Trump administration weighs selling ICE warehouses built for mass detention
ICE is reconsidering warehouses bought for mass detention after spending more than $38 billion on facilities meant to hold up to 8,000 people each.
The Trump administration is weighing whether to sell several warehouses that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought this year for a mass detention expansion, a striking reversal after paying more than $38 billion for property meant to hold as many as 8,000 immigrants apiece.
Department of Homeland Security and ICE officials have identified several of the 11 warehouses purchased under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for potential sale, though none has been put on the market and no final decision has been made. The same review is also extending to aircraft bought or leased under Noem, including a luxury Boeing 737 Max 8. Those planes were the first government-owned deportation aircraft ICE has used, after years of relying mainly on chartered flights.
The shift exposes how quickly the detention buildout moved, and how quickly its assumptions have changed. In January, Bloomberg reported that ICE was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on warehouse purchases for detention centers, with two deals alone costing $172 million. One warehouse in El Paso, Texas, could have become an 8,500-bed jail if completed as planned, and Bloomberg said ICE had been looking at as many as 23 warehouses. NBC News reported in November 2025 that the administration had explored buying warehouses designed for companies like Amazon, then retrofitting them near airports in the southern U.S. to speed deportations.
The broader strategy was part of a push to create capacity to detain 100,000 immigrants at one time, in addition to existing facilities that already held tens of thousands more. Advocacy groups said the effort was built around a “detention reengineering” model that would move ICE away from the long-standing reliance on contracted jails and prisons and toward a network of government-owned sites. The American Immigration Council said Congress provided $45 billion for immigration detention in July 2025, a surge of money that made the warehouse purchases possible, and noted that ICE owned just 10 detention facilities out of 220 used to detain immigrants as of February 2025.
Now, DHS says ICE no longer needs capacity for 100,000 detainees. A department spokesperson said that under new leadership, “DHS is assessing all its resources, including aircraft, to maximize efficiency and continue to deliver on Trump’s mission of securing the homeland.” Trump has also said he may want a “softer touch” on immigration enforcement after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens during an operation in Minneapolis in January. The warehouse review suggests the administration is still committed to large-scale detention, but no longer to the scale it spent billions preparing for.
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