A $1.26 billion contract to build the nation’s largest detention center was awarded to a little-known Virginia company—which doesn’t even have an office.
On July 18, the Acquisition Logistics Company won a federal contract to build and operate a detention center in El Paso County, Texas, at the Fort Bliss Army base.
But according to The Richmonder, the company is “not a household name”: Its website is largely inaccessible without a login, it only has 39 employees (according to ZoomInfo), and its headquarters is listed as a regular house in a suburban Richmond neighborhood called Tuckahoe.
Acquisition Logistics Company was awarded the contract through a government program that directs federal dollars to small businesses, according to Bloomberg. Founded by a retired Navy officer in 2008, it specializes in supply chain management, mostly for the U.S. military, and has had previous, far smaller contracts with the Defense Department.
The company’s CEO and founder, Kenneth Wagner, and COO Darrin Armentrout didn’t respond to The Richmonder’s request for comment. When called, Wagner picked up the phone—and promptly hung up.
The 5,000-bed Texas tent camp they are tasked with building would be the biggest in the nation, and has unsurprisingly sparked concerns among immigration advocates.
“It’s very hard to imagine how soft-sided facilities could satisfy even the low detention standards that are reflected in ICE’s most recent standards,” Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, told Bloomberg in July.
Advocates like Winger have serious reason to doubt the setup: Recent reports from ICE detention facilities paint a horrifying and inhumane picture of the conditions, with immigrants treated “like dogs” at several Florida facilities. For scale, “Alligator Alcatraz,” Trump’s hastily erected, bug-infested tent camp, has 700 beds. The El Paso camp would have over seven times that.
And in addition to the inherent inhumanity of imprisoning people in modern-day concentration camps, the new behemoth center would be run by a company with no experience managing a detention facility, nor handling a project of this financial weight: This contract would be 442 times larger than the size of Acquisition Logistics Company’s last published contract, according to The Richmonder.
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