For decades, two companies have been the government’s go-to partners for immigrant detention: Geo Group and CoreCivic run the facilities where the majority of people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are held.
But as the Trump administration embarks on a $38 billion planto convert industrial warehouses into a new breed of large-scale holding centers, it is turning to a crop of relatively untested businesses to rapidly build and operate the facilities.
On Friday, the administration awarded a contract worth at least $113.1 million to KVG LLC, a defense contractor, to build and operate a detention center in a Williamsport, Maryland warehouse, according to federal spending website USASpending.gov. The company has not been awarded any previous federal contracts for immigrant detention, according to government procurement records.
GardaWorld Federal Services, a security contractor, was awarded at least $313.4 million to run the detention center planned at a Surprise, Arizona, warehouse. The company employs guards at immigrant holding centers in Canada as well as at the “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades. Prior to the Arizona award, it had not been directly contracted by ICE to oversee any detention centers, records show.
Both contracts have a potential end date of 2029. John Boyer, the CEO of KVG, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement. A GardaWorld spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The awards set in motion a scramble to meet the government’s rapid timeline for building the detention centers, part of a plan to create new massive facilities, including some with roughly the same capacity as Las Vegas resorts. The Department of Homeland Security has said the first facility will begin accepting detainees by April, giving some contractors just weeks to transform empty, uninhabitable buildings into secure holding facilities.
The companies will install climate control and build dormitories, recreational spaces, courtrooms, cafeterias, visitation rooms and medical facilities. And they will have to work around what local leaders in many places have described as insurmountable limitations on infrastructure, including access to water, sewer and electricity.
The selection of two less experienced firms also signals an industry shift threatening the core business of Geo Group and CoreCivic — neither of which were mentioned in Friday’s awards. The high expectationsthat executives and investors had for the two companies following the reelection of Donald Trump have soured in recent months, as the administration has courted start-ups and explored new methods of detaining people en masse.
In a statement, Geo Group spokesman Chris Ferreira declined to comment on the warehouses but said the company will continue to provide services “that help the federal government meet its goal of increasing overall detention capacity.”
Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, said the company remains a committed partner to the Trump administration, as evidenced by multiple ICE contract awards it has received in recent months.
“CoreCivic isn’t a company whose business model is under threat — we’re a company whose expertise has never been more essential,” Owen said. “The idea that companies with no track record in this industry can replicate the decades of operational experience, compliance infrastructure and facility management capability we have defies common sense.”
A DHS spokesperson declined to comment on the new contracts, but said that because of the money Congress allocated last allocated year for immigration enforcement, “ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities.”
The contract awards were first reported by The Baltimore Banner and Project Salt Box.
Rather than holding most migrants in buildings owned and operated by private firms and outsourcing virtually all aspects of detention to those companies, as the U.S. has done for years, the government now plans to own many of the buildings itself and exert more control over their operations, DHS has said in its communications with local communities hosting the projects.
The pivot may bolster the government’s leverage over the private detention firms.
These companies have long used their dominance over detention beds to push for favorable terms, according to Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches private prisons as a senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy organization affiliated with New York University’s law school.
“It has traditionally been difficult for the federal government to avoid contracting with firms like Geo Group, CoreCivic and LaSalle Corrections because the government didn’t have” enough of its own detention space, Eisen said.
During private meetings with leaders of Geo Group and CoreCivic in recent months, DHS officials have demanded that the companies reduce their prices for all existing detention contracts by 15 percent, according to a person briefed on the discussions. ICE also asked Geo Group and CoreCivic to suggest changes to federal detention standards that could help the government reduce spending on its contracts, according to a different person briefed on those discussions.
Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private government discussions. It’s not clear how the companies responded to either request.
CoreCivic’s Owen said the company routinely engages with government partners “on ways to deliver value to the taxpayer,” adding that such conversations are “not a sign of diminished leverage — it’s how a mature, accountable partnership operates.”
Last month, DHS representatives said in a conversation with local officials in Social Circle, Georgia, that the agency planned to replace much of the nation’s existing detention capacity with the new warehouses, according to an account of the meeting that Social Circle shared on its website. That could mean closing dozens of privately owned detention centers and ending ICE’s partnerships with county-run jails to hold detainees.
Geo Group and CoreCivic warned their investors in annual filings last month that ICE’s efforts to buy “non-traditional” detention facilities, including warehouses, could have an “adverse impact” on their business with ICE — both companies’ No. 1 customer.
Owen said CoreCivic has an obligation to disclose factors that may negatively impact its business and publishing them “does not necessarily mean we expect those risks to materialize.”
The government has also said it plans to acquire up to 10 existing detention centers from private companies. According to a draft solicitation document obtained by The Washington Post in December, the facilities ICE was targeting for acquisition included two CoreCivic-owned facilities in California and six Geo-owned facilities in California, Colorado, Louisiana, Texas and Washington.
A DHS spokesperson declined to confirm whether it plans to close any locations, saying in an email, “We are INCREASING detention capacity.”
For his part, Geo Group’s Zoley has expressed caution about the prospect of holding thousands of detainees at a single location. Geo Group’s largest facility now holds around 1,800 detainees per day. ICE plans for its largest warehouses to hold between 7,500 and 10,000 detainees at a time.
On a call with analysts last month, Zoley warned that renovating the warehouses would be “more complicated than you may think.”
One of the companies taking on that challenge will be KVG, which won the contract to oversee a 1,500-bed detention center in Western Maryland. The firm — run by a former Marine in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and founded in 2013 — provides logistics support to military missions overseas, including by sending industrial 3D printers to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict, according to a media interview.
The warehouse contracts were awarded through a military procurement system that permits the government to issue a form of contract called task orders without a normal bidding process.
On its website, KVG says it has received 130 task orders and managed $37 million in contracts through this system, including by providing humanitarian aid in Sudan and supporting the operation to remove Americans and allies from Afghanistan during the Taliban offensive in 2021. Its website does not mention any work involving immigrant detention centers.
Some industry leaders have warned the government that the speed of the warehouse effort and the scale of the new facilities go beyond what has been done in recent history. The largest warehouses are expected to hold up to 10,000 detainees — twice the capacity of the largest existing ICE detention center.
After initially saying the first planned facilities would need to begin accepting detainees as soon as 60 days after contracts were awarded, ICE recently asked vendors to resubmit proposals with longer time frames, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Post. That request followed complaints from companies that 60 days was unrealistic, according to a person briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal agency matters.
DHS officials still expect the Maryland facility to open in April, the person said.
ICE built its largest current facility, a tent encampment called Camp East Montana with a capacity to hold up to 5,000 detainees, on an empty patch of desert in El Paso in a span of a few weeks last summer. When the agency’s own inspectors visited the site shortly after it opened, they found 60 violations of federal standards for detention, including missed medical screenings and a lack of any security policy.
Last week, ICE said it is reviewing the $1.2 billion contract for Camp East Montana, more than a year before its expected completion date. The contract had been overseen by Acquisition Logistics, a small business with no previous history of federal contracts related to detention centers.
Marianne LeVine, Jonathan O’Connell and N. Kirkpatrick contributed to this report.
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