ICE is offloading seven concentration camp warehouses. What does it really mean?

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As soon as I saw the New York Times report drop Thursday afternoon about ICE looking to sell seven of the 11 warehouses they’d purchased to convert into immigrant concentration camps, I knew I had to talk to Michael Wriston. Wriston is a 20-year veteran military analyst and one of the founders and masterminds behind Project Salt Box, a data and editorial project that has tracked the many developments in the Trump administration’s quest for warehouses to cage humans. He’s been aware of every sale, every failure, every contract awarded, and as a result, he has a unique insight into what this news functionally means (insofar as anyone can really divine anything from Trump news.)

My initial read, having written an in-depth piece about the obscure contracting mechanism behind purchasing the warehouses and from following along since then, was that this was overall positive news. Obviously it didn’t mean an end to Trump’s project of mass incarceration and deportation, but it signaled to me that the widespread pushback among communities blue and red, coupled with numerous legal challenges, meant that sand had successfully been thrown in the gears. Still, I figured it was best to consult an authority.

Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz subsequently reported that the following facilities are the ones planned for offloading: Romulus, Michigan; Social Circle, Georgia; Flowery Branch, Georgia; Hamburg, Pennsylvania; Tremont, Pennsylvania; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Roxbury, New Jersey. So what did that mean for the remaining warehouses?

I hopped on the phone with Wriston to get the warehouse whisperer’s reaction to this new development, to ask if he thought it was indeed a major turning point, and to discuss the potential alternative danger it could signal. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length (though not much because most parts, in my opinion, were too interesting to leave out.)

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: So the last time we spoke, the situation with the warehouses was a bit different.

MICHAEL WRISTON, PROJECT SALT BOX: A little bit, yeah.

KABAS: The New York Times just reported that DHS plans to offload seven of the 11 warehouses that that you tracked as purchased over the last few months. After watching this whole thing unfold, what do you think accounts for this seemingly pretty major change in approach?

WRISTON: I think a couple things. I think that the first and foremost factor that's leading to this decision would have to be just the total infeasibility of the project. And I think that's something that people within ICE have known for a while—that converting warehouses into detention centers or concentration camps is logistically just not feasible. 

I think the other thing, too, is cost. Per warehouse they were looking at something like $600 million just for conversion. And so that's essentially doubling the $1.07 billion dollar figure that they spent buying these warehouses outright.

Then there are some legal aspects of it that are starting to play out in the courts that I think demonstrate that ICE has a losing hand with the warehouses. That became clear in April when Judge [Brendan] Hurson in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction against ICE to the state because ICE failed to do its due diligence in terms of environmental impact assessments that would fall under the National Environmental Policy Act; failed to follow some provisions of the Procedural Act in how they did or did not work through the General Services Administration; and failed to do all of the things you're supposed to do before you buy an 800,000 square foot facility and then say you're going to turn it into a detention center. And so that has now replicated itself six times, with active federal lawsuits against ICE in the states of Maryland, Arizona, Michigan and New Jersey and the cities of Social Circle, Georgia and Salt Lake City.

So I think what ICE is kind of contending with here is this notion that all of this is coming back to bite them, and it's probably not gonna go the way they want. 

KABAS: It sounds like a lot of this could have been foreseen. So do you think they just expected they would be able to ram this through? How were they so ill-prepared for what has come at them?

WRISTON: Yeah, I think that it was a “let's throw money at the situation and that will fix everything.” That was the thought process back in December and January when they were rushing through buying all of these. Sources that I've spoken to have all said that because they had $38 billion to spend on detention, they were going to use every last penny of it and they wanted to do it as quickly as possible. And that meant just buying these facilities and essentially pencil whipping the paperwork because they didn't think anyone would pay attention. They thought no one's paying attention to warehouse sales: Maybe people are distracted by the data center purchases, which are equally important to pay attention to. And that wasn't the case. 

I think when The Washington Post reported in December that they were looking at the warehouses, it really resonated with the public and people latched onto it. And from there people paid attention. And when people pay attention, it's hard to sneak in a 10,000-bed detention facility in the middle of rural Social Circle, Georgia or in the middle of a major city like Salt Lake. And now there's been this massive pause. It's been three months since the last warehouse sold, and there have been no new contracts awarded since then. It's been a complete hiatus despite ICE's statements that they're going to push full steam ahead with this scheme. 

