency was pivoting to new facilities on land it controls. The solicitation posted Thursday calls for construction at government-owned sites and directs the winning company to help ICE find the next parcels to buy.

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Unanswered questions

For a program with a $10 billion ceiling, the solicitation answers few basic questions.

ICE has not chosen a builder. The posting is a request for bids, with proposals due Aug. 14; the agency expects to pick winners by Sept. 25.

The construction dates are blank. The contracts take effect Sept. 30, but that is a paperwork date, and the start and completion dates for each project are left to be filled in later, job by job. The only firm number is an outer limit: 730 calendar days, two years, from the start of design to a finished building.

How many people the units would hold is unstated. Each is drawn as 26 cells — 21 for men, three for women, one accessible cell on each side — but the documents never say whether a cell holds one detainee or two, so the bed count is unfixed. Who would guard or run the units is also absent; this is a contract to construct buildings, not to staff them.

Several of the sites go unexplained. The solicitation lists 14 places where work could be ordered but describes what would be built at only the eight housing units. Three of the 14 — Huntsville, Texas.; Honolulu; and Fort Benning, Ga., an Army post — have no ICE detention facility today, and the document says nothing about what it would put there.

While there are no ICE-owned detention centers in these areas, the agency does regularly hold immigration detainees at U.S. Marshall Service and local law enforcement jails located near the named regions. It is not clear if the construction contract would cover expansion at these sites. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Building at centers that closed

Some of the eight sites are centers ICE runs today — Batavia, N.Y.; El Paso; Florence, Ariz.; and Krome in Florida. Three are not.

Others closed years ago. The El Centro Service Processing Center, in California’s Imperial Valley, shut down in October 2014 and its detainees were moved to a newly built contract facility in Calexico.

The Aguadilla Service Processing Center in Puerto Rico — spelled “Aquadilla” throughout the solicitation — dates to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and last appears in the agency’s own records on a 2005 distribution list, at 505 Gun Road in Ramey. The solicitation prices a new lockup unit at each.

A third has never existed. No Service Processing Center has operated on St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, yet the contract schedule lists a “St. Thomas Service Processing Center” and assigns it the largest price tag of the eight, up to $42 million. Its statement of work drops the label, calling the job only construction “at the St. Thomas campus, U.S. Virgin Islands,” with no address or site identification of any kind.

Identical design at eight sites

The four scenario statements of work reviewed by Project Salt Box — Aguadilla, El Centro, El Paso, and St. Thomas — run about 54,000 words apiece and are identical but for the facility name, the state where the design firm must be licensed and a block of Texas environmental rules that appears only in the El Paso version. The Puerto Rico, California and Virgin Islands documents got no comparable local language.

Each tells bidders to price the work on a soil report for Los Fresnos, Tex.: “Assume the same soil conditions for this site.” The instruction applies equally to El Centro, in one of the country’s most seismically active regions, and to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, both shaken by damaging earthquakes in 2020. The documents do require borings at each site before design begins, by a locally licensed engineer — including, in the Virgin Islands, a firm with at least five similar projects completed “in St. Thomas.”

The soil report was written for none of these projects. It is a July 2023 report by the Army Corps of Engineers’ Fort Worth District, prepared for an earlier design-build solicitation titled “ICE Secure Housing Unit, Port Isabel, Texas,” and built on borings drilled in January 2019 for two adjacent Port Isabel projects, a kitchen building and wastewater plant improvements. The statements of work credit the borings to a firm called Geotechnology Inc., in March 2019; the report itself credits ETTL Engineers & Consultants, in January. Corps concept drawings for the Port Isabel unit, attached to the current solicitation and dated to the previous administration, are marked "CONCEPT NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION," and the spaces for a solicitation number and an issue date are filled with rows of X's.

The Port Isabel details carry through to sites 1,700 miles away. The St. Thomas and Aguadilla documents, like the others, tell the contractor to bring construction traffic in from Memorial Drive — a road on the Port Isabel location in Texas — and to coordinate grass-seed selection with “local SPC personnel” at centers that have no personnel because they are closed or were never built.

Fourteen possible sites

The contract also covers new construction of buildings and real property, demolition, and renovations “inclusive of change of occupancy use” — the building-code term for converting a structure to a new purpose. And it names the places where work can be ordered. One group, labeled “Mega Hub DC, One IDIQ Award,” consists of Aguadilla; Broadview, Ill.; Guantánamo Bay; Huntsville, Tex.; Oakdale, La.; St. Thomas; and Honolulu. A second group of individual awards covers the existing centers plus Fort Benning, the Army post in western Georgia.

The phrase “Mega Hub DC” appears once in the 102-page solicitation and is never defined. Five of the seven locations grouped under it have no ICE-owned detention facility today. Guantánamo Bay, where a presidential memorandum in January 2025 directed the expansion of migrant operations that President Trump said would hold 30,000 people, is a Navy base.

The competition is written for a handful of very large firms. Small businesses are barred from bidding, and every company must prove it can line up $10 billion in bonding — the insurance that guarantees a job gets finished if the builder fails — a bar few American construction firms can clear. As recently as April, ICE had asked bidders to show a fraction of that, $300 million. The workers on the job would need security clearances to handle classified national security information, unusual for a construction contract, and ICE reserves the right to order individual projects verbally.

The document also contradicts itself in ways ICE has not explained. In one place it puts the ceiling at $10 billion; two paragraphs later it caps the total work at $300 million, a difference of more than thirtyfold. One section says a company can win only one contract; another says two. The cover letter counts an initial batch of twelve projects; the schedule prices eight. And one heading still carries the label for a different kind of contract entirely — the multiple-company arrangement that appeared, unexplained, in the notice ICE posted last week.

Scouting the next sites

The contract also puts the builder to work finding the government’s next detention sites. The work statement includes tasks that have nothing to do with pouring concrete: the winning firm is to draw up “site options,” scout properties, and hand ICE a package on each one — price, zoning, who holds the easements, whether the land suits the intended use — “for Government to make decision on sites to be acquired.”

The firm must keep on staff an environmental specialist whose job is winning the federal sign-offs that let a project skip a full environmental study, and whose résumé, the document says, should ideally include work for “federal law enforcement agencies.”

That sign-off — a categorical exclusion, a finding that a project is too minor to warrant deeper environmental review — recurs across ICE’s expansion. Project Salt Box has documented the agency’s use of it at the planned Gilroy, Calif., facility, and a federal judge in Maryland found in April that ICE likely broke the law by cutting environmental corners at a warehouse in Williamsport.

Under this contract, the company preparing the exemption documents would be the company building the project — and, for sites the government has yet to buy, the company that picked and priced the land.

Proposals are due Aug. 14, 30 days after posting. Site visits at Port Isabel and Fort Benning are set for July 29 and 31. ICE anticipates awards by Sept. 25 and an effective date of Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year, with no phase-in period.

Updated July 11, 2026, at 9:53 a.m. ET to include a statement from David Broderick, legal counsel for Project NINJA.

The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court Friday evening that it is reconsidering its decision to abandon plans for an immigration detention facility in a Roxbury, N.J., warehouse — eleven days after government lawyers represented to the same court that the agency no longer intended to convert the building and would sell it.

In a two-page notice filed July 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Justice Department attorneys wrote that DHS officials informed them on July 8 that “upon reconsideration, the agency intends to move forward with plans to consider the retrofitting of the Roxbury Township warehouse facility for use as a detention facility.”

The notice states that agency deliberations remained ongoing as of July 10. The parties will file a joint status report on July 17.

The filing walks back a representation the government made on June 29, when the parties submitted a joint status report stating that “Defendants no longer intend to convert the Roxbury Warehouse into an immigration detention facility and intend to sell the warehouse.” According to Friday’s notice, counsel for the government “was authorized to make that representation by authorizing officials within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The notice does not explain what changed between June 29 and July 8, and it does not identify the officials who authorized either position.

The June 29 representation came eleven days after The New York Times reported that ICE planned to dispose of seven of the eleven warehouses it purchased nationwide for detention conversion, with Roxbury among the properties slated for sale or transfer. Friday’s notice does not address whether the disposition plans for the other six properties remain in place.

It is the second time this year the federal government’s stated position on the Roxbury warehouse has changed within a matter of days. In February, a DHS spokesperson confirmed to Gothamist that the agency had purchased the property; the next day, a spokesperson told another outlet that no purchase had occurred, and township officials said they were informed the original statement had been issued without proper approval. Two days after that, Roxbury’s mayor announced that ICE had closed on the building. DHS retracted similar purchase confirmations the same week in Chester, N.Y., and Lebanon, Tenn.

The turnabout comes as ICE has aggressively sought to expand its detention capacity amid a nationwide immigration crackdown surge.

David Broderick, a board member of New Jersey Appleseed and legal counsel for Project NINJA, the residents’ coalition opposing the facility, said in a statement that the government had offered no new facts to explain the change — only that DHS officials had reconsidered. He pointed to the Justice Department’s care in noting that DHS had authorized both the June 29 representation and Friday’s reversal, “in effect saying, ‘Don’t blame us, Judge. We have a crazy client.’”

Whatever the agency ultimately decides, Broderick said, DHS remains bound by the May agreement barring construction at the site until an environmental assessment is complete. In the meantime, he said, public funds are being spent to secure what he called “a $129 million white elephant” while Roxbury goes without the property’s tax revenue.

