President Donald Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly started to "abandon" one of its big projects, The New York Times reported on Thursday — and one legal expert is gobsmacked at the reversal.
Specifically, after ICE spent around $1 billion to buy up nearly a dozen mega-warehouses that it planned to convert into detention centers, they are now trying to offload seven of them, either to other federal agencies or to private buyers.
This move, noted the report, "is a rejection of a signature initiative under the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, who pushed the boundaries of what the government can do to aggressively round up potential deportees," as newly appointed Secretary Markwayne Mullin "has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement."
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick posted on X that the turnabout is a massive deal.
"This is HUGE," said Reichlin-Melnick. "After spending over $1 BILLION on the purchase of multiple commercial warehouses that ICE planned to convert into the largest jails/prisons in the nation, ICE is now largely abandoning the idea and will aim to sell off multiple warehouses at a loss."
Even before now, there were signs the federal government was abandoning the idea of converting warehouses to immigrant jails, and it ran into massive problems.
For one, in some cases ICE was prevented from buying warehouses in the first place because local owners opposed selling, or in one case in Oklahoma, a tribal nation bought it first to stop them. They also had to contend with lawsuits, including one brought by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.