Outrage as Trump cronies buy ICE warehouses for 10x markup: 'A new level of corruption'

In what More Perfect Union described as a “new level of corruption” for the Trump administration, an investigation by the progressive news outlet revealed how members of the president’s inner circle are cashing in on the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of warehouses for immigrant detention.

It was reported earlier this year that under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, who has since been fired, DHS was planning to spend nearly $40 billion to buy up dozens of warehouses around the US to convert them into makeshift detention camps that could each hold anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.

But when Mae Ryan, a reporter at More Perfect Union, looked into the contracts, she said she “noticed something weird.”

“Many of these warehouses had been sitting on the market for years,” she explained in a video posted Wednesday. “Now DHS was buying them at a massive markup.”

She pointed to one warehouse in Socorro, Texas, recently valued at $11 million, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased from the company El Paso Logistics II LLC for $123 million—more than a 1,000% profit.

According to Michael Wriston, an ex-military analyst and investigative journalist who tracked the enormous markups for several of these warehouse purchases for his website Project Salt Box back in March, “across more than a dozen warehouse acquisitions, ICE paid prices that exceeded both prior property valuations and recent market comparables at nearly every site.”

For one warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, previously valued at just under $12 million, ICE paid over $70 million. For another in Social Circle, Georgia, valued at about $30 million, the agency paid nearly $130 million.

Many of the warehouses that raked in obscene taxpayer-funded purchases by DHS were owned by financial institutions with deep connections to the Trump administration, Ryan explained.

One warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, valued at about $54.6 million in 2025, inexplicably sold to ICE for over $129 million, more than double. Its majority owner was the investment bank Goldman Sachs, where many Trump appointees during his first term—including former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Trump financial adviser Gary Cohn—were formerly employed.

ICE paid double for another warehouse in Tremont, Pennsylvania, buying it for nearly $120 million despite a valuation of about $60 million. It was owned by the private capital firm Blue Owl, where at least 33 members of Trump’s administration have investments in its funds, including the president himself, who has about $5 million invested in the firm.

Another in Salt Lake City, valued at just $97 million, was purchased by ICE for $145 million, and the agency now plans to convert it into a 10,000-bed facility. It was owned by Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump about $2.5 billion over the past two decades.

Wriston told More Perfect Union that the financial payout to Trump allies was top of mind for DHS as it drew up the controversial warehouse plan.

“ICE doesn’t necessarily want to be using warehouses,” he said. “The plan came from folks very close to the White House who were sitting on properties that were causing them losses every year. And the decision was made to buy them at taxpayer expense.”

It’s part of a larger pattern of ICE contracts being distributed to companies that have given major financial support to Trump.

According to an investigation in March by OpenSecrets, the GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies that have collectively received more than $2.8 billion in ICE contracts, each donated $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. The GEO Group’s employee-funded political action committee contributed $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. during his reelection campaign in 2024.

The vast majority of those who have been detained during Trump’s second term have had no criminal records, despite claims by the administration that they are targeting “the worst of the worst” criminals for deportation.

Those who have been held in ICE detention centers—often without any due process or access to a lawyer—have consistently reported being held in horrendous conditions, denied access to basic food, sanitation, and medical care, and subject to torture and sexual assault by guards.

DHS has reportedly spent only about $1 billion of the more than $38 billion allotted for immigration detention warehouses so far. According to The New York Times, the administration is hoping to build a mass detention system that could stuff these warehouses with over 100,000 detainees at a time across more than 20 facilities.

According to Wriston’s running tracker of ICE warehouse sales, at least 13 purchases have been canceled, in many cases due to public backlash. Still, the administration has already purchased enough warehouse space to hold more than 41,500 people at once.

“What we’re seeing happen now—I never in a million years envisioned seeing this happen on US soil,” Wriston said. “Never. Never once.”