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On Monday, the Department of Defense announced it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest immigration detention camp at Fort Bliss Military Base, a facility that plays a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plan.
What’s not mentioned is that the disaster management group, one of the subcontractors to work on the project, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company in 2019 that hired undocumented workers and pleaded guilty to a scheme that would hide from immigration authorities. Albers is a large Republican donor who spent time in Malua Lago.
The two first-hand knowledge of the award and the company familiar with the company told Propublica that the disaster management group has helped build the new facility and received a significant portion of the government’s over $1.2 billion allocated to the project.
“The idea that you can sell services to ice after using illegal labor is a bit ironic,” said Scott Schüchert, a former employee of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term, who later mentioned an immigration case involving former company Tentrogix under President Joe Biden.
In response to a question from Propublica, a Disaster Management spokesman said Albers and Disaster Management had been removed from the Tentlogix DHS investigation and exonerated. When he learned of the illegal activities of the co-founder of Tentlogix, the spokesman said, “Albers broke up as a minority and non-operating owner of Tentlogix.”
The spokesman did not directly answer questions about the role of disaster management in Fort Bliss detention camps, but said the company is “prideful to support nationally important projects for nearly 20 years.”
The White House did not answer questions about disaster management or Albers and introduced Propublica to DOD and DHS, but neither provided any comments.
The new immigration detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to accommodate up to 5,000 people. The main contractor is Virginia-based acquisition logistics, and those with first-hand knowledge of the Fort Bliss work told Propovica that Amentum, the leading engineering and technology services contractor, will become another subcontractor.
Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum responded to Propublica’s questions about the project.
Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. It has won more than $500 million in government contract work since 2020, primarily to build accommodations for the US program to resettle Afghan refugees.
Last year, the Ministry of Labor announced it had discovered disaster management and subcontractors that it cooperated with Afghan refugee contracts that violated federal labor laws, including minimum wage and overtime. The agency recovered nearly $16 million in workers’ salaries, and Disaster Management signed a compliance agreement with an agency designed to prevent further violations. The company did not answer questions about the incident.
Albers’ relationship with Tentlogix said Scott Amey, general adviser to the project on government oversight, would not have ruled out him or disaster management from other government contract work.
Tentlogix reported a criminal conviction in the federal contract database, but Albers and his other businesses are considered separate corporations. The companies that award a federal contract are necessary to prove they operate on a satisfactory record of business ethics, but “they don’t need to report much,” Amey said. “I don’t think this will appear on the contractor’s radar.”
Still, there is a web of connection between Tentlogix and disaster management. Albers was one of the two Tentrogix supervisors when he pleaded guilty to violating immigration laws. The other was Gary Hendry co-founded Disaster Management with Albers, and the two were once brothers-in-law. When immigration authorities attacked Tentrogix in 2018, they shared disaster management and address.
The attack follows a 2016 Homeland Security Investigation Audit by Tentlogix. Court records show that Hendry later set up a Shell Company and attempted to deceive investigators by relocating undocumented workers to the organization, hiding them from Homeland Security Investigative Auditors. However, the agency discovered the scheme and found undocumented workers on the company’s website when officials attacked it in 2018.
In 2019, Hendry pleaded guilty to immigration charges alongside another company’s officer and was sentenced to a one-year prison sentence. (He served just over three months before being allowed to release early due to the pandemic.) Business group Tentlogix also pleaded guilty and was ordered to confiscate more than $3 million. Although Albers was not personally charged, he signed a company’s guilty plea, court records show. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
Hendry did not respond to requests for comment.
The federal contract work of disaster management is advantageous for Albers. Last year he bought a $30 million home in Jupiter, Florida, and has since been ranked among the most expensive homes in the area.
Albers has also become a massive donor to the Republican campaign. He was given over $150,000 last year alone. He and his wife spent an election night at Mar Arago in 2024, co-chairing a charity fundraiser with Eric, the president’s son, and his wife, at Trump National Golf Club. They participated in “Crypto Ball,” a cryptocurrency event sponsored by Trump supporters in the digital currency industry. Participants paid between $25 million and $1 million for tickets. (The Trump organization did not answer questions from Propublica.)
Center Kimberly Albers posted a photo on Instagram where she and her husband Nathan were shown to the right in Mar Lago on election night last year. Credit: Screenshots by Propublica
Since the end of last year, disaster management has spent $210,000 lobbying on Congress and administration on immigration-related issues, including “finances related to temporary facilities.” The company had no history of lobbying, according to federal disclosures.
The share of disaster management for Fort Bliss immigration detention agreements could rank among the company’s largest contracts.
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The Fort Bliss Award comes as immigrant arrests have skyrocketed in recent months, and ice has been arrested due to the lack of space to hold everyone in custody. In the past, most people arrested for ice were housed in brick and mortar detention facilities.
However, in the urgency to increase deportation, the Trump administration can rely on contractors to set up so-called softside facilities (tents with rigid internal structures) more quickly.
The administration saw military bases as a place to establish these new detention camps. In April, ICE announced a $3.8 billion award to run a share of lions in the softside facility that was used in the past and to build a facility to deploy such resources to temporarily house migrants entering the country along the tropical border.
ICE suddenly cancelled its contract a few days after it was announced without explanation. Now it appears that disaster management could do much of its job. Industry insiders estimated that a slice of a $1.2 billion contract at Fort Bliss in Disaster Management would be worth hundreds of millions of people next year, but it’s not clear how the three contractors will split the work. Bloomberg first reported the total value of the Fort Bliss contract.
The Fort Bliss facility is expected to be the first of many. Earlier in the month, Trump signed an expenditure bill that allocated $45 billion to build a new immigration detention site. Experts estimate that this could roughly double the capacity of immigrant detention to around 50,000 to over 100,000 people.
Mica Rosenberg contributed the report. Pratheek Rebala, Kirsten Berg and Mario Ariza contributed to the research.