Broderick noted that the impracticality of converting the warehouse presumably drove the agency’s original decision to sell. “One can’t help but suspect that this is nothing more than a political charade designed to embarrass State and local leaders who declared victory at the time of DOJ’s original filing,” he said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked private contractors Friday morning for at least 5,500 new detention beds across four regions of the country, in facilities that must start holding detainees within 30 days of a contract award. The agency gave the industry just one week to respond.

The request for information, posted to the federal contracting site SAM.gov, seeks detention facilities that contractors would operate near Denver, Miami and Seattle, and in central Pennsylvania. Responses to the notice, which includes a 160-page draft statement of work, are due in just five business days — by July 17 at 4 p.m.

According to procurement documents, ICE plans to award four regional contracts under a flexible structure that lets the agency order detention services as needed rather than committing to a fixed amount upfront. The required minimum capacities include 1,500 beds near Denver, 1,500 near Seattle, 700 near Miami, and 1,800 in Pennsylvania—the largest allocation of the four.

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The mandate requires each facility to be reserved exclusively for ICE. The agency will accept sites built for low- and medium-custody populations, but prefers those capable of handling high-custody detainees.

While contracting documents reviewed by Project Salt Box state that turnkey properties, renovations, and new construction are all eligible, the timeline tells a much different story. In practice, a strict requirement to begin housing detainees within 30 days of an award effectively limits the field to only existing, fully staffed, and functional buildings.

ICE also specified exactly where the detention centers must be located. The Denver facility must be located within 30 driving miles of the field office in Centennial, Colorado. The Miami detention center must be within 50 driving miles of the field office in Plantation, Florida. The Seattle facility must be within 30 driving miles of the field office in Tukwila, Washington. For the Philadelphia field office, the detention center must be located near the airport in State College, Pennsylvania.

Those geographic requirements align precisely with four detention facilities currently operated by the GEO Group that ICE already relies on: the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado, the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Washington and the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania.

ICE did not explicitly identify these facilities in the notice, name the GEO Group as a prospective contractor or indicate whether current operators would receive new contracts. Instead, the agency described the notice as market research intended to gather information from potential providers. Contract officers at ICE did not respond for requests for comment in time for publication.

The request comes as the future of several major detention centers remains uncertain. ICE has discussed potentially purchasing multiple GEO-operated facilities, according to reporting by Project Salt Box and public remarks from George Zoley, the private prison company's chief executive. At the same time, the agency is seeking new contracts to continue using its existing footprint.

As written, the RFI outlines plans for an Indefinite Delivery Contract (IDC) award. In federal procurement, an IDC establishes a binding framework with predefined pricing and operational standards, but allows the agency to dynamically order services via task orders as needs arise rather than committing to a fixed, upfront service volume. However, establishing an IDC framework does not prevent the government from executing a parallel property buyout later.

A procurement search built around existing facilities

By design, the listed procurement criteria heavily favor facilities that are already operational.

Prospective contractors face an exhaustive list of hurdles, including proving legal control of the property, securing necessary occupancy approvals, and providing detailed staffing and environmental documentation. ICE is also demanding comprehensive operational blueprints for medical care, transportation, security, attorney visitation, maintenance and on-site immigration court operations.

Under the draft statement of work, dedicated court space is non-negotiable. For a facility housing roughly 1,600 detainees, a bidder must provide five video-equipped courtrooms, judges’ chambers with separate secure entrances and dedicated interview offices for asylum officers.

Rather than simply selecting the lowest bidder, ICE plans to use a “best-value” evaluation model that prioritizes operational readiness and management experience over cost alone.

Though new construction is technically eligible, a strict 30-day window to begin housing detainees effectively disqualifies unbuilt sites. Because a winning bidder must be ready almost immediately, the procurement framework functions as a mirror for the exact detention centers ICE already uses.

Why seek contracts for facilities ICE already uses?

Soliciting new contracts for facilities already under agency control raises an obvious question: Why replicate an existing network?

Driving this sudden push is an impending deadline. All four GEO Group-operated facilities matching the geographic footprints in the notice are running on contracts or operating agreements set to expire between August and October, forcing ICE to act quickly to avoid losing detention capacity.

The Aurora, Broward, Northwest and Moshannon Valley processing centers currently anchor ICE’s regional enforcement network. The new solicitation provides a legal pathway to maintain access to those locations before current agreements lapse.

The focus on central Pennsylvania coincides with recent shifts in the agency’s aviation logistics. Regional flight tracking logs analyzed by JJ in DC at Habeas Flight Watch show a steady stream of ICE charter operations out of University Park Airport near State College, totaling 15 flights in the past 30 days. The flights, typically using Air Wisconsin CRJ-200 passenger jets operating on behalf of the agency's transit network, run a loop connecting to an ICE operational hub in Alexandria, La. Logistical data indicates that roughly three flights a week stay overnight at the airport, suggesting that a charter flight crew may now be basing out of State College.

Gillian Brockell, an independent journalist who tracks ICE flight operations, noted that it is highly unusual for a federal detention charter to lay over in a non-base city, reinforcing indications that the airport is functioning as a base for the agency. Brockell added that ICE also appears to have shifted some regional enforcement roundups from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Harrisburg — a relatively new pattern that may reflect a broader consolidation of aviation logistics toward central Pennsylvania.

The solicitations also overlap with a separate effort by ICE to buy privately operated detention facilities outright. Project Salt Box previously reported that the agency was exploring the purchase of at least 10 turnkey detention sites.

That acquisition strategy materialized earlier this month in California, when the Department of Homeland Security executed a $1.5 billion deal to buy two facilities from CoreCivic, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center — just six months after renewing its operations contract. Under that transaction, the federal government assumed ownership of the infrastructure while CoreCivic retained a management contract to run the facility through December 2029. As that California deal demonstrates, securing or renewing an operational service contract does not prevent the government from buying the underlying real estate.

Two of the centers aligned with the new RFI — the Aurora and Northwest ICE processing centers — were on that initial list of 10 acquisition targets. While ICE has not disclosed whether those buyouts are still active, a federal purchase would fundamentally change the legal status of the properties. Owning the facilities could allow ICE to operate the sites directly or through third-party contractors under a different legal framework than privately owned centers.

That jurisdictional dispute is already playing out in Washington, where state officials have spent years seeking access to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma for health inspections. A federal judge on Thursday ordered the GEO Group to allow state inspectors inside, granting Washington’s request for a preliminary injunction after the company refused access.

The legal push for local oversight coincides with newly released internal agency records. A June 2026 inspection report from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) flagged three safety and medical compliance failures at the Tacoma facility, including delayed comprehensive health assessments and missed welfare checks for detainees on suicide watch. The report also disclosed an ongoing federal investigation into a April 17, 2026, allegation that a female detainee was physically assaulted by medical staff during a seizure

The Tacoma findings underscore the exact friction testing a state's authority to regulate a privately run federal facility.

For ICE, federal ownership could offer a tempting legal shield, potentially insulating these high-stakes facilities from state-level crackdowns on private immigration detention.

Expanding the Regional Footprint

The recent notice arrived just one day after ICE awarded the GEO Group a $528.7 million contract to reactivate the Big Horn detention facility in Hudson, Colorado. The facility, which has sat vacant since 2014, could provide ICE with capacity for more than 1,000 additional detainees once operational, according to a Project Salt Box analysis of agency detention records.

The award follows months of bureaucratic maneuvering over the empty facility. ICE previously entered into a $39 million letter contract with the GEO Group covering six months beginning in April 2025, despite the site remaining entirely empty during that window. A second letter contract followed in December, though its specific terms and pricing were redacted.

The Big Horn contract and the latest RFI highlight the immediate logistical challenge facing ICE: rapidly securing and expanding detention capacity as the agency pushes to increase its overall enforcement footprint in the wake of its abandoned warehouse conversion scheme.

Beyond Colorado, the agency is leveraging alternative procurement channels to scale up capacity in the Southwest. In Marana, Ariz., ICE recently issued a sole-source contract award to Management and Training Corporation to convert a shuttered state prison into an immigration detention center.

A June 2026 Department of Homeland Security environmental notice revealed plans to upgrade that facility’s baseline capacity from 506 to 775 detainees, with provisions for an additional 600 temporary beds. The planned enhancements would push total capacity past 1,300 inside a designated 100-year floodplain.

Whether reviving a mothballed facility in rural Colorado or expanding a prison footprint in an Arizona floodplain the strategy remains uniform. Nationwide, ICE is moving aggressively on multiple procurement tracks to solidify its grip on any facility it can to hold detainees.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to award its own construction contract to expand the detention campuses it owns — and possibly to build new ones — restoring much of the fast-track building capability it lost when it stopped routing work through a Navy logistics program, according to a contracting notice posted Thursday.

MACC Statement of Work

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The notice, posted to SAM.gov, the federal contracting portal, describes what it calls a Single Award Construction Contract: a standing arrangement under which ICE would hand individual project assignments, known as task orders, to one firm at fixed prices as needs arise, covering “new construction, renovation, and repair of owned Service Processing Center” facilities — the detention centers the agency owns and runs itself. Its scope extends to “new construction of buildings, facilities, and real property.” Bidding is restricted to large businesses, and ICE says the formal request for bids will post no later than July 17.

The solicitation follows two retreats in ICE’s detention buildout. The agency stopped sending construction work through WEXMAC TITUS, a Navy contracting program built for rapid construction and supply work that the Department of Homeland Security had used to award warehouse retrofit contracts in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., after Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) pressed the Pentagon to end its agreement with DHS.

