Kristi Noem’s billion-dollar warehouse-to-megajail crusade has been thrown into doubt.
The ousted Homeland Security chief, 54, was the architect of a frenzied bid to snap up commercial warehouses across the country and turn them into Amazon-style migrant processing hubs—a scheme detailed by The Daily Beast in December. About $1 billion has been poured into 11 such sites in pursuit of Donald Trump’s hardline target of 100,000 detention beds, but the plan has been beset by community uproar, scrapped deals, and Republican revolts ever since.
This month, federal District Judge Brendan Hurson, 48, a Joe Biden appointee, halted the planned conversion of a $102 million warehouse in Williamsport, Maryland, into a holding center for up to 1,500 detainees, finding ICE had skipped a legally required environmental impact assessment.
In legal filings reported by the New York Times, Hurson noted the building had just four toilets and two water fountains, and warned that its rapid transformation would “jeopardize the health and safety of the surrounding ecosystem.”
Internal documents reviewed by the paper showed Justice Department officials have privately fretted that ICE’s strategy of bypassing environmental reviews could expose the administration to a flood of legal challenges.
The agency is now scrambling to commission full environmental assessments at a minimum of two warehouse sites—a process, experts told the paper, that could last months.
Similar legal challenges have been launched in New Jersey, Michigan, and Arizona. Maryland officials warned in court filings that the Williamsport project posed risks to a Potomac River tributary and to species protected under state law, the paper reported.
The mounting legal blowback piles fresh pressure on a program that Noem’s successor, Markwayne Mullin, 48, has openly questioned since being sworn in on March 31. A senior administration official told the paper Mullin had voiced doubts about acquiring further warehouse sites.
Outgoing ICE Director Todd Lyons said this month that Mullin was still weighing whether to push ahead at the warehouse sites and reviewing the agency’s broader detention plans. “We’re making decisions based on if we’re going to move forward at those locations,” Lyons, 52, told the House Appropriations Committee.
As the Beast has reported, the former Oklahoma senator has also privately backed an inspector general probe into how Noem and her chief adviser and rumored lover Corey Lewandowski, 52, handled DHS contracts.
DHS, in a statement to the Times, argued that the agency had stuck to every relevant federal law and accused “liberals” of weaponizing environmental rules to derail Trump’s mass deportation drive.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
