On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to “allocate all legally available resources” to expand its detention capacity. In response, DHS began reopening recently shuttered prisons and using them to hold detainees arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There were fantasies and schemes of offshoring and black sites, including an ill-fated plan for a thirty-thousand-bed detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. That February, the administration expanded “third country” removals, flying detainees to partnered nations — Eswatini, South Sudan, Mexico, and others — where they might be held and then transferred somewhere else, or arbitrarily incarcerated in prisons like El Salvador’s CECOT.
ICE is now the most heavily funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law in July 2025, allocated $170 billion to ICE over four years, with $45 billion of that earmarked for expanding detention infrastructure and $25 billion for increasing the ranks of ICE officers. On June 10, 2026, President Trump signed a budget reconciliation package, the Secure America Act, which gave ICE and Border Patrol an additional $70 billion.
Yet ICE is limited by available detention space. The vast dollar amounts set aside for detention in various bills and budgets are fictitious until and unless they can be turned into physical facilities, or at least until money can be made real by paying someone for something. Detention space — how much of it there is, where it is located, who controls it — is a bottleneck, a material limit on designs for mass deportation and the aims of a federal police state.
Hence the warehouse plan. In January 2026, Bloomberg published an article describing federal purchases of several large industrial buildings around the country for conversion into immigration detention facilities. There were plans to purchase more — around two dozen sites total. In February 2026, New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte released an internal ICE memo for something called the Detention Reengineering Initiative. The overall vision: $38.3 billion, 92,600 beds, 8 large-scale detention centers, 16 processing sites, 10 existing facilities, all to be operational by the end of the fiscal year. DHS had relied on a Navy contract vehicle — the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract, or WEXMAC, normally used for military operations — to bypass normal contracting rules and public notice. Federal ownership, some officials told reporters, would mean that local zoning and sewer laws as well as environmental review would not apply. It was a dream of centralization and frictionlessness.
But there was friction. Local opposition organized at nearly every site, as residents and their representatives rejected the idea that concentration camps should be built in their backyards and connected to local infrastructure. “We simply do not have the water and sewage capacity,” said a city manager in Social Circle, Georgia, “to handle the demands which would effectively tripl[e] the population of our city practically overnight.” Maryland, Arizona, and Michigan sued DHS for skipping environmental review. Social Circle sued. There were protests around the country, across party lines.
The department had bought eleven warehouses over the course of several months, for roughly a billion dollars. By June 2026, it was selling off seven sites, some $700 million worth. “The warehouses were a quick concept to scale up mass deportation,” a former Trump Administration official told the New York Times. “Unfortunately, because of the scale and footprint, the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks.”
Fascism is geographically uneven. It is built with existing materials and maintained through existing relationships.
Though the Detention Reengineering Initiative seems to have failed on its own terms, it has succeeded in moving huge sums of cash out of the OBBB and into major financial firms with vacant properties for sale. It has also cleared the way for at least four new detention camps. And if DHS is unable to turn its fascist infrastructural fantasies into reality, other long-standing strategies remain available. Over decades, a network of prisons and jails has been built at an enormous scale across America. ICE can pay to hold people in these facilities. “DHS is moving swiftly,” the department said in a statement, “to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.”