It is also moving to sell seven of the eleven commercial warehouses it bought for just over $1 billion to convert into detention space, including sites in Romulus, Mich., Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga., Hamburg and Tremont, Pa., Salt Lake City and Roxbury, N.J.

In June, a federal contractor with direct knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of their work, told Project Salt Box that ICE was shifting away from the warehouse conversion strategy and toward greenfield construction — building new facilities on undeveloped land.

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The shift comes as ICE’s warehouse strategy appears to be giving way to other ways of expanding its detention footprint. Earlier this month, the federal government acquired two California immigration detention facilities from CoreCivic for a combined $1.5 billion, with the private prison company expected to continue operating the sites under existing ICE contracts. The purchases marked another move toward federal ownership of detention infrastructure, rather than relying solely on converting commercial properties into detention space.

An in-house contract would give ICE much of what WEXMAC supplied — a standing vehicle for rapid design-build work, in which a single firm both designs and constructs a project — while moving the work fully inside DHS and away from the Pentagon contracting channel that brought additional scrutiny to the warehouse program.

But the parallel is not an entirely exact one. WEXMAC allowed a group of pre-approved contractors to compete for individual projects, while the July 9 notice describes a contract that would place the work with a single firm. But the effect would be similar: moving detention construction away from purchased and leased commercial buildings and onto property ICE already controls — or plans to.

The warehouse purchases drew six federal lawsuits, while the agency’s reliance on commercial properties has exposed its detention expansion plans to legal challenges and local opposition. Those obstacles are largely avoided when the government builds on land it already owns.

The paperwork behind that shift, however, is less clear. The notice sets a single award with an initial one-year term that ICE can extend, carrying forward the structure of a market research notice the agency issued in April seeking “highly flexible construction contracting” from firms able to secure at least $300 million in construction bonding, the insurance-backed guarantee that work gets finished.

That April notice outlined a potentially massive construction vehicle. ICE said it anticipated awarding up to nine contracts that would allow it to assign future construction projects without opening a new competition each time, with a combined maximum ordering limit of $10 billion over five years if all options were exercised. The agency described projects ranging from $100,000 assignments to work reaching the full contract ceiling.

But the accompanying statement of work posted today describes a “MACC Contract,” a multiple-award structure in which several firms would compete for individual construction projects over an initial five-year term. Neither document explains the discrepancy.

Built for the campuses ICE already owns, or the ones it plans to build

Under the work statement, facilities “may include, but are not limited to dorms, administrative buildings, medical clinics, classrooms, training centers, warehouses, roads, firing ranges,” and renovation work runs “up to major building renovations inclusive of change of occupancy use.” That is the building-code term for converting a structure to a new use — turning an administrative building into detention housing, for instance.

The security provisions are written for the Service Processing Centers, a category that includes Krome in Miami, Florence, Ariz., and Batavia, N.Y. Anyone entering “the SPC” must be cleared in advance by the ICE Security Division. If the contractor removes or adds fencing, it has to tie into the campus’s “existing fiber optic perimeter fence detection system” and keep “containment at required levels” the whole time the work is underway.

The work statement makes clear that ICE is not seeking a general construction contractor. The projects must be built to the agency’s detention construction and design standards, including barriers tested to withstand physical assault under methods developed for jails and prisons. Where ICE’s own standards do not address an issue, the document directs contractors to follow the American Correctional Association’s jail standards: “Where the ICE Detention Standards are silent, the ACA Jail Standards must be followed.”

Those requirements extend beyond the buildings themselves. Contract employees who will have “direct contact with Detainees” must undergo additional screening under standards implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which sets requirements for preventing and responding to sexual abuse in detention facilities.

The work statement also hands environmental review to the contractor. The project documentation section assigns “NEPA reviews and document preparation” — reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act — to the builder, and “NEPA Categorical Exclusions, Environmental Assessments, and decisional documents (if applicable)” appear on the deliverables list. A categorical exclusion is the document that declares a project exempt from deeper environmental study.

Project Salt Box reporting has previously found ICE projects where the agency relied on streamlined environmental reviews, including a categorical exclusion for the planned Gilroy, Calif., facility.

That arrangement would place responsibility for preparing those exclusion documents with the same firm tasked with constructing a facility — a notable provision given that states and municipalities have challenged DHS projects over allegations that accelerated environmental reviews failed to adequately assess their impacts.

ICE says additional details will come with the formal solicitation later this month. The agency did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

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Bottom Line Up Front

CBP awards record-setting border wall contract: Customs and Border Protection issued what appears to be the largest border wall construction award in its history to Fisher Sand & Gravel - a whopping $2.5 billion for the Big Bend Texas sector. The agency also awarded a $1.3 billion border wall contract to SLS Federal.

DHS Abandons Warehouse Scheme: As first reported by The New York Times, DHS is planning to sell warehouses in Romulus, Mich.; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga.; Hamburg and Tremont, Pa.; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, N.J.

The end of the road for WEXMAC: In June testimony, Secretary Markwayne Mullin told House appropriators that ICE has stopped using the Navy’s WEXMAC contract for detention services, shutting off the opaque Defense Department vehicle DHS had relied on to expand detention capacity outside normal civilian procurement methods.

DHS pivots from Warehouses to Existing Facilities

DHS is backing away from its most ambitious warehouse conversion plans and shifting back toward more traditional detention real estate: existing jails, prisons, and private facilities that can be brought online faster and with less upfront political risk. After facing lawsuits, protests, and congressional scrutiny, the department is moving to offload or repurpose at least seven warehouses purchased for mega‑centers, while signaling that future capacity increases will rely on “existing detention space with our state and county partners” and on buying operating facilities from private prison companies.

This week, CoreCivic sold two of California’s largest immigration detention centers to the Department of Homeland Security in a $1.5 billion real estate deal, while retaining the lucrative contracts to keep running them for ICE. DHS purchased the 1,994‑bed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County and the 2,560‑bed California City Detention Facility in Kern County, giving the federal government ownership of the buildings even as CoreCivic continues operations under existing agreements that run into the late 2020s.

CoreCivic expects about $1.1 billion in net proceeds from the sale, which it plans to use mainly to pay down debt and potentially repurchase stock. The deal comes amid broader talks between ICE and major private prison firms about selling additional “turnkey” detention facilities to DHS, a shift away from the now‑stalled warehouse conversion program toward buying and federalizing existing prisons that continue to be operated by the same private vendors.

In parallel, ICE and its contractors are turning to previously closed prisons and long‑dormant sites as the next wave of detention infrastructure. CoreCivic has already reopened shuttered prisons in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee to house immigrant detainees, and is investing in repairs and upgrades at the closed Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota, positioning it as a potential ICE hub that would more than double detention capacity in the state if activated.

ICE Says It Has Stopped Using WEXMAC TITUS

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a House Appropriations subcommittee June 25 that ICE is no longer using the Navy's WEXMAC contract, the Defense Department vehicle DHS relied on to build out detention capacity beyond the disclosure requirements of civilian procurement, according to Federal News Network. As Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) began asking about ICE's use of the contract to buy detention services, Mullin cut in: “We're not using it anymore, just so you know.”

Task orders issued through WEXMAC TITUS are not publicly advertised, a structure DHS used to award the warehouse conversion contracts in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., that remain in federal litigation. The same vehicle gave ICE fast-track access to The GEO Group after its ceiling was raised to $65 billion, and carried surge support for enforcement operations in St. Paul. A May task order to Acquisition Logistics LLC suggested the department intended to keep relying on the contract. In March, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to end the department's support for the arrangement, writing that it was unclear what section of law gave the Pentagon authority to administer detention construction contracts for DHS.

Mullin did not say what will replace WEXMAC for ICE detention purposes. But in April, ICE sought industry input on a set of single-award construction contracts that would let the agency issue detention construction task orders directly, without the limited competition WEXMAC requires and outside Defense Department oversight.

DHS funds investigative contractor network targeting immigrant youth

In late June, DHS and its contractors began building out a nationwide investigative apparatus around immigrant youth placements, with new contracts and job postings that blur the line between child welfare and intelligence work. Under updated performance work statements, contractors are tasked with assessing the “adequacy” and “quality” of minor placements, including probing sponsors or guardians and anyone currently or previously residing at listed addresses. The April modification to the solicitation explicitly expanded that scope to cover people who are no longer minors but were under 18 throughout the period specified in the PWS.

This expansion tracks with a DHS forecast that would give ICE direct access to T‑3 visa applications, a visa category intended for immigrant youth survivors of human trafficking, and with a parallel solicitation for CBP “child caregivers.” These moves combined demonstrate how DHS is building an enforcement‑adjacent pipeline around ostensibly protective programs, tying trafficking‑related claims and child‑focused services into a larger data and investigations architecture.

Who is getting the work

The first award under this structure went to MVM Inc, a firm already known for handling transfers and holding operations for immigrants at Guantánamo Bay. From there, a cluster of companies began actively hiring into these contracts, including SOS International, Savvy Professor dba SVI LLC, Continuity Global Solutions, Alpha Recovery, Delta Point, and others. Open postings describe roles such as “Mission Support Specialist,” “Child Welfare Advocate,” “Youth Counselor,” “Compliance Officer,” and “Field Analyst.”