But I do think it presents an opportunity to pay attention to what they're going to do next, which I think is a harder fight for the public, and is the one that gives me pause as I think about it. I think this is a great victory, and we need to celebrate it—and begin looking forward to what's coming down the line.

KABAS: I really want to get to what you think comes next. But first I want to talk about how this development really speaks to the power of the media in fighting fascism, as you touched on.

WRISTON: Transparency is historically the tool of defeating fascism and defeating authoritarianism. You shine a light and really dig in and be relentless in the questions that you're asking. And the attention that you pay to it, the amount of people that you have on your side asking those questions and showing up, whether it's at a protest outside a detention facility, whether it's at a county council meeting or just flooding inboxes and phone lines and asking the questions that are informed by journalism. 

There are a lot of well-earned parallels between what's happening in America today with Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s. But what happened in Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s can't fully happen in America today because we still have that First Amendment and people are still exercising it. And if anything, it's a call to action for people to continue to exercise it. The second we abdicate that and the second we stop paying attention and stop asking questions is when we fully allow for authoritarianism to take root and take hold.

KABAS: And I think there's also just an awareness thanks to different kinds of media that like, Social Circle, Georgia doesn’t want to be the next Dachau. They don't want their city associated forever with this kind of depravity. I wonder if you have seen that awareness play into people pushing back on the warehouses.

WRISTON: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's the one thing, from Williamsport, Maryland to Social Circle, Georgia, all the way over to the sites on the west coast—every last one of these groups has said the same thing: “We don't want the next Auschwitz in our backyard. We don't want the next Dachau in our backyard.” A big press machine putting out this document of potential sites that ICE was looking at gave average, ordinary citizens—in concert with local press who know their region very well—to ask questions and go to trusted sources and start doing public records requests and paying attention to it.

I think all that happened in Germany happened in great secrecy and with a lot of public lies and not a lot of mechanisms to challenge those lies. And certainly not the resources that we have today for rapid response organizing or for instantaneous social media updates. Social media, for good or ill, still continues to be a prevailing force in fighting fascism so long as it remains independent and out of the clutches of fascist enablers. The choice of [which] social media [you use] is important.

KABAS: What role do you feel resistance by regular people played in changing the conversation around the warehouses?

WRITSTON: Massive. When we talk about the political side of things, there was an assumption that the typical liberal left was going to be upset about the warehouses, and that was going to be that. And of course they're upset. But because it was a very bipartisan backlash and there were Republican senators and Republican representatives and Republican townships that were fighting against these in Republican districts alongside your broad spectrum of political affiliations, it really sent a message that this is a group of people that are united in their dislike. That sends a pretty clear message on down-ballot issues in upcoming elections, especially the midterms, and I think they realize that this is a losing issue.

KABAS: I mean when Marsha Blackburn and Elizabeth fucking Warren are on the same side of an issue, you know you kind of have a political loser, right?

WRISTON: Yeah, you've really struck the hornet's nest with that one.

KABAS: There was some chatter online that this is all just like, a big real estate laundering scheme by Trump and his allies. Do you see any merit to that?

WRISTON: I do. I think that there are aspects of that that are absolutely 100% true. I wouldn't say that it necessarily factors into all of them, but there are some very suspicious ties. The facility that sold in Salt Lake City was sold by an LLC that was a subsidiary of DWS, a company in which Deutsche Bank has a majority stakeholder ownership. Goldman Sachs was a primary financier for the warehouse in Maryland. There was a Russian oligarch that sold the Social Circle warehouse and claimed that he had signed an NDA with ICE and so he wouldn't answer any questions about it.

I would say probably the most damning ones are the ones that you can pull their SEC filings and you can see that in the years leading up to the sales, the primary owners were claiming them as major losses. So the company that owned the Hagerstown warehouse for like the last four or five years in their SEC filings had named it as a contributor to their poor financial performance. The one that sold in Tremont, Pennsylvania and the one that was being targeted in Durant, Oklahoma, were both former Big Lots facilities that are now both owned by Blue Owl Capital. So ICE was essentially just looking at what, based on the list that we've looked at and based on the records that we've pulled, looking at warehouses that were in deep financial trouble. 

