Documents reveal ICE plans to spend $38.3bn converting warehouses across US into detention centers
USCIS expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire.
The documents, published on the state’s website yesterday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, plus an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
According to an overview of the plans, which were first reported by the Washington Post, ICE would buy and convert 16 buildings across the US into regional processing centers, each holding 1,000 to 1,500 people at a time. Another eight large-scale detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people at a time, and serve as “the primary locations” for deportations. Detainees would spend an average of three to seven days at the processing sites before being transported to the larger facilities, where they would be held about 60 days before being deported.
The new model for increasing detention space is needed, according to the document, due to a surge in ICE hires and an anticipated rise in arrests.
Key events
George Chidi
On the brink of her department being shut down in a congressional impasse over the conduct of immigration agents in her charge, Noem held the press conference in a secure facility in Arizona, bussing journalists to the building.
Noem said she spoke with Maricopa county recorder Justin Heap before the press conference held in Arizona. County supervisors – Republicans and Democrats – have threatened to remove the former Republican state representative from office after a year of contentious relations, in which Heap has refused to respond to questions from elected officials and his chief of staff discussed picking sides “in the coming civil war”.
Heap has expressed an intent to give Noem access to the county’s voter rolls, which is strongly opposed by elected leaders out of concern for protecting personal information from disclosure.
Noem also met with state senator John Gillette, a far-right Republican and army veteran who In September 2025 called for Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington to be executed for encouraging anti-Trump protests.
George Chidi
The Save America Act would require all voters to present proof of citizenship at the time of registration and photo ID to vote. The Brennan Center estimates that 21 million US citizens of voting age have neither a passport nor a copy of their birth certificate readily available.
The legislation requires states to share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security to compare it with federal databases, while placing no restrictions on what the department might do with the information. If passed, the law would also subject elections officials to as much as five years in prison if they registered someone to vote without the required documentation, even if the registrant is a citizen and eligible to vote.
Implementation of the requirements in the original bill, including the proof of citizenship requirements, would take effect immediately, leaving states scrambling to align their voting systems to the new law.
George Chidi
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem touted the virtues of the Save America Act, a package of election legislation passed largely by Republicans in the US House this week that is almost certainly dead on arrival in the Senate.
“Although the constitution gives states the primary responsibility for running their elections, Congress also gives authorities and duties to the federal government,” Noem said at a press conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday. “Now, as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, those authorities lie within my department and the responsibility lies with me.”
Noem described the legislation as “commonsense” and “extremely popular with American citizens”, citing polls showing strong public support for voter ID. “It’s a fact that non-citizens have been voting in our elections. They’ve been registered and they have voted from state to state,” she added, citing incidents in Maryland and Kansas.
Noem and other administration officials have argued against existing evidence that non-citizens are voting in meaningful numbers.
Audits by several states have consistently shown that the number of incidents has been in single or double digits, with many people registering by mistake and never voting at all. For example, a 2022 audit of voter rolls in Georgia following conservative reaction to Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden showed just 20 non-citizens enrolled out of 8.2 million people. Only nine had voted.
Trump addresses military families at Fort Bragg
Donald Trump is now addressing military families at the Fort Bragg military base in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The president claimed that if Democrats win big in the 2026 midterm elections, the US military will be “severely disturbed”.
“We rebuilt it in my first time, and now we’re making it stronger, bigger, better than ever before,” he added.
Lucy Campbell
The Department of Justice filed a new lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of failing to hand over documents and comply with a federal investigation into alleged racial discrimination in its admissions process, in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s long-running legal pursuit of the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard stressed in a statement that it was responding to inquiries “in good faith” and prepared to engage “according to the process required by law”.
In its lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Massachusetts on Friday, the justice department accuses Harvard of failing for over 10 months to comply with the government’s request to provide documents, including applicant-level admissions data, and other records and information pertaining to the investigation.
“Harvard has thwarted the Department’s efforts to investigate potential discrimination,” the justice department claimed in the filing. “It has slow-walked the pace of production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions … The repeatedly extended deadlines for document production have long passed.”
Trump is ‘tearing apart’ transatlantic partnership, AOC warns
Jakub Krupa
In a Q&A during a panel on populism earlier, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about her presence at the Munich Security Conference and the signal she wants to send by being involved in these discussions here.
She said:
“I think this is a moment where we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the transatlantic partnership, rip up every democratic norm, and … really calling into question, as was mentioned by Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum, the rules based order that we have, or, question mark, do we have?”
She laid out her pitch for the need to address hypocrisies in the international order:
“But that does not mean that the majority of Americans are ready to walk away from a rules-based order and that we’re ready to walk away from our commitment to democracy.
I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.
And so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies … when, too often, in the west, we’d look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes, whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonise Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide.
Hypocrisies are our vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies.
And so I think many of us are here to say we are here and we are ready for the next chapter, not to have the world turn to isolation, but to deepen our partnership on greater and increase commitment to integrity to our values.”
She got a good reception from the audience here with a round of applause.
Trump says US is ‘negotiating right now for Greenland’
Asked about Greenland as he left for Fort Bragg, Donald Trump said:
Well, I think Greenland’s going to want us. We get along very well with Europe. We’ll see how it all works out. We’re negotiating right now for Greenland.
Donald Trump said earlier today that Volodymyr Zelenskyy will miss “a great opportunity” for peace if he doesn’t “get moving”, claiming that Russia wants to make a deal amid its ongoing war in Ukraine.
Trump told reporters at the White House:
Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelenskyy’s going to have to get moving. Otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.