Many of these titles sound like social services, but the hiring requirements focus on a different set of skills. Experience in investigations and intelligence is often mandatory, while social work is merely “preferred” and bilingual skills are not required. Public bios for company leadership, where available, show deep roots in military intelligence, FBI, defense contracting, security, and other law‑enforcement tracks. Several of the nineteen known companies are newly formed entities with little or no federal contracting history and minimal public information, raising questions about vetting, oversight, and how much of this work will be shielded behind private corporate structures.

Contract values for this emerging network range from roughly $62 million to as high as $3.1 billion. It remains unclear how many subawardees will be brought in, but similar job listings have started appearing at smaller local organizations, including Cayuga Centers, CivTeam, MCHS, and Everstand, suggesting that the operational footprint could spread through community‑based entities that are effectively plugged into a federal investigative framework.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. If there are specific procurements, companies, regions, or topics you would like us to cover in future monthly reports, please reach out to us and let us know.

Earlier this week, I got the chance to speak about the Trump administration’s failed warehouses-as-immigration-camps scheme with over on Legal AF. We spoke at length about why the plan fell apart, what comes next — and, in no small part, about the work that thousands of you have put in to resist this unjust and inhumane scheme.

Over the past six months, we have worked closely with communities across the country to provide information, documentation, and often proof to help drive decisive action against this unparalleled and unchecked expansion of government authority. Often, our team gets the honor of speaking publicly with the press and legislators and key voices at a national level about the importance of community action. But we know that we are one very small part of a much larger movement, and that there are so many of you out there whose efforts go uncelebrated and unrecognized.

Tonight, as I listen to the fireworks sounding off around Baltimore, I think about what freedom means, and what it is we are celebrating. I had the privilege to serve our nation in the Armed Forces for two decades. I joined shortly after 9/11, at a moment of great national unity and mounting global uncertainty.

One of the lessons I learned from my time in uniform was that no valiant act of rugged individualism or personal excellence counts for much on its own. Instead, the military celebrated and promoted acts of teamwork — often in the form of bridge-building and nurturing strategic relationships — that drew on the expertise and talents of the many over the lone strengths of the one. Those were the skills we valued to win the day.

That lesson predates my service by two centuries. We remember the Declaration of Independence as the work of one man’s pen, though it was drafted by a committee, debated and amended line by line in Congress, and signed by fifty-six delegates who mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

And what that collective effort produced reads less like soaring philosophy than like a bill of particulars: twenty-seven documented grievances against unaccountable power, laid out one by one, because the signers believed that Facts, as they put it, should be submitted to a candid world. One of those grievances accused the King of obstructing the naturalization of foreigners and refusing to encourage their migration to these shores. A government hostile to immigrants was among the abuses the founders considered worth documenting for the world.

Documenting abuses of power, and binding your fate to your neighbors’ while you do it, is the oldest patriotic work there is. When you sent us a record, or flagged a court filing, or read the fine print of a federal lease, you were carrying that work forward.

The signers wrote that promise in a country where nearly a fifth of the people were enslaved, and many of the men who pledged their sacred honor held human beings in bondage themselves. The gap between what the Declaration said and whom it served has been the central American argument ever since, and every narrowing of that gap has come about the same way the document itself did, through people acting together.

Abolitionists built their movement across lines of race and creed, joining free Black organizers with Quaker printers and evangelical congregations. The Reconstruction Congress that wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution, and the later bipartisan coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act, both depended on cross-party support from lawmakers willing to break with their region and party. That correction remains unfinished.

We are at our best when we work together for a common cause and the advancement of our neighbors’ well-being. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all. You — anyone who sent in a document, or shared your expertise with us, or showed up to a town council meeting, or organized protests, or marched in them, or wrote letters to your congresspeople, or researched tedious records and regulations, or asserted your expertise in support of your immigrant neighbors — are that tide. And so many of you doing this work are immigrants and the children of immigrants, defending communities you belong to.

Common cause is different from compromise. The coalitions in this history agreed on a principle and defended it, and they took allies wherever allies stood — which this year included a city council in one of the reddest states in the country, writing an ordinance against a detention center. Unity of that kind gives no ground on what it defends.

The administration has turned away from this scheme after spending $1.07 billion on it. That is proof of the effectiveness of your steadfast labor. Tonight, we celebrate that spirit. It is hard to be patriotic in times like these. But this week gave us one more thing worth celebrating.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara and rejected the executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship. Adam and I talked about the case in our conversation. The judgment was 6 to 3, but on the constitutional question the margin was a single vote. Five justices held that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: every child born on this soil is a citizen, whoever their parents are. A sixth agreed only that the executive order violated a statute, and wrote that Congress remains free to change that statute.

That is the razor’s edge we are dancing on as a nation. The difference between citizenship as a birthright and citizenship as a permission slip came down to one vote.

Justice Jackson’s concurrence (which starts on page 32) is worth reading tonight of all nights, because it recounts the greatest of those corrections: how birthright citizenship was won.

In the decades before the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans, most of them barred from the ballot and the courtroom, organized more than 600 conventions to insist that they were already citizens, born here and owed protection here. Rather than seeking a special rule that covered only themselves, they fought, as Jackson writes, for “the shared humanity of all people,” and their organizing gave the Constitution what she calls its anticaste engine, a guarantee that now shelters every child born in this country.

The Court’s precedent here is itself an immigrant’s story. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents during the era of Chinese exclusion, and when the government barred him from returning to his own country after a trip abroad, he fought the case to the Supreme Court and won. His victory in 1898 settled that the children of immigrants are citizens, and this week’s decision held that line.

Jackson also offers a clear warning in this moment: quoting Douglass’s insistence that “nations should have memories,” she writes that the distortion of historical facts “may be an even greater threat” than the fading of memory itself.

As you stared down warehouses in your communities, how many of our countrymen had forgotten Manzanar, Topaz, and Gila River, where the government confined Japanese Americans behind wire on land that, in Gila River's case, it took from a tribe that objected? At Crystal City, Texas, the government interned entire families, including more than two thousand Japanese Latin Americans whom the United States had seized from their homes in Peru and elsewhere and shipped here, some to be traded to Japan in hostage exchanges.

Fewer still remember the confinements that came before them. The Army marched the Navajo three hundred miles to Bosque Redondo and held them there for four years. Plains Indian prisoners were shipped across the country to Fort Marion, a stone fortress in Florida, and the officer who ran that prison went on to found Carlisle, the model for hundreds of boarding schools built to hold Native children apart from their families and their languages.

Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated at Angel Island, in the same bay where Wong Kim Ark was born.

And then there is Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which held Geronimo’s Apache as prisoners of war for a generation, held Japanese American men in 1942, and in 2019 was proposed as a detention site for migrant children, until survivors of the wartime camps stood at its gates and said no.

This spring brought a counterexample from the same state. The Choctaw Nation, whose people the federal government marched to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears nearly two centuries ago, purchased the vacant warehouse in Durant that ICE had been eyeing as a detention site, on the same stretch of road as the tribe's own headquarters, childcare center, and elder services. The purchase took the property off the federal market and with it, by our analysis, an estimated 8,500 detention beds. A people that remembered federal confinement made sure it would not happen on that ground.

That is why I call unity in our common pursuit an inheritance. The Court described citizenship as “the right to have rights.” Douglass called it “the glorious birthright of our common humanity.” It was secured by ordinary people who linked their fate to their neighbors’ — freed men and women, the children of immigrants, citizens who refused to let the promise shrink — and it survived this week by a single vote because the memory of their work has yet to be erased.

It will stay secured the same way it was won.

Adam and I ended our conversation on what comes next, and I will close here the way I closed there: “Beyond this July 4th, and beyond this administration, democracy is constantly under threat so long as we let those forces continue to have a foothold. We’re not out of the woods yet. So continue to build those community bonds. Continue to be strong. Show up. Protest. File FOIA requests. Write letters. Whatever it is you bring to the fight, do it, because it is a winning fight so long as you stay engaged.”

Tonight we celebrate the brave patriots who came before us, who laid the bricks of social justice and common decency, toward a more perfect union, just as we celebrate our wins this year toward the same. Living up to that American birthright is the hard work worth doing.

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

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The scope of this acquisition is to provide real estate title abstract, escrow and settlement services of properties in Florence, AZ, Krome, FL, and Batavia, NY. These properties are required to meet operational requirements for modernizing and enhancing immigration detention and enforcement capabilities for ICE. The existing processing centers in these locations will be expanded to enable additional administrative, medical, training and detention facilities and space.

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The document, a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition numbered J&A-26-0143, discloses a sole-source, $240,000 contract awarded June 2 to First American Title Insurance Co. of Santa Ana, Calif., for title abstract, escrow and settlement services tied to the three sites.

ICE's Office of Acquisition Management, the agency's contracting arm, issued the award on behalf of its real estate division, the Office of Asset and Facilities Management. The $240,000 contract is split into two parts: a four-month base period worth $60,000, plus an eight-month option for additional service ICE can exercise later for $180,000. ICE did not post the justification publicly until July 1, a month after the award.

While the justification does not name any specific parcel, seller or acreage at any of the three locations, it does state that the existing processing centers “will be expanded to enable additional administrative, medical, training and detention facilities and space.”

ICE's justification cites "unusual and compelling urgency" as grounds for bypassing competitive bidding, attributing the accelerated timeline to seller-imposed deadlines and the timing of the property selection process rather than to any delay by the contracting office. It defines that urgency as the risk of losing the properties outright: without an immediate award, sellers could walk away from negotiations, accept competing offers, or raise the price, and any resulting delay could push back construction and other mission plans tied to the sites.

