ICE to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers

[dalton99a]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/13/ice-warehouses-detention-centers-dhs

ICE to spend $38bn turning warehouses into detention centers, documents show
US homeland security eyeing 24 buildings, some as ‘primary locations’ for deportations, in escalation of Trump agenda
Lucy Campbell and Marina Dunbar
Fri 13 Feb 2026 15.00 EST

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire.

The documents, published on the state’s website on Thursday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.

According to an overview of the plans, which were first reported by the Washington Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would buy and convert 16 buildings across the US into regional processing centers, each holding between 1,000 and 1,500 people at a time. Another eight large-scale detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people at a time and serve as “the primary locations” for deportations. Detainees would spend an average of three to seven days at the processing sites before being transported to the larger facilities, where they would be held about 60 days before being deported.

The new model for increasing detention space is needed, according to the document, due to a surge in ICE hires and an anticipated rise in arrests. The number of people in ICE detention has hit records in the second Trump administration.

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