And sources that we've spoken to within ICE have all said, yeah, this was a push from high up in the administration to ICE to purchase these for the sake of people that wanted to get rid of failing properties. Is there any concrete evidence of that? Not that we've been able to find, but I think there's merit to that conjecture.

KABAS: The administration spent $700 million on the seven warehouses that they're trying to offload. Do you think there will be any accounting for that money?

WRISTON: A couple weeks ago, NBC News had published a piece that said ICE was eyeballing offloading some of the warehouses, and so we at Project Saltbox had this conversation in-house and we said, well, that's, that's amazing. But logistically what does that look like? 

There are some barriers to a federal agency outright selling. It's not like you or I putting our house up on the market, or Colliers or JLL putting a warehouse out on the market. There's accounting that they have to do. They have to go through the General Services Administration. There has to be a review that's done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to determine if any offloaded federal properties would be better suited for homeless advocacy purposes or homeless housing purposes. And so there are these lengthy periods that they have to go through before they even go on the market or transfer them laterally to other administrations or other departments. 

And if they do decide to sell them on the market, a hardship I think that they're going to face is offloading them for the same cost that they bought them for. So it's a double-edged sword, right? They purchased them at great sums of money, and in many of those cases—I'm going to use the term bailed out, but essentially paid off the debts associated with many of these warehouses for the private seller. That was to the private seller's great benefit. The other edge of that now is if ICE is seriously looking at selling these and they purchased them at 20,30, 40% markups, is there a commensurate private seller out there that's going to buy them at those same markups? Or is there a loss that ICE is going to be willing to take them at? 

KABAS: Regarding the purchase price markups, was there ever any accounting for those discrepancies? Did they explain why they paid so much more than they seemed to be worth?

WRISTON: No, and those FOIA requests remain unanswered. So yeah, that's something that we partnered with the ACLU on earlier this year. I was writing kind of an omnibus FOIA request that included their evaluation strategy. How did they arrive at those particular figures for these warehouses? What guidelines did they use? It's still pending, as all things FOIA go with this administration. And whenever we ask ICE for, you know, what led you to spend $102.4 million for a warehouse in western Maryland, we get the classic mugshots of “the worst of the worst,” and that's about it.

KABAS: From all your tracking, was there a point in the last couple of months where you thought it appeared the tide might be turning against the warehouses?

WRISTON: I will say that the moment that I thought the tide was actually beginning to turn was when the preliminary injunction was granted [in Maryland] in April. And the reason I think that that was the turning point was because the judge in that case basically said ICE failed to do its due diligence under NEPA. Because if you look at the records that ICE submitted as part of discovery, they essentially showed that they did the quote unquote due diligence, the environmental assessment, in a single afternoon within the span of about 30 minutes within days of purchasing the warehouse. It's this incredibly condensed timeline. One environmental report was done hours after the suit was filed, and you could just tell there was this desperation there to just push these things along and say no, no, no, we're covering all our bases. 

That gave us great optimism because it demonstrated that at the federal level, even within the courts, there was great skepticism about the diligence ICE was doing (or the lack thereof.) And once that happened, you could feel this sort of deflation from ICE. Their legal filings became more antagonistic and more par for the course for the Trump administration, whereas before they seemed a little more neutral. And you could just tell that they were throwing whatever they could at the wall hoping that they could sway these judges to let them off the hook. And the more this happened, the more people started getting involved and started showing up and started calling and saying, well, hey, you didn't do due diligence in our communities. And they started calling on their attorneys general to take action. 

And so one by one, more cases started filing, more protesters started showing up demanding more action from their elected officials. Two weeks prior to that preliminary injunction is when Kristi Noem was ousted. This was right during the pause that Markwayne Mullin announced where they were going to be taking a good hard look at the warehouse purchases. And then not long after, the Office of the Inspector General announced that they were investigating ICE's plan to purchase warehouses. So there is now an internal investigation happening into ICE and how they bought these. So there's just tremendous political, financial, and Republican and Democratic pressure against this whole harebrained idea that they have.

KABAS: Speaking of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, he told the Times today that the agency is pivoting to “utilize existing detention space with our state and county partners.” What does that tell you and does that worry you?

