Feds plan to sell three warehouses near El Paso it bought for migrant detention centers, Congress member says
By Alejandro Santos Cid and Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune
August 11, 2026
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is planning to sell three warehouses in El Paso County it purchased last year for $123 million to convert into detention centers that could hold more than 8,000 immigrants awaiting deportation, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said on Tuesday.
The announcement marks the latest shift in DHS strategy under its current head, Markwayne Mullin, who is trying to sell most of the warehouses the agency purchased during former Secretary Kristi Noem’s yearlong tenure — a strategy that triggered lawsuits and opposition from inside and outside the Republican Party.
Escobar said in a statement that DHS will transfer the warehouses to the U.S. General Services Administration to sell.
“This means the warehouses will be put up for sale and they will no longer be used by the federal government for detention purposes,” she said.
A spokesperson for DHS said in a statement in late July that the Trump administration “is always evaluating the best methods” to find, arrest and deport immigrants with a criminal history.
“DHS is moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners,” the statement said.
Before her firing in March, Noem led the purchase of at least 11 warehouses across the country at a cost of more than $1 billion, aimed at increasing the agency’s detention capacity amid the mass deportation program launched by President Donald Trump when he returned to the White House.
Located in Socorro, a small city southeast of El Paso, the warehouses are just the latest that the government is trying to offload. The New York Times reported that DHS has sought to get rid of seven others, planning to either sell them at a loss or transfer them to other federal agencies: in Romulus, Mich.; Social Circle and Flowery Branch, Ga.; Hamburg and Tremont, Pa.; Salt Lake City; and Roxbury, N.J.
That leaves three remaining warehouses, including one in east San Antonio for which DHS paid $66.11 million last year. The agency has not publicly addressed what it intends to do with the building.
Homeland Security had planned to spend $38 billion to convert the warehouses into detention centers with space to hold thousands of immigrants. The agency has struggled to find enough detention space to handle the huge increase in detainees since the mass deportation push began.
At its peak in mid-January, DHS detention centers held more than 70,000 people who awaited deportation or some judicial process, a number that fell short of the agency’s own original goal of building capacity for 100,000 detainees by the end of the year.
Under Noem, DHS spent above the market price and previous appraisals for the 11 warehouses, according to a comparison of state tax and land records and commercial sales done by Project Salt Box, an independent Maryland newsroom focused on monitoring DHS fiscal accountability through public records.
After Mullin replaced Noem as DHS secretary, the agency’s own internal watchdog launched an audit into the warehouse’s purchase in May. Days later, Mullin told the House Homeland Security Committee that the department was canceling most pending contracts initiated under Noem.
Meanwhile, the plan met resistance from local and state authorities, nearby residents, human rights advocates and environmentalists, who opposed the idea of confining thousands of human beings in buildings meant for industrial purposes that didn’t have the proper plumbing, ventilation or sanitary conditions.
Even some Republican leaders opposed the plan, worried about overwhelmed communities, ramped up public spending and potential protests against the facilities.
Judges in Maryland, New Jersey and Michigan ruled that the agency had not assessed the environmental impacts of converting warehouses to detention centers, blocking the retrofitting.
In El Paso, local leaders opposed ICE’s warehouse plan from the beginning, arguing that Socorro, a desert town with less than 40,000 residents that has historically suffered water scarcity, didn’t have the infrastructure to host 8,500 detainees — equal to about a quarter of its current population.
“The community has also faced challenges with water, wastewater, and general infrastructure, making the purchase of these facilities for detention a terrible idea to begin with, threatening their ability to execute on their future plans and growth,” Escobar said.
In June, Escobar met with acting ICE Director David Venturella to discuss the issue, and said later at a press conference that the agency had greatly scaled down the number of detainees it would hold there and would mostly use the structures for training, offices and conference rooms.
El Paso already houses the country’s largest immigration detention center, Camp East Montana, which has become the focus of intense public scrutiny after the death of three detainees and repeated reports of unsanitary conditions, poor food, inadequate medical care and security vulnerabilities.
The camp’s conditions have sparked a congressionally-mandated inspection that found dozens of violations in April, a lawsuit by a group of legal and civil rights organizations a month later, and an audit by a federal watchdog that determined DHS had wasted up to $11.5 million of taxpayer money during the facility’s first two weeks of operations while its cells were still empty.
According to public documents published on July 16, DHS’ new plan for El Paso is to adapt its existing facilities at the El Paso Service Processing Center to hold more detainees, building a new unit consisting of 26 modular cells.
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.