U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering ways to expand capacity at immigrant detention facilities to accommodate 125,000 people, as well as buying up existing privately owned facilities, according to four sources with knowledge of or involved in planning. Buying rather than leasing detention facilities will give ICE greater control over operations that would otherwise fall under state and local governments’ purview, sources said.
As the Trump administration pushes further toward the White House’s mass deportation effort, the federal agency is looking at ways to add space to its existing network of detention sites and gain greater control of those sites.
“The government is going to buy all of the properties that GEO Group and CoreCivic own,” one source said in a phone call. Three others confirmed that purchasing properties is a plan under serious consideration and is already seeing early movement.
The Washington Examiner learned that while ICE has publicly disclosed plans to buy roughly 10 warehouses and convert them into immigrant holding sites, another component of that plan focuses on gaining control of the land and buildings where existing detention sites are located.
Doing so would give the federal government control over facilities that presently fall under state rules.
Warehouses becomes focus of ICE
ICE is in its second year of carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation quest. The federal agency is in the process of adding more than 10,000 new deportation officers to its 6,500 existing officers last year, and arrested hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in the first year. As more officers join the workforce, the number of illegal immigrants arrested is likely to grow, prompting the agency to require more detention space.
Detention is the middle step that must run smoothly in order for the growing number of ICE officers to continue making arrests. While in detention, immigrants will appear before an immigration judge who will determine if they will be removed from the country. Once a person is ordered to be removed, ICE will wait until it has the plane or transportation needed to repatriate the person to their home country.
An internal ICE document that the Washington Examiner obtained showed the agency’s plan to reengineer detention practices with $38 billion in funding that it received in last year’s One Big, Beautiful Bill.
As part of the overhaul, ICE will acquire and renovate eight large-scale detention centers and 16 facilities where people in custody are processed, as well as 10 “turnkey” facilities that it already has. Those changes are expected to bring the total to 92,600 beds, up from roughly 50,000 at the start of Trump’s second term.
“This is likely to be the big detention story of 2026 — the literal warehousing of people in converted buildings,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a prominent immigrant rights lawyer and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote in a post.
Why owning detention sites is beneficial
Separately, ICE uses roughly 30 existing immigrant detention sites nationwide that are owned and operated by private contractors that the federal agency has paid to do so. It also relies on agreements with county jails in many states to detain illegal immigrants.
GEO Group and CoreCivic are the largest government contractors assisting ICE with detention, according to a second person familiar with the plans. As of early 2026, GEO Group’s portfolio included approximately 20 ICE detention or staging sites where illegal immigrants are held pending court proceedings. CoreCivic owned and oversaw roughly 10 detention facilities.
ICE wants to remake these existing immigration detention sites to give the federal government far more control over them so that they are not beholden to state policies.
In blue states, such as California and New Jersey, this means those federal detention sites are subject to all state regulations, including unannounced state inspections. Facilities would be required to meet the National Detention Standards, the federally imposed bare minimum for facilities where people are detained.
“The state DOJ could just come in and inspect and say, ‘We’re going to inspect your chemical storage.’ But that was just their way to get in the door, and they’d start looking at other conditions of confinement and all that,” the first source said. “The government’s idea is if we buy all these facilities, they become federal property. Then we contract back with the company to run the facility.”
“The state has absolutely no jurisdiction over them whatsoever,” in that case, the source continued.
Federally owned detention sites have their own requirements, including fencing, the distance they are set back from property lines and roads, and security. Given recent incursions through the past decade during which activists and rioters have carried out attacks on ICE offices and facilities, including in Dallas, Denver, Chicago, and Portland, ICE would prefer stronger regulations to keep detainees, staff, and contractors safe, the previous source elaborated.
For example, amid security concerns at a GEO Group-run facility in California, ICE had to ask the city for permission to install a fence, a type of legal barrier that could be avoided if the government owned each site.
“The government will own this property, and they don’t have to abide by the state regulations or the city regulations or city codes to keep the protesters away or secure the property to what works for them best,” the first person added.
That change is not likely to sit well with immigration attorneys and immigrant rights activists.
Buying up current sites means the federal government would not need permits to operate those facilities or business licenses. That in itself would avoid a “big hassle,” even in red states.
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Holding sites for immigrants were owned and operated by the federal government until more than two decades ago, when they were outsourced to private contractors.
The same contractors, and possibly new ones, will be brought back in by ICE to staff those facilities, including food, security, medical services, and more.