WRISTON: Yeah, that's the one that's the downside to this, right? There's a lot to celebrate here, there's a lot to worry about what comes next. 

So in our investigation of documents, what we've been finding is ICE is beginning to rely very heavily on sole source procurement for [private prison companies] CoreCivic and GEO Group-owned facilities, which is nothing new. That's been happening for years now. What worries me are statements that were made by both the GEO Group and the Core Civic CEOs during recent investor calls at the close of the quarter, and both of them mentioned that ICE had been looking at “turnkey detention facilities” within the GEO Group and the Core Civic portfolio to either purchase and run as federal facilities or to invest heavily in to turn them into much larger detention facilities than they currently are. We talked to some folks that we knew within ICE and we were able to get a list of eight of those facilities. [Note: Those facilities are Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash.; California City Detention Center in California City, Calif.; Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego; Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, Calif.; Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas; Central; Louisiana Processing Center in Jena, La.; the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colo.; the Winn Processing Center in Winnfield, La.]

So those are the ones we know that they're looking at buying. What that would do and why this is so problematic is where the warehouse fight really fell apart for ICE was that they were purchasing non-detention facilities for the purposes of detention and didn't do any of that environmental consideration and so they were very easy to fight on those grounds. These [existing facilities] are already operating as detention facilities. They're already being used by ICE for the purpose of detention. It would be much more difficult for the public to fight if ICE were to decide to buy these and turn them into federal facilities. And that would come with a lot of headaches for localities.

KABAS: So why didn't ICE just do it this way in the first place? Seems a lot easier.

WRISTON: Yeah that's the $1.07 billion dollar question. And, and in the course of talking to, talking to people, folks at ICE were very quick to say that was always what they wanted to do. That was as far back as when the one big beautiful Bill Act was passed last summer. A lot of those internal conversations were, let's start procuring existing detention space. That was what they envisioned with that $38 billion. It was external elements of pressure, allegedly within the White House and allegedly very close to the president, pushing to say, no, we want to go this warehouse route. And that's where I think a lot of that very damning evidence points to there being some level of corruption in terms of buying off these failing warehouses. 

One of the things they don't mention in this [Times] article that I think people should be paying very close attention to is the possibility of what they're calling “greenfield construction” projects, which is essentially using undeveloped land and building brand new detention centers from the ground up. We have seen indications of that coming in Gilroy, California, which is in Santa Clara County right outside of San Jose. There are a number of contracts swirling to develop a parcel of land that the General Services Administration owned and then sort of gave control to some Texas-based corporation, Edgewood Capital Group, that is building detention facilities for ICE in other states. And so this would be government-owned land operated by a contractor, developed by money procured by ICE to build brand new purpose built detention facilities that would make it very difficult for advocacy groups to fight. Not impossible, but difficult. There'd have to be a change in strategy. 

A source that we spoke to specifically said they're looking at Texas as a place to build brand new detention facilities due to the abundance of federal land and private land that they could buy unopposed, proximity to the border, and deportation hubs.

KABAS: My initial read was that this development was an overall positive sign.

WRISTON: That is the correct read. This is absolutely a victory. It's a victory for rule of law. Obviously there are federal laws in place for a reason, and I think the courts and the direction that ICE is going with their settlements and their negotiations with the states demonstrate that they didn't follow the law. And it was bound to be proven in court that they didn't follow the law, and that would have been damaging for the warehouse scheme altogether. It would have meant going completely back to the drawing board on all 11 of them to do a year's worth of due diligence each to make sure that the water system was adequate, that they weren't going to be leaching forever chemicals into local communities, that local communities had the opportunity to step up and make their voices heard, and all of the things that should have gone into this. 

It's a win for the First Amendment and for all of the protesters and demonstrators and activists and everyday people that just showed up, made their voices heard. Every last one of those people contributed to a decision to offload these and just reducing that detention headcount. It is a win because we have to think about what that represents downstream. If we're talking seven warehouses, that could represent up to 30, 40, 50,000 people that aren't going to be held in just the worst conceivable conditions that we can think of in the modern age. Warehouses that aren't properly ventilated, facilities that don't have adequate toilets, running water or HVAC in very hot locations. And even though there are fights ahead, that is just a victory that people need to be proud of.