The filing adds that a market search conducted from April 7 through May 7 concluded that First American was the only vendor able to perform the work within that timeframe. Records on USAspending.gov show ICE previously contracted with the company for a $25,000 purchase order covering title and escrow services at an undisclosed location, issued in October 2025 and also on behalf of the Office of Asset and Facilities Management.

Florence, Ariz.

At the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, owned & operated by CoreCivic under contract with ICE, a Haitian asylum seeker named Emmanuel Damas died this year after what fellow detainees described as repeated, unaddressed requests for treatment of a tooth infection.

Arizona Reps. Greg Stanton, Yassamin Ansari and Adelita Grijalva, all Democrats, have called for an independent investigation, and Ansari has said detainees told her Damas was not taken to a hospital until others protested outside his cell, according to KJZZ. CoreCivic has referred questions about the death to ICE.

In Marana, roughly an hour from Florence, Pima County supervisors have passed a resolution opposing a separate, proposed ICE detention facility, and local advocacy groups have organized against it, according to AZ Luminaria.

Krome, Fla.

The Krome North Service Processing Center in western Miami-Dade County is owned by ICE and operated under contract by Akima Global Services. It opened in 1980 and was designed to hold roughly 600 people, a capacity its population has repeatedly exceeded over the past year, with detainees and attorneys describing men sleeping on floors, near toilets and on buses for hours while awaiting processing, according to reporting by WPTV and CBS Miami.

ICE contracted with Akima Global Services to erect a tent structure on the facility grounds to house an additional 250 men in April 2025.

Last month, ICE evacuated Krome because of nearby wildfires, relocating detainees to other sites in Florida and elsewhere. ICE has said some of its facilities are experiencing temporary overcrowding and that it is working to manage capacity through detainee transfers and expedited case processing.

Batavia, N.Y.

The Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, also known as the Buffalo Service Processing Center, is government-owned and operated under contract by Akima Global Services. It has housed more detainees than its stated capacity of 650 beds for much of the past year. Federal data compiled by TRAC Immigration showed the facility’s population reached 745 in February, an increase of 200 people over the prior year, according to WHAM. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office has said it has been monitoring conditions at the facility and has pressed ICE to address crowding.

ICE and First American Title Insurance Co. did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Arizona and the Department of Homeland Security asked a federal judge Monday to approve an order pausing litigation over a Surprise, Ariz., warehouse the government has been moving to convert into an immigration detention facility. The order has no legal effect unless and until U.S. District Judge Susan M. Brnovich signs it. No hearing has been scheduled.

Proposed Stipulated Order for Surprise, Ariz. Warehouse

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The proposed order, filed jointly by the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, would head off a preliminary injunction motion Arizona said in the filing it intends to bring against DHS, ICE, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons over the property at 13290 West Sweetwater Avenue.

Arizona sued in April, arguing the agencies were moving to convert the site without completing environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Under the terms the parties have asked the court to adopt, DHS would agree not to detain anyone at the facility or take steps to physically convert it until it completes a formal environmental assessment and issues a decision document, or a full environmental impact statement if one is deemed necessary. That commitment extends to construction obligations under a contract the filing describes only as “consolidated,” according to the filing, which does not name the contractor or disclose its value.

The proposed order also lists a series of exceptions to that pause. DHS would still be permitted to continue security upgrades including fencing, cameras, lighting, and guard shacks, along with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical maintenance, pest control, custodial work, and interior demolition to reconfigure office space for what the filing calls administrative, security, property-management, or environmental-review support purposes. That work cannot be used for detainee housing, intake, medical, kitchen, or visitation space, according to the filing, though contract administration and procurement work may continue.

Once DHS delivers a final environmental assessment to Arizona, the state would have 10 days to decide whether to press forward with a preliminary injunction motion. If it does, DHS would need to hold off on conversion work for another 21 days, or until a judge rules otherwise. DHS would also be required to file status reports with the court every 60 days until the environmental review concludes.

Arizona’s underlying lawsuit remains active regardless of the outcome, though a ruling on the merits would be deferred, with the case’s next steps tied to a timeline set by DHS itself.

Similar NEPA-based challenges to ICE facility conversions are pending in New Jersey and Michigan, where a federal judge is weighing claims over a proposed detention facility in Romulus.

Project Salt Box's tracking of the 11 warehouses DHS purchased this year for detention use shows seven now slated for sale or transfer to other federal agencies, based on reporting from The New York Times. Of the remaining four, Surprise and a warehouse near Williamsport, Md., have awarded contracts but are currently blocked by litigation. A third, in Socorro, Texas, is being converted into a smaller ICE training and office campus rather than the 8,500-bed detention center originally planned, though it will still include some privately run detention, according to El Paso Matters, which cited Rep. Veronica Escobar's account of a meeting with acting ICE Director David Venturella. DHS has not disclosed active plans for the fourth.

Neither DHS nor the Arizona Attorney General’s office responded immediately to requests for comment beyond the filing.

The General Services Administration signed the lease June 24 under solicitation 2NY0894, the procurement it opened in 2024, and posted the award the next day. The deal provides ICE with 42,377 rentable square feet, the most the solicitation allowed. Ten of the 15 years are firm.

GSA does not usually name tenants in its sensitive law enforcement lease awards. Its property inventory, though, lists 800 Corporate Blvd as a “new lease for DHS ICE.”

That link was first made earlier this year, when a file briefly posted to the government’s contracting portal appeared under the name “2NY0894 ICE Newburgh,” on a solicitation that called for a sally port big enough for detainee buses and vans, secured parking and small-arms storage, under Level III security standards.

ICE did not provide comment in time for publication.

Leverage Enterprises registered as a federal contractor in 2023. Commercial construction is its main line of work by its own filing, which also lists real estate leasing among its registrations. The company lists itself as a minority- and service-disabled veteran-owned small business.

Federal records show that Leverage Enterprise has one prior contract for Customs and Border Protection offices in Arizona.

The building is a single-tenant warehouse of about 60,143 square feet, on 10 acres near Stewart International Airport and built in 2001. Newburgh property records list National Realty & Development Corp. as an owner of the Northeast Business Center, the complex that sits at 800 Corporate Blvd, and the company markets the building among its office listings. A representative for National Realty did not respond to a request for comment.

Planning documents for the solicitation estimated the interior buildout at about $343 a square foot, $282.58 above GSA’s standard allowance, and near $12 million across the minimum space sought.

ICE has run into resistance elsewhere in the Hudson Valley. The agency backed off a plan earlier this year to put a detention center for as many as 1,500 people in a former Pep Boys warehouse in Chester, N.Y., after more than 30,000 people signed a petition against it, telling State Assemblymember Brian Maher it would not go ahead “at this time.”

ICE already maintains a 9,074 square foot office at 15 Governor Drive in Newburgh. That location has housed the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor since 2015. The new lease is more than four times that size.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has awarded a nearly $200 million contract to a Virginia company that has never held a federal contract before. According to federal contracting records reviewed by Project Salt Box, Savvy Professor LLC was hired on June 17 to help find and check on unaccompanied migrant children released to sponsors nationwide.

It is the first order under a much larger, open-ended agreement the agency set up with Savvy Professor, and it requires the company to handle at least 1,000 cases, each one a child it is paid to locate and check on. The government classifies the work as investigation services.

The figures attached to the deal describe different things. The $1.6 billion is a ceiling, the most ICE could pay the company if it keeps ordering work up to that limit over the contract’s life. The agency buys the work in batches, and this first order is estimated at nearly $200 million. Of that, about $4.7 million has been set aside so far, the money the government has formally committed to pay as the work is done.

The order is part of a much larger federal effort, the Unaccompanied Alien Children Safety Verification Initiative, or SVI, that the Department of Homeland Security launched in November and describes as a way to protect children placed with sponsors from abuse and trafficking. The children, who arrived in the country without a parent or guardian, were placed with sponsors — usually relatives — while their immigration cases proceed.

In March, ICE asked private companies to help check on an estimated 100,000 of these children. On March 16, ICE modified an $801.8 million contract with MVM, Inc. to include the SVI as part of its core responsibilities.

ICE has since awarded these kinds of open-ended contracts to 18 companies, with ceilings reaching $3.1 billion and a combined potential value above $20 billion. The administration says the checks confirm that a child is safe, in school and not being exploited.

However, an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian indicates the operations are meant to deport the children or build criminal cases against them or their sponsors.

Savvy Professor does business as SIVS LLC and lists its address as a private residence on Old Mill Lane in Spotsylvania, Va. At the same address, it holds a federal license to sell firearms under the name SIVS Tactical Solutions, according to corporate registration records reviewed by Project Salt Box.

SIVS LLC’s owner, Todd Thompson, describes himself on LinkedIn as a “medically retired FBI Cyber Tech” whose prior work included “providing technical support to FBI field casework” and “conducting FBI child exploitation investigations.”

At the time of publication, visitors to the company’s website encountered a browser security warning because the site presented an expired certificate issued to *.hostingplatform.com rather than to sivs.us.

Those who chose to proceed were redirected to a password-protected Shopify storefront, sivsllc.myshopify.com, where a page titled “SIVS Tactical Solutions” instructed visitors to text “PW” to 540.308.9595 — the same number Mr. Thompson used in social media recruitment posts — for access.

