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The federal government is marketing seven warehouses ICE bought to hold immigrants, two of them in Georgia, after a federal watchdog found the agency had already sunk more than $20 million into sites it no longer plans to use.
The ICE warehouse sale now underway is the clearest sign yet that the Department of Homeland Security has given up on the boldest piece of its detention build-out: turning giant distribution centers into mass holding sites. Seven warehouses bought for detention in Georgia, Utah, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas are being offered to private buyers, and CBS News Atlanta reported on Nov. 12 that bidding on the two Georgia properties, in Social Circle and Oakwood, was set to end that Thursday. What the government recovers will put a price on an abandoned experiment, but where the money went next says more about detention’s future.
The ICE warehouse sale by the numbers
The Government Accountability Office laid out the numbers in a Sept. 24 report. ICE bought 11 warehouses for about $1.07 billion, told GAO in June that it was working to sell seven of them, and reported more than $20 million in costs it cannot recover on those seven, mostly zoning assessments and security. GAO warned that losses could grow if the buildings sell for less than ICE paid.
The commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield is marketing the properties as a “Federal Warehouse Portfolio” with no published asking prices, KSL reported in October. Bisnow, a commercial real estate news outlet, calculated that the government paid $706.5 million for the seven.
| Site | Reported purchase price | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Salt Lake City, Utah | $145.4 million | AP; KSL |
| Social Circle, Ga. | $128.5 million | Walton Tribune |
| Socorro, Texas (three buildings) | $122 million | AP |
| Tremont Township, Pa. | $119.5 million | KSL |
| Hamburg, Pa. | $87 million | KSL |
| Oakwood (Flowery Branch address), Ga. | $68.2 million | CBS News Atlanta, citing a deed |
| Romulus, Mich. | $34.7 million | AP |
Those reported prices add up to about $705 million, a calculation that lines up closely with Bisnow’s figure.
Why the warehouse detention centers never opened
The Georgia sites show the scale ICE had in mind. Social Circle was expected to hold 7,500 to 10,000 detainees, and Oakwood was planned as a processing center where people would stay three to seven days, with 1,000 to 1,500 held on an average day, according to CBS News Atlanta. Social Circle, a town of a little more than 5,000, cut off water to its site in March until ICE showed how it would stay within water and sewer capacity, and a federal court in the Middle District of Georgia stayed related litigation in September with an order barring conversion of the building during the stay, the Walton Tribune reported.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin paused the roughly $38 billion expansion plan in April to review contracts signed under his predecessor, Kristi Noem, CBS reported. GAO found ICE expanded without a strategic plan, consistent bed-space goals or analysis comparing costly new sites with cheaper options. DHS agreed with GAO’s single recommendation to write such a plan, but ICE does not expect to finish it until Aug. 31, 2027. DHS has defended the spending, telling CBS News that “the costs cited in the GAO report were appropriate and necessary.”
Fewer warehouses does not mean less detention
The sale is not a retreat from detention. DHS said in June it was “moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners,” according to the Associated Press, and the money has followed that line. CoreCivic said it sold four facilities with 7,187 beds to the federal government in the third quarter for $2.2 billion, part of the trend covered in CoreCivic’s push to close detention sales, and the $495.6 million Appleton, Minn., purchase is already drawing Senate scrutiny.
The practical effect for people in removal proceedings is that new capacity is landing in finished prisons, including rural sites such as Appleton, rather than in warehouses near Atlanta, Detroit or Salt Lake City. The list has also shifted. The AP’s June report counted a New Jersey warehouse among those to be shed, but it is not among the seven now on the market, and ICE has since revived its Roxbury, N.J., detention plan. Other projects, including San Antonio and Surprise, Ariz., are moving through environmental review.
What comes next
- Sale prices: whether winning bids recover what ICE paid will determine if the $20 million GAO counted becomes a much larger loss. GAO Director Heather MacLeod told CBS News another review is underway.
- Oversight: purchase decisions are likely to be revisited in the new Congress that convenes in January, following the pattern of record-preservation demands already sent over Appleton.
- ICE’s strategic plan: due by Aug. 31, 2027, under the timeline DHS gave GAO, even as the $45 billion for detention in the 2025 reconciliation law, as reported by CBS News, is already being spent.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- GAO, “Immigration Detention: Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars,” GAO-26-108663 (Sept. 24, 2026)
- CBS News Atlanta, “Georgia warehouses purchased by ICE to turn into detention centers up for sale after plan scrapped” (Nov. 12, 2026)
- CBS News, “ICE wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in rapid push to expand detention capacity, government watchdog finds” (Sept. 29, 2026)
- KSL, “Former proposed ICE detention center site in Salt Lake now up for sale” (Oct. 21, 2026)
- Bisnow, “Cushman & Wakefield Wins Assignment To Sell Would-Be ICE Detention Facilities” (Sept. 30, 2026)
- CoreCivic, “CoreCivic Reports Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results” (Nov. 4, 2026)
- Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, “Federal officials plan to offload some warehouses purchased for immigrant detention” (June 24, 2026)
- Walton Tribune via Monroe Local, “Social Circle warehouse up for sale as ICE interest melts away” (Oct. 8, 2026)
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