Eve is here. The headline facts are bad enough, but the potential spending is even worse as it shows how President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is setting up mass incarceration centers. Calling them concentration camps doesn’t seem an exaggeration, especially considering the massive ICE civil rights violations in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The fact that the amount of money potentially available for mass incarceration has increased from the already controversial $10 billion to $55 billion speaks to the scale of the planned incarceration and dispossession.
Written by Common Dreams staff writer Stephen Prager. Originally published in Common Dreams
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly moving ahead with plans to expand its mass detention capacity, using military contracts to build what Pablo Manriquez, author of the immigration news site Migrant Insider, calls a “national ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps” after immigration officials killed three Americans within weeks.
Manriquez reported on Sunday that “a large Navy contract fleet once valued at $10 billion has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion cap to further President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ plan.”
This is an expansion of a deal first reported by CNN in October, which said that DHS was channeling $10 billion through the Navy to expedite the construction of a network of immigrant detention centers across the country, in a deal aimed at speeding up the construction of the centers, according to sources and federal contract documents.
The scoop: The Navy contract that funneled tens of billions of dollars to ICE for a nationwide “ghost network” of concentration camps has been repurposed and made even bigger. https://t.co/yvzszpD8t2
— Pablo Manriquez (@PabloReports) February 2, 2026
The report says the money will be allocated to “new detention centers,” which will likely be “primarily soft-sided tents and may or may not be built on top of existing Navy facilities. DHS often relies on soft-sided facilities to manage migrant inflows,” according to a person familiar with the plan.
“The goal is to build facilities in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah and Kansas, each capable of holding up to 10,000 people,” said a person familiar with the project.
Manriquez reports that the project has grown even larger since the Navy grant money was repurposed a few weeks ago. It was authorized through the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract (WEXMAC), a flexible purchasing system used by governments to quickly move military equipment to dangerous and remote locations around the world.
The contract states the funds will be repurposed for “TITUS,” an abbreviation for “territorial integrity of the United States.” While it is not uncommon for naval contracts to be used for expenditures aimed at defending the country, Manriquez warned that such a staggering shift in funds for domestic internment signals something ominous.
“This $45 billion increase, announced just a few weeks ago, transforms the United States into a ‘geographic region’ for expeditionary force-style detention,” he wrote. “This represents a massive increase in the government’s ability to pay for the logistics of detention and deportation over time. In the world of federal contracting, this is the difference between a temporary appearance and a permanent infrastructure.”
He said the use of military funding mechanisms is aimed at disbursing funds quickly, avoiding typical bidding wars among contractors that would normally result in a period of public scrutiny. Using Navy contracts means new projects can be created through “task orders,” which can begin almost immediately once a “specific date and location has been identified” by DHS.
“This means that the infrastructure is now a ‘ghost’ network that can materialize anywhere in the United States the moment you choose a site,” Manriquez wrote.
With the country deporting 1 million people each year, the White House has said detention facilities will need to be significantly expanded to create more beds for detainees. But Manriquez said the document suggests that “this is not just about bed space, but about the rapid development of self-contained cities.”
In addition to a tent city that can house thousands of people, contract items include facilities aimed at sustainable living, such as enclosed tents likely for medical use and industrial-sized grills for cooking.
These also include spending on “force protection” equipment such as earth-filled defensive barriers, 8-foot-tall CONEX box walls, and “weatherproof” guard huts.
Epidemiologist and health economist Eric Feigl-Ding said the contract provision of supplies meant to address medical needs and deaths is “even more appalling.” “Services have been extended to ‘medical waste management’ with specific protocols for biohazardous incinerators,” the report said.
Graphic from Bloomberg
Migrant Insider’s new report comes on the heels of a Bloomberg report last week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used part of its $45 billion to purchase warehouses in remote communities to house thousands of detainees each, which the agency said “could be the largest expansion of capacity in U.S. history.”
The plan has also faced opposition from local residents in the largely Republican-leaning areas where the construction is taking place.
This month, demonstrators protested warehouse conversions in New Hampshire, Utah, Texas and Georgia after The Washington Post published an early version of the conversion plan.
In mid-January, a tour scheduled for contractors at a proposed warehouse site in San Antonio was canceled after protesters showed up the same day, according to a person familiar with the scheduled visit.
In Salt Lake City, the Ritchie Group, a local family business that owns an ICE warehouse earmarked for a future “megacenter” prison, said it had “no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government” after protesters showed up at its offices and put pressure on it.
On January 20, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) joined hundreds of protesters outside a warehouse in Hagerstown, Maryland, that will be converted into a 1,500-person facility.
The senator called the construction of this camp and other detention facilities “one of the most obscene, inhumane, and most illegal operations undertaken by the Trump administration.”
Reports of a new influx of funding from the Navy come as Congressional Democrats face pressure to block tens of billions of dollars in new funding for DHS and ICE during budget negotiations.
“If Congress does nothing, DHS will continue to thrive,” Manriquez said. “With three more years of pre-funding, and the US Navy as a backer, Secretary Kristi Noem, or her potential successor, has the legal and financial runway to continue building ICE concentration camps overnight in American society long after the news has faded.”