In a Facebook post on April 4, Mr. Thompson wrote that he had “recently started a private investigation firm” and had bid on a government contract “to help track down unaccompanied minors,” and said he would hire case managers and “mission support specialists” willing to travel.

He described the work as well suited to retired law enforcement officers and first responders, and wrote that “husband/wife teams are encouraged to apply.” Mr. Thompson told interested applicants to text him for more information.

Less than two months later, the federal government awarded his firm nearly $200 million.

Mr. Thompson did not respond to emailed questions about the company or his background in time for publication.

SIVS advertised at least three positions related to the contract, including a full-time case manager in Spotsylvania and a contract child protection case manager in Orlando, both listed as remote roles. The postings drew 36 and 27 applicants respectively before applications were closed.

In practice, the listings described supervisory, investigative, and compliance functions. Case managers were responsible for real-time quality control during home visits and address verifications, including use of standardized checklists, documentation requirements, and immediate escalation procedures for suspected abuse, neglect, or trafficking concerns. They would also coordinate directly with local law enforcement and Child Protective Services when cases required intervention or protective custody determinations.

Neither role required an existing investigator’s license, with the company stating it would support selected hires in obtaining certification. Workers would be required to front travel costs and be reimbursed later under the contract structure.

Compensation across postings varied, with ranges between $50,000 and $100,000 annually depending on role and listing version. One mission support specialist posting listed duties including maintaining case files, purchasing gift cards and groceries for families, and using commercial and public databases to identify the current addresses and occupants associated with a child’s location. Preferred qualifications included “Spanish language skills (or strong proficiency with Google Translate).”

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The lease covers 7240 Holsclaw Road, on unincorporated land in south Santa Clara County, about 11 miles south of an ICE field office in Morgan Hill, Calif. A review of federal contract records shows the agency awarded it in January 2025 to ECG 6 LLC, which shares a Beverly Hills address with Elmwood Capital Group, at a total contract value of $26.5 million for 18,700 rentable square feet over a term of 20 years, 15 of them firm. County property records show Elmwood acquired the Holsclaw Road parcel weeks after the award.

The occupying agency is withheld from the leasing file under a law-enforcement exemption. The agency requirements package attached to the solicitation is a 104-page Immigration and Customs Enforcement cabling standard marked “For Official Use Only,” carrying the seals of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

San José Spotlight, which first reported the project in May, later obtained blueprints dated Sept. 17, 2025, that show detention areas, holding rooms and detainee processing at the property.

Project Salt Box today obtained ten pages of GSA leasing, environmental and procurement records through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in May, providing new details about how the agency evaluated and advanced the project.

Among the records is a GSA Form 4002 signed Dec. 26, 2024, in which the agency claimed an automatic categorical exclusion, the tier of review under the National Environmental Policy Act that requires neither an environmental assessment nor an impact statement. The category the agency selected covers the acquisition of space within an existing structure where there is no change in the general type of use and only minimal change from the previous occupancy level. While the “Agency” field is redacted in the GSA files, a search of federal contracting databases for the project number, “8CA3614,” shows ICE as the primary federal agency behind the project.

The form lists the existing building on Holsclaw Road as 24,000 square feet, built in 1982, within a 1-percent-annual-chance floodplain, the designation formerly called a 100-year floodplain. It records the action as not a critical action, which the form defines as any activity for which even a slight chance of flooding would be too great a risk.

To lease within that floodplain, the agency prepared a Justification for No Practicable Alternatives. A review of the document shows the General Services Administration posted the requirement on the federal contracting site in October 2022, placed it on hold for a lack of agency funds, reposted it in 2024, and received no additional offers; one property met the requirements. A floodplain memorandum approved by the acting Region 9 commissioner of the Public Buildings Service found no practicable alternative to the floodplain and no impact from the lease.

The leasing records also show the environmental determination came after years of procurement activity tied to the same requirement. Documents state GSA first posted the solicitation in 2022 under the Biden administration, suspended it because of a lack of agency funding, and later reposted it after funds became available. In a separate floodplain justification, the agency said it reviewed commercial listings, advertised the requirement twice and concluded that only one property satisfied the government's specifications.

San José Spotlight has reported that the procurement began in 2020, under the first Trump administration, as a search for detention space and continued through the Biden administration under a solicitation that shares the current contract's identification number. GSA documents show the agency posted the requirement publicly in 2022, suspended it for a lack of funding, reposted it in 2024 and awarded the lease in January 2025.

A review of the leasing file shows the tenant-improvement allowance was $61.22 per occupiable square foot, about $1.04 million, with a separate security allowance of $204,000. The solicitation disclosed that the government anticipated the buildout would exceed that allowance by roughly $182 per square foot, an overage of about $3.1 million before relocation costs. The same documents set the facility’s security level at II — a standard security level comparable with other federal law enforcement offices — on a four-level federal scale and listed a further package of agency requirements “containing sensitive information,” available only to bidders who requested it from the contracting officer.

California and Santa Clara County sued the federal government on June 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking to block construction on the grounds that the lease and the work underway are a major federal action that required an environmental assessment or impact statement the government never produced. The complaint also cites the Immigration and Nationality Act, California’s Williamson Act and federal consultation requirements, and describes the site as likely to become an Enforcement and Removal Operations office, a category designed for administrative use and short-term holding. Santa Cruz County has joined the suit, and Monterey County and the Gilroy City Council have passed measures opposing the project.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told San José Spotlight in May: “We have no new detention centers to announce at this time.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be planning a $400 million detention facility in Hammond, La., with a construction start date of Sept. 1, according to a project entry in ConstructConnect, a subscription database that construction companies use to find and bid on upcoming work.

The project, which is not publicly available, was described in screenshots provided to Project Salt Box by a reader. It names ICE and the Department of Homeland Security as the project’s owners.

The entry describes the project as the remodeling of a mixed-use development to include a detention facility, a medical facility, and multi-residential development. Its status is listed as conceptual, and the record was last updated May 5.

Six companies have registered interest in the Hammond facility: Diamond Scaffold Services of Bogalusa, Road Warriors Construction of New Orleans, Stone Mountain Access Systems of Atlanta, and Security Constructors of Oklahoma City, each listed as an interested subcontractor; and Economy Brick Sales of Gonzales and HRM Concrete of Baton Rouge, listed as interested suppliers. None responded to a list of questions about the project, and the database does not indicate that any has submitted a bid.

Neither the $400 million figure nor the Sept. 1 start date appears in any public government record, and ConstructConnect, which compiles project data from permits and industry contacts, may have estimated them.

Neither DHS nor the General Services Administration have posted contract solicitations to SAM.gov, the federal system agencies use to advertise contracts and solicit competitive bids. But it has awarded other detention contracts without one, using a Navy contracting vehicle called WEXMAC TITUS under which pre-approved contractors bid on and are awarded work through a non-public system closed to other firms.

Hammond Mayor Pete Panepinto said in late December that no federal agency had contacted the city. “No one from ICE, DHS, or any other entity has reached out to me about such a facility,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that he would share information if that changed. Mr. Panepinto’s office did not respond to a list of questions sent by Project Salt Box.

Permit records showed no construction on that scale as of late December. Hammond, the largest city in Tangipahoa Parish, sits about 45 miles east of Baton Rouge and 45 miles northwest of New Orleans, with a population of roughly 21,000 at the 2020 census. The largest new commercial project permitted by the parish government in the preceding three months measured 7,541 square feet, according to parish reports reviewed by The Times-Picayune.

The prospect of a facility in Hammond has circulated in local Facebook groups since at least the spring, where residents have speculated about possible sites and raised concerns about the effect on water, electricity, and city infrastructure. Some have pointed to vacant warehouses near the Hammond Northshore Regional Airport, though no record reviewed by Project Salt Box identifies a site.

Hammond has appeared in ICE’s plans before. A draft solicitation reported by The Washington Post in December described seven large warehouse detention centers nationwide, including one in Hammond holding up to 9,000 detainees, as part of a plan to detain more than 80,000 people at a time. The draft required each facility to begin accepting detainees 30 to 60 days after construction starts; a Sept. 1 start would put the first detainees inside by October or November.

DHS has identified more than 20 potential locations for warehouse detention facilities, according to a spreadsheet verified by NBC News in November 2025, and members of Congress investigating the program’s contracts have put its planned cost at $38.3 billion in public funds. A second Louisiana site, a 250,000-square-foot former Conn’s HomePlus warehouse in Port Allen, is as a proposed location for a smaller facility holding roughly 500 detainees.

But in recent weeks, ICE has moved away from the warehouse purchases. The agency bought eleven warehouses for the program before pausing new acquisitions after Markwayne Mullin became secretary in March. On June 18, The New York Times reported that ICE planned to offload seven of them, purchased for more than $700 million, by transferring them to other federal agencies or selling them. The seven are in Romulus, Mich.; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga.; Hamburg and Tremont, Pa.; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, N.J. It is unclear if this retreat from the warehouse strategy would impact the proposed project in Hammond.

ICE has awarded construction contracts to refit only two of the eleven, in Williamsport, Md., and Surprise, Ariz., and neither is on the list of those to be offloaded. The Hammond project is in neither group; the entry describes a remodeling of an existing development, and no record shows ICE has purchased property there.

More than four months after the mayor’s statement, the entry’s location field still read “To Be Determined, Hammond, LA 70401.”

