ICE Awards GardaWorld $17.3M to Convert an East Side San Antonio Warehouse into a Detention Facility

ICE awarded a $17.3 million contract on August 27, 2026 to GardaWorld Federal Services LLC for renovation of an ICE-owned warehouse at 542 Southeast Loop 410 on San Antonio’s East Side, in Bexar County, Texas. The contract language describes the work as procuring “the renovation of existing, ICE-owned permanent structure in San Antonio, TX to serve as a processing and detention facility” — the acquire-then-convert sequence rather than a lease.

The award makes San Antonio one of the first Texas sites with a formally awarded conversion contract under the Detention Reengineering Initiative (2026-06-23–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-100k-warehouse-network), the program targeting a network of ICE-owned warehouse facilities ahead of the fiscal-year deadline. GardaWorld is the same contractor holding the $313M operating contract at the Surprise, Arizona warehouse (2026-03-06–ice-awards-gardaworld-313m-surprise-arizona-contract) — the recurrence of a single vendor across geographically separate warehouse conversions is a feature of the program’s procurement structure, not a coincidence of bidding.

Bexar County has prior history in this program: a NEPA challenge already paused a warehouse conversion in the county (2026-04-15–hurson-maryland-nepa-precedent-bexar-tx-warehouse-pause), and San Antonio passed an ordinance restricting detention facilities (2026-04-17–san-antonio-restricts-detention-facilities-ordinance). Federal ownership of the structure is what routes around both — the pattern documented at Surprise, where a municipal detention ban was nullified by federal preemption.

Contractor identity and the specific address were confirmed from the KSAT reporting; the ledger capture that surfaced this event had flagged both as unverified.