ICE Signs $9.9M Sole-Source Caretaker Task Order to Maintain the Williamsport Warehouse a Court Barred It From Opening

ICE signed a $9,975,502.40 task order on September 4, 2026 with Teya Diversified Solutions, an Alaska Native corporation-owned firm, to keep security, power, and fire-detection systems running at the vacant warehouse outside Williamsport, Maryland that a federal judge barred it from opening as a 1,500-bed detention center five months earlier. The award period runs through September 3, 2027. It is the first task order issued under a broader caretaker contract vehicle worth up to $28 million, awarded to Teya without competition under the Small Business Administration program that lets Alaska Native corporation-owned companies win federal contracts without competitive bid. Project Salt Box, working from federal spending records, puts actual spending on the site at $225.4 million to date and total potential exposure at roughly $753.4 million if every option is exercised — the $102.4 million January purchase price, KVG’s $641 million renovation option ceiling, and this $9.9 million caretaker order.

The structural fact is that the injunction stopped the facility but not the spending. Canon already records each upstream step: the purchase from Fundrise (2026-01-27–dhs-purchases-fundrise-williamsport-md-warehouse), the KVG renovation award (2026-03-07–ice-awards-kvg-113m-williamsport-contract), the NEPA injunction that halted construction (2026-04-15–judge-halts-williamsport-ice-construction-nepa), and the WEXMAC acquisition method that let DHS buy the building before the public knew (2026-04-20–wypr-exposes-williamsport-wexmac-contracting-method). What this entry adds is the terminal state of that sequence: a site legally unusable for its intended purpose, generating a nine-figure sunk cost and a fresh seven-figure annual maintenance obligation, with the maintenance itself routed through a non-competed vehicle. Litigation raised the cost of the program without reaching the appropriation behind it.

Two procurement patterns compound here. The site was acquired through a method designed to avoid the ordinary public real-estate process, and it is now maintained through a set-aside that avoids the ordinary competition process. The one-year award term is itself evidence: an agency provisioning a full year of caretaker service at a blocked site is not treating the injunction as the end of the project. That reading is consistent with the program-wide posture recorded in 2026-08-19–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-stalls-program-wide-11-purchased-sites — 11 purchased sites, $1.074 billion spent, no restart timeline — where the initiative stalled without being abandoned. Williamsport is the per-site version of that same holding pattern, and the NEPA theory that produced the injunction is the one mapped across the WEXMAC-TITUS census in 2026-09-11–gilroy-williamsport-nepa-injunctions-share-categorical-exclusion-theory.

Independently verified beyond the ledger’s original sourcing. The $9,975,502.40 figure, the September 4 signing, the $28 million non-competed vehicle ceiling, the September 3, 2027 period of performance, and the $225.4M-spent / $753.4M-exposure arithmetic were confirmed against Project Salt Box’s reporting on 2026-09-20; the same contract was independently noted in Austin Kocher’s September 19, 2026 immigration-numbers digest. The judicial bar and the underlying Maryland suit are tier-1 sourced (Washington Post, March 11, 2026).

Open: the USAspending record for the Teya task order (to confirm whether additional orders have issued since September 4), the funded-versus-option split on KVG’s $641 million ceiling under the injunction, and the current posture of the Maryland litigation — whether the preliminary injunction remains in force, whether ICE has appealed, and what conditions the court set for lifting it.