'Irony is thick': ICE jail contract given to man convicted of using undocumented workers

On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.

Two people with direct knowledge of the award and two familiar with the company told ProPublica that Disaster Management Group would help build the new facility, receiving a substantial chunk of the more than $1.2 billion the government has allocated for the project.

“The idea that you could use illegal labor and then sell services to ICE, the irony is thick,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and later under President Joe Biden, referring to the immigration case involving TentLogix, the company Albers once co-owned.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Disaster Management said that Albers and Disaster Management had been dropped from the DHS’ investigation of TentLogix and exonerated. Upon learning of illegal actions by TentLogix’s co-founder, the spokesperson said, “Mr. Albers parted ways as a minority and non-operating owner of TentLogix.”

The spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions about Disaster Management’s role in the detention camp at Fort Bliss, saying only that the company “is proud to support projects of national importance for nearly 20 years.”

The White House didn’t answer questions about Disaster Management or Albers, referring ProPublica to the DOD and DHS, neither of which provided comment.

The new migrant detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to hold up to 5,000 people. The prime contractor is Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics, and people with direct knowledge of the work at Fort Bliss told ProPublica that Amentum, a major engineering and technology services contractor, will be another subcontractor.

Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum replied to questions from ProPublica about the project.

Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. Since 2020, it’s won over $500 million in government contracting work, mostly to construct lodgings for a U.S. program to resettle Afghan refugees.

Last year, the Department of Labor announced that it had found Disaster Management and subcontractors it worked with on the Afghan refugee contract violated federal labor laws, including those on minimum wages and overtime. The agency recovered nearly $16 million in pay for workers, and Disaster Management signed a compliance agreement with the agency designed to prevent further violations. The company didn’t respond to questions about the case.

Albers’ ties to TentLogix wouldn’t have excluded him or Disaster Management from other government contracting work, explained Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project On Government Oversight.

TentLogix reported its criminal conviction in the federal contracting database, but Albers and his other businesses are considered separate legal entities. Companies awarded federal contracts are required to certify that they operate with a satisfactory record of business ethics, but “a lot of things are not required to be reported,” Amey said. “I don’t even think this would appear on the radar of a contracting officer.”

Still, there’s a web of connections between TentLogix and Disaster Management. Albers was one of TentLogix’s two directors when it pleaded guilty to violating immigration law. The other, Gary Hendry, co-founded Disaster Management with Albers, and the two were once brothers-in-law. When immigration authorities raided TentLogix in 2018, it shared an address with Disaster Management.

The raid followed a 2016 Homeland Security Investigations audit of Tentlogix, which found the company had 96 undocumented employees on its books. According to court records, Hendry then attempted to deceive investigators by creating a shell company and transferring the undocumented workers to that entity to conceal them from Homeland Security Investigations auditors. But the agency discovered the scheme and found undocumented workers at the company’s site when officials raided it in 2018. That year, Albers was listed as one of four officers on the company’s corporate filings.

In 2019, Hendry pleaded guilty to immigration charges alongside another company officer and was sentenced to a year in prison. (He served a little over three months, then was granted an early release because of the pandemic.) TentLogix, the corporate entity, also pleaded guilty and was ordered to forfeit over $3 million. Although Albers was not personally charged, he signed off on the company’s guilty plea, court records show. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

Hendry did not respond to a request for comment.

Disaster Management’s federal contracting work has been lucrative for Albers. Last year, he purchased a $30 million house in Jupiter, Florida, that then ranked as the area’s most expensive home.

Albers also has recently become a large donor to Republican campaigns, to which he’s given more than $150,000 in the last year alone. He and his wife spent election night at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 and once co-chaired a charity fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club with the president’s son, Eric, and his wife. They attended the “Crypto Ball,” a cryptocurrency event sponsored by Trump supporters in the digital currency industry; participants paid between $2,500 and $1 million for tickets. (The Trump Organization did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Since late last year, Disaster Management has spent $210,000 lobbying Congress and the administration on immigration-related issues, including “funding related to temporary facilities.” The company had no prior history of lobbying, according to federal disclosures.

Disaster Management’s share of the immigration detention contract for Fort Bliss could rank among the company’s largest contracts.

The Fort Bliss award comes as immigration arrests have soared in recent months and ICE is running low on space to hold everyone it has detained. In the past, those arrested by ICE would mostly be housed in brick-and-mortar detention facilities.

But in its urgency to increase deportations, the Trump administration has turned to contractors to build so-called soft-sided facilities — tents with rigid structures inside — that can be set up much more quickly.

The administration has eyed military bases as locations to set up these new detention camps. In April, ICE announced a $3.8 billion award to build such a facility to Deployed Resources, which had operated the lion’s share of the soft-sided facilities used in the past to temporarily house immigrants entering the country along the southern border.

ICE abruptly canceled that contract just days after it was announced without explanation. Now it appears Disaster Management could do much of that work. An industry insider estimated to ProPublica that Disaster Management’s slice of the $1.2 billion contract at Fort Bliss could be worth hundreds of millions for the company in the next year, though it’s not clear how the three contractors will split the work. Bloomberg first reported the total value of the Fort Bliss contract.

The facility at Fort Bliss is expected to be the first of many. Earlier in the month, Trump signed a spending bill that allocates $45 billion to build new migrant detention sites. Experts estimate this could roughly double the country’s capacity for immigration detention from around 50,000 people to more than 100,000.