Outrage as Trump cronies buy ICE warehouses for 10x markup: 'A new level of corruption'

Source: Raw Story

May 21, 2026 8:12PM ET


In what More Perfect Union described as a “new level of corruption” for the Trump administration, an investigation by the progressive news outlet revealed how members of the president’s inner circle are cashing in on the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of warehouses for immigrant detention.

It was reported earlier this year that under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, who has since been fired, DHS was planning to spend nearly $40 billion to buy up dozens of warehouses around the US to convert them into makeshift detention camps that could each hold anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.

But when Mae Ryan, a reporter at More Perfect Union, looked into the contracts, she said she “noticed something weird.” “Many of these warehouses had been sitting on the market for years,” she explained in a video posted Wednesday. “Now DHS was buying them at a massive markup.” She pointed to one warehouse in Socorro, Texas, recently valued at $11 million, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased from the company El Paso Logistics II LLC for $123 million—more than a 1,000% profit.

According to Michael Wriston, an ex-military analyst and investigative journalist who tracked the enormous markups for several of these warehouse purchases for his website Project Salt Box back in March, “across more than a dozen warehouse acquisitions, ICE paid prices that exceeded both prior property valuations and recent market comparables at nearly every site.”

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-ice-2676928750/