The reversal raises questions about detention capacity, taxpayer spending, and how the federal government plans to carry out large-scale deportations.
The idea was meant to supercharge President Trump’s mass deportation plan.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement would purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses across the United States to massively expand its capacity to detain people deemed to be in the country illegally, which in turn would spike deportations. A year into Mr. Trump’s term, he had bought 11 facilities at a cost of $1 billion.
But in a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright, according to documents reported by The New York Times.
The decision to sharply scale back the warehouse plan is a rejection of a signature initiative under the previous Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, who pushed the boundaries of what the government can do to round up potential sports aggressively. The new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who had privately expressed skepticism about the plan, has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.
“Since Day 1, D.H.S. has remained singularly focused on removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the United States and is always evaluating the best methods to do so,” the Homeland Security Department said in a statement for this article. “These heinous criminals, once arrested, should be removed at lightning speed, not married on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense. D.H.S. is moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.”
The move comes months after Ms. Noem’s agency, flushed with cash, pursued an idea to fundamentally change immigration detention in the country by not only expanding it to unprecedented levels but also placing ownership in the federal government’s hands, rather than contractors’.
The shift also raises questions about the original decision-making behind the plan to buy the warehouses. This costly undertaking involved converting industrial space into places that could house thousands of human beings, with water and sewer capacity and proper ventilation, and created almost immediate conflict with local communities across the United States.
ICE has been battered by lawsuits over a lack of environmental checks, and the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general is investigating the purchases.
The agency appears to still be moving forward with four of the warehouses purchased for detention purposes. It was not immediately clear why the agency decided to proceed with those four spaces for detention. ICE also plans to buy immigrant detention facilities from private prison companies that it already contracts with, according to documents.
But the move to offload most of the warehouses raises questions about the agency’s ability to deport high numbers of immigrants.
Immigrants set for deportation are typically arrested, processed and then detained by ICE before being flown out of the country. For an agency whose budget jumped from $8 billion annually to $28 billion through funding by Congress, detention was always going to be a priority. Without more beds, any conversation of deportation on the scale of what Mr. Trump discussed on the campaign trail would be out of the question.
