Michael Wriston, Founder and Editor of Project Salt Box, Has Issues a Report Today on the Most Recent Actiities of ICE.

It’s Been Reported that ICE Agents in Maine Now are Equipped With Body Cameras; Let’s Hope that Someone Instructed them to Turn Them On.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is pressing the companies that would build its new detention housing to work faster, cutting its own construction timeline in half and offering higher scores in the competition to bidders who commit to the most aggressive schedule according to a report issued late this afternoon by Michael Wriston, founder and editor of Project Salt Box, (PSB), a nonprofit that monitors the activities of ICE nationwide.

“The condensed timing, first detailed in the agency’s August 13 answers to contractors’ questions is the latest glimpse into a program through which ICE intends to build immgrant detention space on land it aleady owns — the approach it has ostensibly turned to after lawsuits and political pressure stalled earlier efforts to convert warehouses it had purchased for over $1 billion and to route the work through a Navy construction program.

“In its written responses, the agency struck the two-year deadline to design and build a secure housing unit – a wing of individual cells – and replaced it with one year, keeping the financial penalties for finishing late.  The documents for the program’s only funded unit at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Los Fresnos, Texas, go further, inviting bidders to propose an even shorter ‘accelerated” schedule  – one that would count in their favor and that the government would then hold them to.

In its July 2026 update, TRAC listed a capacity of 1,175 people at Port Isabel.  KRGV, a local news station, counted more than a thousand people in custody there during a tour this summer.  The Texas Tribune has  documented a long record of complaints over conditions and medical care at the facility and people have died after being held there, among them Adiran Adreas Florian, an 85 year old German who died in June after more than seven months hospitalized in ICE custody.

Even as it pressed for speed, the agency refused the construction methods that could reasonably deliver it, ruling out any project start before a design is finished, rejecting the purchase of materials or the off-site fabrication of components during the design phase and declining to credit the modular or prefabricated approaches that let bulders move quickly,

The answers, which also pushed the bid deadline to August 31, cleared up contradictions PSB identified when the solicitation was first posted in July.  The agency said the program could be worth as much as $10 billion, not the $300 million figure that appears elsewhere in the same document and that one company could win as many as two of the contracts.  It also lowered the financial bar to compete, cutting the guarantee that a job will be finished if the builder fails – called a bond – from $10 billion to $2 billion.

The Wriston report continues: Outside one grouping the soliciation labels “Mega Hub DC,” ICE has split the work by region, with each contract covering a separate geographic area.  That grouping includes seven sites into a single contract.

According to the contracting documents, one company would build all of them – ‘concurrently,” as ICE put it – in Broadview Ill, outside Chicago; Oakdale, La; Huntsville, Texas; Honolulu, Aguadilla, PR; St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands and the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Five of the seven have no ICE-owned detention facility today.

At Guantanamo, a presidential memorandum in January 2025 ordered the migrant operations center expanded to full capacity, a buildup the Trump Administration said would hold 30,000 people.

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