A government contractor says White House adviser Stephen Miller "wanted it to be cruel" when the administration planned to turn warehouses into immigrant detention centers.
The contractor, whose company was approached to convert several warehouses into Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, spoke to NPR for an investigation published Thursday. He asked to remain anonymous because he feared retaliation from the government.
The Department of Homeland Security bought 11 warehouses earlier this year and spent about $1 billion on them as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort, NPR reported.
"No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people," the contractor told NPR.
At a meeting with a DHS deputy director, the contractor said, his company proposed camps in Texas similar to those used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would be more humane.
The contractor said that idea was quickly shot down. Miller did not attend the meeting, but the company was told the camps were not what Miller wanted.
"Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted," the contractor said, describing what he took away from the meeting.
"Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director," he said.
"What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I've never been in that position before," the contractor added.
"It simply isn't true and this is defamatory," White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement to NPR, calling the contractor's comments "false hearsay" from "someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller."
"[Miller] has never made any remarks to anyone about wanting illegal aliens to have worse detention facility conditions," Bis added.
The White House did not respond to NPR's repeated requests to speak with Miller directly, the outlet reported.
"[E]veryone knew the warehouse plan was insane but Miller demanded inhumanity," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration policy expert at the American Immigration Council, wrote on Bluesky as he shared the NPR report.
A former DHS official who served during Trump's first term told NPR they often heard higher-ups in the administration talk about wanting to showcase the difficult conditions immigrants were held in. That official was not in the meeting the contractor described.
"It was really about the optics of people being kept in these cages and these large warehouses," Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box, a group that tracks ICE's expansion, told NPR.
The plan stalled after several state attorneys general sued over environmental concerns, NPR reported. In Maryland, Arizona, and New Jersey, DHS either agreed or a judge ordered it to stop converting warehouses until environmental reviews are finished.
Seven of the warehouses are now listed for sale at an asking price below what ICE paid, according to Project Salt Box.
"ICE effectively set millions of dollars on fire for a complete boondoggle," Reichlin-Melnick wrote in a follow-up post.
NPR reported that DHS is holding onto a few warehouses, including one in Roxbury, N.J. The outlet found signs that ICE has been using the Roxbury warehouse to hold people, even though a court order bars the government from converting it into a detention center.
"We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday, quite honestly. We need our state to aggressively pursue this investigation and demand to get inside," Sandra Wittner, a Democratic council member in nearby Dover, told NPR.