You do not need to be a journalist, a lawyer, or an advocacy organization to file a request. Any person can request federal records under FOIA. State sunshine laws vary, but most extend broad public access rights — and in some states, residents who live in a jurisdiction have legal standing that out-of-state requesters do not.

Readers who file requests and share what they find are a direct part of how Project Salt Box tracks and documents ICE's expanding detention footprint across the country.

What these laws cover

The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, requires most executive branch agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection — to release records upon request unless a specific statutory exemption applies. The nine exemptions cover areas including classified national security information, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, and certain law enforcement records. Agencies cite these exemptions often, and most can be appealed.

State public records laws govern state and local agencies: county governments, planning departments, fire marshals’ offices, city councils, and public utilities. For example, Maryland’s Public Information Act, codified at Md. Code, Gen. Prov. § 4-101 et seq., requires agencies to respond within 30 days and mandates that the first two hours of search and preparation time be provided at no charge.

Before you write a request

Check existing FOIA reading rooms and disclosure libraries first. Many agencies are required to post frequently requested records online. DHS maintains a public reading room and ICE posts responsive documents at ice.gov/foia/library. A document already posted is available immediately; submitting a new request for it delays your access and consumes agency processing time. MuckRock, a nonprofit platform that facilitates records requests, maintains a searchable archive of records obtained by other requesters across thousands of agencies — check it before you start.

Then narrow your request before you write it. FOIA and its state equivalents do not require agencies to answer questions or conduct research on your behalf — they require agencies to search for and produce records. A request asking what an agency’s plans are for a particular facility will likely come back as not describing an identifiable record. Before drafting, identify the specific document types you want — contracts, correspondence, permits, inspection reports — and pair each with a named party, a facility address or contract number, and a defined date range. The narrower the request, the faster it tends to move and the less it is likely to cost.

You can submit the same request to multiple components of a large agency if you are not certain which one holds the records. ICE and CBP are separate components of DHS, and records about a facility may exist in one, the other, or both.

Submitting your request

Most federal agencies and many state agencies accept requests through online portals, which confirm receipt and assign a tracking number. The national FOIA portal at foia.gov allows you to submit requests to most federal agencies, track their status, and receive productions electronically. As of early 2026, DHS and ICE no longer accept requests by mail; requests must go through foia.gov or the ICE FOIA portal. CBP uses a separate SecureRelease portal. The Department of Justice maintains a directory of federal agency FOIA contacts with submission links for agencies that operate their own systems.

For state agencies, your state attorney general’s office typically maintains a directory of agency public records contacts. Many county and municipal agencies accept email submissions; some still require written requests by mail. When in doubt, call the agency’s main public affairs line and ask where to send a records request.

Keep a copy of every request you submit, the confirmation of receipt, and all subsequent correspondence. Response deadlines run from the date the agency acknowledges receipt, not from the date you submitted it.

Writing the request

A records request can be written plainly, but it needs to be precise. Every request should include your name and contact information, a description of the specific records you want, a reference to the Freedom of Information Act by name, and a fee waiver request. If you have grounds for expedited processing, include that as well.

When describing the records, be concrete. Name the facility, the contractor or agency, the document type, and the date range. Requests that describe a broad topic rather than specific records — “all documents related to ICE detention in [state]” — will likely be rejected outright. Specific requests move faster and cost less.

Requesting a fee waiver

FOIA authorizes agencies to charge fees for search time, duplication, and review. If you are requesting records for a noncommercial public interest purpose, you can ask the agency to waive those fees — and you do not need to be a journalist or affiliated with a news organization to do so.

The request should explain what you are looking for, why it matters to the public, and that you have no commercial interest in the records. Keep it short. Agencies receive boilerplate fee waiver language constantly; a clear, specific explanation of your purpose carries more weight.

If your fee waiver is denied, you can appeal that denial separately from any appeal of a withheld record.

Requesting expedited processing

Federal FOIA allows requesters to ask for faster processing when delay would harm the public’s ability to get timely information about what the government is doing. To qualify, you generally need to show that you are sharing information with the public and that there is a specific, time-sensitive reason the records are needed now. A general claim that the public should know is not sufficient; a pending construction start, an imminent facility opening, or an active legal proceeding are.

Appealing

If an agency withholds records in whole or in part, denies your fee waiver, or fails to respond within the 20 business day statutory deadline, you have the right to appeal. Federal appeals go to the agency’s FOIA Appeals Officer. Your letter should identify the request by its tracking number, describe what was withheld or what deadline was missed, and explain why you believe the response was wrong. You do not need a lawyer to write one.

If an administrative appeal is denied, you may file suit in federal district court. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the National Freedom of Information Coalition offer free guidance on that process.

At the state level, appeal mechanisms vary. Some states have an open government ombudsman who can intervene; others require suit in state court. Your state attorney general’s office can direct you to the applicable process.

How to submit a request through the SecureRelease portal

ICE and CBP process FOIA requests through the federal SecureRelease portal, accessible through foia.gov. The portal walks you through six steps.

Step 1: Agency and component. Select “Department of Homeland Security” from the agency dropdown, then select “U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement” from the component dropdown. The portal will display ICE’s contact information and any active processing notices — check these before proceeding, as they may flag delays. As of February 2026, ICE has noted delays across most FOIA offices.

Step 2: Contact information. The portal will ask what type of requester you are. Select “All Other” unless you are filing on behalf of a news organization or educational institution — your requester category affects what fees may apply. Fill in your name, mailing address, email, and phone number. This information is collected separately from your request, so you do not need to include it in the request text itself.

Step 3: Request details. Select “FOIA Request” as the request type. The portal then presents a single open text field labeled “Request Description.” This is where you paste your request language. The portal instructs you to be as specific as possible — name the document types, the parties involved, the location, and the date range. If you have submitted related requests previously, note the prior request ID here as well.

Step 4: Additional information. The portal will ask for a “Request Designation.” Select “Other (I am not requesting records about a person).” The remaining fields on this screen — alien number, date of birth, SEVIS number — are for people requesting records about themselves or a specific individual. Leave them blank.

Step 5: Fees. Check the “Request Fee Waiver” box. A text field will appear asking you to justify your fee waiver request — paste your fee waiver language here. The portal also asks for the maximum amount you are willing to pay in fees if the waiver is denied. Entering $25 is a reasonable starting point; you can adjust this based on your situation.

Step 6: Expedited processing. If you are requesting expedited processing, check the box and paste your justification in the text field that appears. If you are not requesting expedited processing, leave this step blank. Complete the reCAPTCHA and click “Submit Request.”

Resident advantages

The case for crowdsourcing records requests is fundamentally geographic. Fire marshal inspection reports, county building permit applications, zoning variance records, local emergency management correspondence, utility connection permits, and tax assessment filings exist only within state and local systems. A federal FOIA request to ICE cannot reach a city’s internal correspondence about a facility, a county assessor’s chain of title, or a local planning department’s site review. Those records require a state or local request, and a local resident is often better positioned to know they exist and to identify the right agency.

In five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and Virginia — that advantage is also a legal one. Those states limit public records requests to their own residents by statute, meaning a news organization headquartered elsewhere may have no standing to file at all. Kentucky imposes a similar residency requirement, with narrow exceptions for registered out-of-state business entities and certain news media organizations. New Jersey and New Hampshire have statutory language that could be read the same way, though neither state currently enforces it as a bar to out-of-state requesters. In any of these states, a local resident filing on their own behalf has access that an outside organization cannot replicate.

Cost is another variable worth understanding before you file. For instance, California’s Public Records Act does not include a statutory fee waiver — if an agency declines to reduce costs at its own discretion, you have limited recourse.

The practical workaround is showing up in person: viewing records at a California agency’s office is free, and you may be permitted to photograph or scan pages with your own device at no charge. Agencies may only bill the direct cost of duplication for copies they produce themselves, and cannot charge for staff time spent searching or reviewing records. A local resident who can walk into an office has a meaningful cost advantage over a remote requester ordering copies by mail.

Elected officials and local agency heads answer to constituents, not to outside organizations. A records request from someone who lives in a jurisdiction lands differently than one from a national outlet headquartered elsewhere — particularly in smaller counties and municipalities where officials are directly accessible. A national organization also has limited capacity to file simultaneously across dozens of jurisdictions. Residents who live near a facility, know which local agencies received correspondence, and can appear at a county office are doing something no national organization can replicate at scale.

Share what you find

Project Salt Box is an all-volunteer investigative nonprofit covering federal immigration detention contracting and homeland security spending. We want to hear from readers who have obtained records through public information requests or have knowledge of federal contracting in their communities.

If you obtain records and would like to share them, or have a tip related to ICE detention expansion, you can reach us at projectsaltbox@pm.me.

We do not identify sources without their permission.

A starting-point records request

Most federal and state agencies now accept records requests through online portals, which collect your contact information separately. The following is the text you will need to paste or type into the request field. Replace the bracketed sections with your own information.

I am requesting copies of the following records under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552:

[Describe the records you want. Be as specific as you can: name the document type, the agency or company involved, the location or address if relevant, and the date range.]

Example: “All contracts and lease agreements between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and [company name] related to the property located at [address], from [start date] to the present.”

I am requesting a fee waiver under 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). I am seeking these records to understand how public funds are being spent and intend to share what I find with the public. I have no commercial interest in these records. If my fee waiver request is denied and fees are expected to exceed $25, please notify me before processing so I can decide how to proceed.

If any portion of this request is denied, please identify the specific exemption claimed and provide information on how to appeal that decision.

