DHS Moves to Offload Seven of Its Eleven ICE Warehouses and Pivots to Reopening Shuttered Prisons

As of early September 2026, DHS was moving to offload seven of the eleven warehouses ICE purchased for conversion into mass-detention processing centers, and had pivoted to reopening shuttered prisons and soliciting bids from private-prison contractors. The seven sites reported as being disposed of are Romulus, Michigan; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Georgia; Hamburg and Tremont, Pennsylvania; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, New Jersey. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged in June congressional testimony that “there was some due diligence that maybe wasn’t actually checked off.” The reversal follows sustained litigation and local-government resistance that blocked facility openings, plus the practical difficulty of retrofitting buildings never designed for confinement.

This is the Detention Reengineering Initiative failing, and canon has the whole arc. The program was recorded at its announcement — 100,000 beds by September 30, 2026, built around warehouse conversions (2026-06-23–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-100k-warehouse-network) — then at its stall in August: 11 purchased sites, $1.074 billion spent, no restart timeline under Mullin (2026-08-19–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-stalls-program-wide-11-purchased-sites). This entry is the next state: not a pause but a disposition. A stalled program holds its assets; this one is selling them.

What defeated it was jurisdictional, not federal. The corpus’s own finding is that the buildout was stopped site by site through heterogeneous local instruments — NEPA categorical-exclusion challenges at Williamsport and Gilroy (2026-09-11–gilroy-williamsport-nepa-injunctions-share-categorical-exclusion-theory), state suits, municipal permitting, a water cutoff. The open question that finding left was durability: whether orders nobody enforces quietly expire. Seven properties going up for sale is the answer, and it is the strongest available evidence that the litigation worked. Romulus and Roxbury are both on the offload list, and both are sites canon tracks as active litigation.

But the beds did not disappear; the vehicle changed. The pivot is to shuttered prisons and private-contractor solicitations — and canon already holds both halves of that replacement: the four-AOR turn-key solicitation covering Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver (2026-09-11–ice-turnkey-detention-solicitation-four-aors-deadline-extended), and a specific 1,400-bed plan at Rivers Correctional in Hertford County, North Carolina (2026-07-24–ice-plans-1400-bed-rivers-correctional-hertford-nc). A shuttered prison is a harder target for the exact legal theory that beat the warehouses: it is already a correctional use, so the change-of-use argument that made the categorical exclusions vulnerable is weaker or unavailable. The resistance won on a terrain the government has now left.

The sunk cost does not unwind with the sale, and Williamsport is the proof. That site is not on the offload list; it remains under injunction, and ICE signed a $9.9 million one-year caretaker task order to maintain it, against $225.4 million already spent (2026-09-04–ice-teya-caretaker-contract-barred-williamsport-warehouse-225m-spent). So the program’s terminal state is mixed: seven sites sold, at least one maintained indefinitely at seven figures a year while legally unusable, and the bed target pursued through a different instrument.

Sourcing note — and a figure discrepancy to carry forward. The seven named sites, the prison pivot, the contractor solicitations, and the Mullin quotation are corroborated across The Marshall Project (tier 1) and the September 3 syndicated Stacker reporting, verified independently on 2026-09-22. The spend figure conflicts across sources and is deliberately not asserted in the title or lead: the ledger capture says “over $1 billion,” one syndicated headline says $700M, and canon’s August entry says $1.074B. These may measure different things — total purchases versus the seven being offloaded versus program-wide obligation — and no reconciliation is available here. The $336 million combined figure for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey properties appears in the capture’s chain attributed to NBC News but was not independently confirmed in this pass. The event date of September 3 is the syndicated-reporting date for the offload status; The Marshall Project’s underlying piece is dated August 1, and the disposition process has no single announcement date.

Open: the GSA or DHS disposal listings for each of the seven properties, which would give actual sale status rather than intent, and prices against purchase; reconciliation of the $700M / $1B / $1.074B figures to a defined denominator; and which private contractors responded to the turn-key solicitations, since that names who inherits the bed target.