Since returning to office, the US president has repeatedly put the onus on Ukraine to secure peace, rather than squarely on Russia, the aggressor that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago.
Documents reveal ICE plans to spend $38.3bn converting warehouses across US into detention centers
USCIS expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire.
The documents, published on the state’s website yesterday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, plus an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
According to an overview of the plans, which were first reported by the Washington Post, ICE would buy and convert 16 buildings across the US into regional processing centers, each holding 1,000 to 1,500 people at a time. Another eight large-scale detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people at a time, and serve as “the primary locations” for deportations. Detainees would spend an average of three to seven days at the processing sites before being transported to the larger facilities, where they would be held about 60 days before being deported.
The new model for increasing detention space is needed, according to the document, due to a surge in ICE hires and an anticipated rise in arrests.
Noem revokes TPS for Yemen, leaving thousands in limbo
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for Yemen on Friday. According to the National Immigration Forum, there are about 1,380 Yemeni nationals living and working in the country with TPS.
A reminder, TPS is a type of status that allows nationals fleeing designated countries for various humanitarian reasons – such as war or natural disaster – to attain temporary authorization live and work in the country without risk of deportation. In that period a TPS beneficiary is able to apply for a visa or permanent residency if eligible.
“After reviewing conditions in the country and consulting with appropriate US government agencies, I determined that Yemen no longer meets the law’s requirements to be designated for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said.
The designation will officially terminate for Yemeni immigrants 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register.
The state department designates Yemen as a level four “do not travel” country due to to risk of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has sought to strip TPS from several countries, including Haiti, Somalia and Venezuela.
Federal judge orders government to grant detainees access to lawyers at Minneapolis ICE holding center
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to guarantee that immigrants held at the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building can speak with a lawyer before they are transferred out of Minnesota.
Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, chided the administration and called its failure to provide detainees at the Minneapolis holding facility a meaningful chance to consult counsel an “unconstitutional infringement”.
Her 41‑page ruling, which remains in effect for two weeks, stems from a class‑action lawsuit alleging that detainees are denied even a single outgoing phone call – the only opportunity many have to reach an attorney or family members who could help secure representation. The suit says detainees are frequently moved out of state before they are formally “booked” and allowed to make that call.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that even when calls occur, they are rarely private and often take place in the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They also contend the Whipple building lacks basic necessities, including beds and adequate toilets.
“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” Brasel wrote. She ordered the DHS to provide detainees private access to telephones and to lists of free legal service providers in multiple languages within one hour of detention – and before any transfer out of the Whipple facility.
Brasel further barred the DHS from transferring detainees out of Minnesota during the first 72 hours of custody, and required federal agents to disclose the destination if and when a transfer occurs.
The Whipple building has been the focal point of sustained protests during Minnesota’s immigration crackdown, which included the fatal shooting of two US citizens. On Thursday, the president’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said the surge of federal immigration enforcement in the state would wind down, announcing a drawdown of the hundreds of officers deployed there.
In response to Brasel’s ruling, a DHS spokesperson insisted that claims of “sub-prime conditions or overcrowding at the Whipple Building are FALSE”.
“This is a processing facility, not a detention facility. Illegal aliens are quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility,” the spokesperson said, adding that ICE provided detainees with “a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys”.
“All detainees receive due process. No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian.
A reminder that my colleague, Jakub Krupa, is covering the latest from Munich at the annual security conference. We’re due to hear from Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will make her debut appearance at the summit. This, of course, comes as lawmakers in Washington grapple with the impending Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
We’ll bring you the latest as it gets under way.
Michael Sainato
Democratic lawmakers, led by the senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth and the representative Mike Quigley, are demanding answers about how Donald Trump’s immigration policies are exacerbating childcare shortages and costs in the US.
About 20% of the childcare workforce in the US are immigrants – and as high as 70% in some regions of the US – and the president’s immigration policies could reduce the childcare workforce by an estimated 15%, according to a letter sent today by 48 lawmakers to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
“Immigration policy changes – including terminations of temporary protected status (TPS), the elimination of other lawful immigration pathways, and immigration raids in and around childcare programs – are driving childcare providers out of the workplace, exacerbating childcare workforce shortages and high prices,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
The lawmakers provided examples of childcare workers ensnared by Trump’s deportation push, including a nanny in Wisconsin, an asylum seeker with no criminal record who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a routine check-in, and immigrant teachers at a preschool in Washington DC who lost their work authorizations and were forced to quit due to TPS terminations by the Trump administration.
White House says it has made ‘every good faith effort’ to keep DHS open amid looming shutdown
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the Trump administration has made “every good faith effort” to keep the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) open as negotiations to place stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers failed to advance a full-year appropriations bill to keep the department funding through September.
In an interview with Fox News, Leavitt said that Democrats are “barreling” the agency towards a shutdown for “political and partisan reasons”. This week, Democrats rejected the White House’s legislative counter-proposal for a DHS funding bill, saying that it was insufficient.
Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, said that the latest inflation figures from Bureau of Labor Statistics show a failure from the Trump administration to make good on campaign promises.
“One year into his [Donald Trump’s] second term, food continues to get more expensive, utility costs are soaring and housing prices are rising,” Warren said in a statement. “Trump is making life less affordable for American families – and instead of fixing the economic pain he’s caused, he says this is the Trump economy and he is ‘very proud’ of it.”
Lauren Almeida
Core inflation, which does not include food and energy prices, slowed to 2.5%, in line with expectations.
It comes after official figures on Wednesday showed the US economy added 130,000 jobs last month, well ahead of forecasts. Last month the Federal Reserve held interest rates at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%, after three consecutive quarter-point cuts.
