ICE Warehouse Detention Program Stalls Nationwide: 11 Purchased Sites, $1.074B Spent, No Restart Timeline Under Mullin

By August 2026 the ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative — the program to convert purchased commercial warehouses into a national detention network, targeted at a new detention model by September 30, 2026 — had stalled program-wide rather than site by site. ICE bought eleven warehouses in the first three months of 2026 across Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah, spending a combined $1.074 billion. DHS then paused further purchases while it scrutinized contracts signed under former Secretary Kristi Noem, and Secretary Markwayne Mullin, sworn in late March 2026, inherited the eleven-site portfolio with no publicly stated restart timeline. Roughly eight additional purchase deals that had not closed were scuttled outright, in places including Kansas City, Missouri.

The stall is the accumulated weight of separate local fights rather than a single decision. Litigation is pending in multiple states where sites were bought, and individual conversions have fallen one at a time: the Salt Lake City warehouse was abandoned and routed to GSA as excess property (2026-08-19–ice-abandons-salt-lake-city-warehouse-conversion-gsa-excess-property); Roxbury, New Jersey was dropped after suit (2026-06-29–dhs-abandons-roxbury-nj-warehouse-ice-detention-after-lawsuit); the Berks and Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania warehouses were withdrawn (2026-07-22–shapiro-administration-ice-withdraws-berks-schuylkill-pa-warehouses); Socorro’s 8,500-bed mega-detention plan was scrapped with warehouses transferred to GSA (2026-08-11–dhs-scraps-socorro-8500-bed-mega-detention-transfers-warehouses-to-gsa); Arizona’s attorney general obtained a stipulation pausing the Surprise conversion (2026-07-01–arizona-ag-stipulation-pauses-surprise-warehouse-ice-conversion). Seven of the eleven purchased buildings were already slated for sale or transfer as of June (2026-06-21–ice-offloads-seven-of-eleven-warehouses-detention-reengineering). The Williamsport, Maryland site is the template for how these die: a federal judge enjoined construction there in April over NEPA violations, with the record citing four toilets for a planned 1,500-bed population and a pumping station unable to carry roughly four times its design load (2026-04-15–judge-halts-williamsport-ice-construction-nepa), and a Maryland environmental order separately barred use of local drinking water and sewage systems until ICE could demonstrate compliance.

The warehouse program should not be collapsed into the larger expansion plan it sits beside. The internal memo reported in March described a $38.3 billion expansion toward a 92,600-bed mega-center network (2026-03-12–ice-detention-expansion-38-billion-mega-centers) — a program-level target for detention capacity generally, not a bed count for the warehouse conversions specifically. The Detention Reengineering Initiative’s own documented design was a network of roughly two dozen warehouse-converted facilities (2026-06-23–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-100k-warehouse-network). What the August record supports is narrower and more useful than a collapse narrative: the acquisition phase ran far ahead of the environmental, sanitary, and legal groundwork, communities and state attorneys general found the gap, and a billion dollars of federal real estate is now sitting in a portfolio whose owner has not said what he intends to do with it.