A few notes on using this template

The description of the records is the only part that requires real thought. Everything else is standard language that agencies expect to see. If your description is too broad, the agency will either reject the request outright or return an estimate for a search that costs more than you want to pay — which is why narrowing your request before you file matters.

The $25 threshold in the fee notification line is a reasonable ceiling for most requests, but you can raise or lower it based on your situation.

For state and local requests, replace the statutory citation (5 U.S.C. § 552) with the name of your state’s public records law. MuckRock’s state-by-state guides can tell you what it’s called and how to cite it. The structure — describe what you want, ask for a fee waiver, ask for an explanation of anything withheld — works in virtually every state system.

Resources

Finding and submitting requests

• FOIA.gov — The federal government’s central records request portal. Submit requests to most federal agencies, track status, and receive productions in one place.

• ICE FOIA Portal — ICE’s dedicated submission portal for immigration enforcement records.

• CBP SecureRelease Portal — Customs and Border Protection’s separate submission system.

• MuckRock — A nonprofit platform for filing, tracking, and sharing public records requests. Includes a searchable archive of records obtained by other requesters and state-by-state guides to local public records laws.

Reading rooms and existing disclosures

• DHS FOIA Library — Previously released DHS records available for immediate download.

• ICE FOIA Library — ICE’s public reading room, updated regularly with new productions.

State public records laws

• Reporters Committee Open Government Guide — State-by-state legal reference on public records laws, written by attorneys in each jurisdiction. The most authoritative resource if you hit a specific legal obstacle.

• Right on Transparency — State Residency Requirements — A summary of which states restrict records requests to their own residents, with statutory citations.

• Ballotpedia — Who Can Make Public Records Requests by State — A plain-language summary of requester eligibility rules in all 50 states.

Legal help and appeals

• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — Free legal resources and attorney referrals for journalists and members of the public facing FOIA disputes.

• National Freedom of Information Coalition — A network of state-level press freedom and open government organizations. A good starting point if your dispute involves a state or local agency.

Note: This guide is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Public records laws vary by jurisdiction and are subject to change. If you have questions about your rights under a specific state or federal records law, consult an attorney or contact one of the legal resources listed above.

Yesterday, ICE announced its plans to reopen a detention facility that has been closed since 2010. The Prairie Correctional Facility - soon to be called the Prairie Detention Facility - is owned by private prison company CoreCivic. At capacity, the facility will hold 1,600 male and female detainees, with an initial 150 detainees the first week and 250 additional every week thereafter.

Citing their need for an “increase [in] bed capacity to meet the administration’s interior enforcement and border decompression goals” ICE plans to award the comprehensive detention services contract to CoreCivic, given the company owns, and has historically operated, the facility.

Comprehensive Detention Services

Prairie Pws 6 2 2026

1.33MB ∙ PDF file

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The Prairie facility has been closed for over 15 years, and the contract requires CoreCivic to plan, manage, and complete all renovations necessary to ensure it meets the most current National Detention Standards. Once the facility is approved for operation, CoreCivic will be responsible for every aspect of running it, including security/guards, housing, meals, and transportation.

Medical care is also built into the contract at a significant level. CoreCivic will have to provide 24/7 on-site health care including intake screening, comprehensive health assessments, sick call, mental health services, dental care, prescription medications, and emergency response coordination. The facility must also support disability accommodations and suicide prevention procedures.

Oversight Under Tight Control

The contract gives ICE near‑total control over who can see inside the facility, including members of Congress and their staff. A dedicated access section makes clear that ICE, not CoreCivic or local officials, decides who may enter secure areas, when tours occur, and what visitors are allowed to observe.

Even when congressional offices or committees request information, they cannot go directly to the contractor - the PWS requires CoreCivic to route all data, records, and responses through ICE, which then decides what to share and when. While this may be standard language in detention contracts, it comes as members of Congress are actively fighting DHS in court just to exercise their statutory right to conduct unannounced inspections of ICE facilities. In the last year alone, lawmakers have been denied entry to multiple detention centers and have sued the Trump administration over new policies that impose advance‑notice requirements and effectively block real‑time oversight of conditions on the ground.

An Unclear Timeline

CoreCivic has a maximum 90‑day “transition‑in” period after award to complete renovations, with detainee intake beginning on day 91 and ramping up by 150 people the first week and 250 more each week thereafter until the facility hits 1,600 beds. The same section requires a detailed mobilization plan and a government‑approved operations schedule, but it does not say when ICE actually intends to award the contract or when that 90‑day clock will start.

The only public marker is the June 19, 2026 response date on ICE’s sole‑source justification notice on SAM.gov. That document explains why ICE plans to give the deal directly to CoreCivic, but it does not include an anticipated award date, construction schedule, or projected opening for detainee intake. Meanwhile, the PWS’ Deliverables section gives ICE up to 30 business days to accept or comment on draft plans, and another 15 business days for CoreCivic to revise, meaning key milestones could sit in back‑and‑forth for weeks without any public indication of when Prairie will actually begin detaining people.

Reopening Prairie Fits into Broader Strategy

ICE’s move to reopen Prairie fits into a broader strategy to rapidly expand detention capacity by leaning on private prison infrastructure that already exists. The agency has faced mounting local opposition to its plan to convert warehouses into large detention hubs, particularly in urban areas where zoning fights, environmental review, and organizing by immigrant rights groups can slow or kill projects.

Reopening shuttered prisons like Prairie offers ICE a faster, often quieter path to increasing detention bedspace. The facility already has a carceral footprint, is located in a rural community familiar with prison operations, and can be brought online through a single, sole‑source contract with a company that has run it before.

ICE and CoreCivic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bottom Line Up Front

Spending Increases following April dip: After a quieter April, DHS detention and enforcement contracting activity picked back up in May, with both total obligations and the size of individual awards trending higher. The rebound was driven largely by large border wall contracts and sizable modifications to existing ICE agreements.

Work Resumes at Surprise, Az. Warehouse: The stop work order on the GardaWorld contract was rescinded on May 6 and since then, the company has ramped up its recruitment efforts, claiming they are “currently building a pipeline…with an expected start date of later this year.”

ICE Continues use of Navy Contract: A May task order issued to Acquisition Logistics LLC is the first on WEXMAC TITUS since Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s transition in. The award indicates that DHS intends to keep relying on this Defense Department contract structure, despite ongoing criticism from transparency advocates and members of Congress.

USCIS Reaches new Year‑to‑Date Spending Peak: USCIS posted its highest monthly obligations so far this year in May, more than doubling its April spending from about $55 million to roughly $230 million - a 317% increase.

May’s Biggest Contracts

Since we started this report back in January, the largest contracts each month have been related to border wall construction, and May was no exception. Southwest Valley Constructors received the month’s largest award - a $1.7 billion award funding more border wall construction in the Big Bend sector of Texas. This is the second-largest border wall contract in CBP history (the largest was issued to Fisher Sand & Gravel back in January). Fisher Sand & Gravel and Sundt Construction also secured wall construction awards, each valued in the hundreds of millions.

The majority of the over $450 million in funds obligated by ICE was spent in modifications to existing contracts, not on new ones. For example, CSI Aviation, the company who runs ICE deportation flights, was awarded an additional $119 million. The GEO Group and CoreCivic also received continued funding through their existing detention and transportation contracts, collectively netting over $104 million.

One new ICE contract of note was the $25 million award to Bi2 Technologies for 1,570 iris scanners. As we reported earlier this month, these scanners are in addition to the 200 ICE bought in September of last year, and are part of a sweeping expansion of biometric and data-analysis tools across federal law enforcement. The agency also awarded yet another task order on the Navy’s WEXMAC TITUS contract, this time to Acquisition Logistics LLC for detention and ground transportation services in the Los Angeles, Ca. area of responsibility.

Over at USCIS, the agency had its highest spending month to date this year. Half of that spend went to one company - Amentum Services. The agency spent $116 million funding another year of the company’s contract to support operations collecting applicant biometric and biographical data.

Analysis and Trends

Warehouse Work Continues, Despite Lawsuits: Contracting activity in May shows that work has restarted at the Surprise, Arizona warehouse, even as lawsuits from the state attorney general and local opponents move forward in federal court. DHS’s decision to resume construction there tracks with reporting that, while the department has paused purchases of new warehouse sites, it appears to be concentrating its efforts in states and localities where it expects less sustained resistance.

ICE Spending Increased Over 200% from April: April was the slowest month of ICE contracting so far this year in both total obligations and the size of individual awards, reflecting a brief transition period as Secretary Markwayne Mullin reviewed inherited contracts and warehouse plans. The more than 200 percent jump in ICE spending from April to May suggests that this pause is over and that the agency has returned to an aggressive pace of obligations, leaning heavily on existing detention, transportation, and surveillance vendors to ramp up operations.

Continued Investment in Biometric Data Collection: May’s contracts show that DHS is deepening its reliance on biometric systems across multiple components. ICE’s $25 million award to BI2 Technologies for 1,570 additional iris scanners points to a rapid build‑out of biometric screening as standard infrastructure in detention and enforcement operations. At the same time, USCIS devoted roughly half of its May spending to Amentum Services to keep collecting applicants’ biometric and biographical data for another year, signaling that large‑scale identity collection remains a priority across DHS.

About this Report

All procurement data used in this report is from usaspending.gov and SAM.gov. If there are specific procurements, companies, regions, or topics you would like us to cover in future monthly reports, please reach out to us and let us know.