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Democratic lawmakers are starting an investigation into the Trump administration’s plan to spend billions of dollars buying and retrofitting warehouses as immigrant detention centers, ramping up scrutiny of a key piece of the White House’s push for mass deportations.
In a letter, the group of more than 50 U.S. senators and representatives asked contractors and real estate companies for details of their roles in the $38 billion plan. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to streamline a network of more than 200 local, state and privately-run facilities into 34 government-owned jails, with at least some operated by contractors.
“ICE has reportedly followed a non-competitive and potentially wasteful acquisition process for these warehouses — exacerbating concerns about companies earning huge profits at taxpayers’ expense,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “These warehouses were built to hold products, not people.”
The probe underscores the growing political controversy over how the Department of Homeland Security is spending about $170 billion that it was awarded under last year’s Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Questions around DHS spending contributed to the ouster of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month. Her replacement, former Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, has said he would review jail locations.
The Democratic lawmakers sent the letter to GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc., two of the largest private jail companies, as well as to contractors KVG LLC and GardaWorld Federal Services and real estate firms Newmark Group and PNK Group.
Steve Owen, CoreCivic’s vice president of communications, said in a statement that the company “is not involved in any of these efforts” outlined in the letter. The other companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment outside normal business hours.
Administration officials have said consolidating the government’s immigration-jail system is a cost-effective way to expand capacity as part of the broader deportation effort.
But Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead authors of the letter, warned that ICE, the DHS agency leading the deportation campaign, “appears to be circumventing the normal competitive bidding processes.” The administration is relying on a US Navy supply network intended to serve the military to “fast-track immigration detention contracts within the United States,” they said.
It’s unclear what response, if any, the contractors will provide to the letter. As the minority party in both houses of Congress, the Democrats don’t have subpoena power.
The lawmakers said they want answers by April 9 to their questions about how government contracts were won, what services the companies will offer and what the original purpose of currently-empty warehouses was. They also asked whether anyone involved in future operations or property sales has made political donations to President Donald Trump or administration appointees.
The companies were also asked whether they had had contact with several senior administration officials including border czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
DHS has so far spent more than $850 million to buy warehouses in at least nine locations. But the sales and planned jail operations have faced increasing local scrutiny and opposition, with officials in multiple jurisdictions raising concerns about the impact on local services such as public safety and water and sanitation systems.
Michigan officials last week filed suit to block a planned warehouse jail. Authorities in Maryland have also sued, winning a temporary injunction earlier this month to halt renovations of a planned facility.
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