Topline
The Trump administration is exploring possibly buying large warehouses originally designed for large shipping companies like Amazon to use as holding centers for immigrants swept up by ICE arrests, NBC News reported Friday citing two unnamed government sources.
President President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour a migrant detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
AFP via Getty Images
Key Facts
Described by a Department of Homeland Security official as “mega detention centers,” the warehouses would be retrofitted to serve as holding facilities and vastly increase the amount of people who could be detained at a time.
Warehouses designed for but never used by Amazon (the company has denied any involvement in this plan) are among the options being considered, the report said, suggesting facilities between 600,000 and millions of square feet are on the table.
Current detention centers aren’t nearly that large—one in Tacoma, Washington, is 277,000 square feet, while another in El Paso, Texas, is 153,000 square feet and a facility in the Florida everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” has about 158,000 square feet of housing space.
A White House official told NBC that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would pay for the warehouses using money allocated in Trump’s large spending bill (which upped the budget for immigrant detention by $45 billion over the next three years), and that the warehouses would be owned by the federal government outright, not contracted through states or private prisons.
How much the warehouses could cost or where exactly they would be is not clear, but NBC reported locations near airports in the South where immigrants are most often deported are the most likely.
Representatives for the White House deferred questions to, Homeland Security which did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment Friday.
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Big Number
66,000. That’s how many detainees were in ICE custody as of this week, CBS News reported, a record high. That number could reach as high as 107,000 by January, according to the Migration Policy Institute.