ICE-MTC Marana AZ Private Prison Reactivation Grows From 513 to 1,300-Plus Beds With No Contract Signed

Arizona Public Media reported on June 18, 2026 that ICE’s plan to reopen the former Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility as a private immigration detention center run by Management and Training Corporation was still advancing in federal documents — and had grown from the 513-bed proposal Arizona Mirror first reported in February to an anticipated capacity above 1,300 beds, nearly triple the original figure. Neither ICE nor MTC had signed a final contract as of that date. What existed was a paper trail: a public comment period opened in June under Executive Order 11988 floodplain review, and an ICE activation schedule targeting all new facilities by November 30, 2026. MTC had bought the former state prison from Arizona for $15 million. Pima County’s Board of Supervisors passed a resolution opposing the facility 4-1 in February 2026.

The unsigned contract is the fact to hold onto, and it cuts both ways. It means Marana is a plan in progress rather than a done deal, and the November 30 activation target is an agency schedule, not a guarantee — if no contract exists by September, that deadline is operationally compromised. It also means the capacity number nearly tripled during a period when no one was contractually bound to anything, which is what a procurement looks like when the scope is being set by an internal activation target rather than by a negotiated agreement. The environmental review opened on a footprint the public had not been shown a contract for.

AZ Luminaria named the accountability gap in March: MTC would hold no contract with the Town of Marana or with Pima County, leaving it answerable only to ICE’s own contractual oversight framework — the framework a court-appointed monitor found insufficient at CoreCivic’s California City that same summer (2026-07-30–federal-monitor-finds-corecivic-california-city-sustained-medical-failure). Marana is one node in a reactivation wave the corpus tracks across the country: ICE’s 14-site private-prison acquisition RFEI (2026-07-20–ice-private-prison-acquisition-14-sites-rfei-2026), the 1,400-bed Rivers Correctional plan in Hertford County, North Carolina that a community mobilized against (2026-07-24–ice-plans-1400-bed-rivers-correctional-hertford-nc) and GEO Group signed anyway (2026-07-29–geo-group-signs-5yr-80m-rivers-correctional-contract-hertford-nc), and the Detention Reengineering Initiative’s 100,000-bed target that names Marana explicitly (2026-06-23–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-100k-warehouse-network). Arizona had already seen one of these paused by the state attorney general (2026-07-01–arizona-ag-stipulation-pauses-surprise-warehouse-ice-conversion).