type: timeline_event
By March 2026, ICE's plan for a massive detention infrastructure expansion — funded through the "One Big Beautiful Bill" — was receiving sustained public scrutiny. WBUR's On Point reported on the program on March 9, 2026, and PBS NewsHour covered the warehouse-to-detention-center conversion program in depth around the same period, with Axios, Bloomberg, and Fox News also publishing detailed breakdowns.
According to an internal agency memo, ICE planned to spend $38.3 billion to scale detention capacity to 92,600 beds through a network of eight "mega-centers" capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, 16 processing centers holding 1,000 to 1,500 people for 3 to 7 days, and 10 additional ERO-run facilities. The mega-centers were slated to be fully operational by November 30, 2026.
To fund the expansion, ICE went on a warehouse acquisition spree: it paid over $100 million for a site in Hagerstown, Maryland; more than $70 million for one in Surprise, Arizona; approximately $87 million for a facility in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania; and $123 million for an 826,000-square-foot warehouse near El Paso, Texas. ICE also reported adding 12,000 new law enforcement officers through a surge hiring effort.
The Brennan Center for Justice described the program as creating a "deportation-industrial complex." The American Immigration Council noted that the expanding and increasingly unaccountable detention system raised fundamental due process concerns, particularly given the concurrent documented pattern of ICE defying court orders in Minnesota. At current enforcement pacing, ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations would have deported only slightly over 85,000 individuals with final orders of removal by the end of fiscal year 2026 — a fraction of the program's projected capacity.