DHS signs over $7 billion in contracts to expand immigration detention
The vans, which would be operated by GTI — the transportation subsidiary of private prison contractor GEO Group — are described in government paperwork first obtained by the watchdog group Project Salt Box. “What they describe is a network of vans that would follow officers into the field as they make these arrests,” said Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box and a former military intelligence analyst. “Very conspicuously missing from this description was: What are the standards? You know, how long a person can be kept in a van. How are people using the bathroom? How are they feeding them?”
The only conditions spelled out in the document are that the vans will be used “until full” or until the operation ends, and that women cannot be held in them for more than 10 hours. Neither ICE nor the GEO Group responded to NPR’s requests for comment.
On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security signed construction contracts worth over $7 billion to expand immigration detention in New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida and California, and announced additional expansion in Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania. The mobile-detention proposal is part of the same broader expansion that began last year when ICE became the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, supplemented by $75 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The plan follows the largely failed strategy of converting warehouses into mega detention centers. ICE had purchased large warehouses nationwide for that purpose, but the project drew widespread protests and lawsuits from several states, including Maryland. According to data gathered by Project Salt Box, ICE is now selling most of the warehouses it purchased.
Linda Powell, a resident of Williamsport, Maryland, where ICE had recently purchased a warehouse, captured the local reaction in March. “I don’t understand. What do we need this for?” she told NPR. “We don’t need it here.”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has described the deportation campaign in industrial terms, saying he wanted squads of trucks rounding up immigrants and the process to run like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
Wriston said the focus on Pennsylvania reflects a practical challenge: the state is large and many local police departments are not allowed to work with ICE, which means detained immigrants cannot be held at local jails.
ICE’s detention system is operating at 68,000 beds, below the 100,000 operational beds the agency is working toward. In an August earnings call, an investor asked GEO Group CEO George Zoley whether ICE was still aiming to reach that number. “I think so, for the most part,” Zoley responded. “So they have another 30,000 or so more beds to go.”
At the same time, the Trump administration is detaining immigrants at record numbers — roughly 100,000 people arrested in the last two months. Of the tens of thousands of people currently in ICE detention, around 70% have no criminal record.
Wriston said the need for mobile detention centers indicates these crackdowns aren’t necessarily going after hardened criminals, as President Trump has said in the past. “If this were targeted immigration enforcement, if this were truly ‘worst of the worst’-type enforcement, it stands to reason that ICE would have a list of a couple of names, and then an officer or a team of officers would go out and make an arrest,” he said. “This describes sweeps, immigration sweeps.”
Wriston said the mobile-detention concept illustrates the scope of the mass deportation campaign.