One of Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem’s last acts at the Department of Homeland Security was to massively overpay for an empty warehouse she had intended to use as an immigration detention center, according to a report.
Noem and her team had put plans in place to purchase the huge building in Salt Lake City, Utah, for $145.4 million in order to help ramp up detentions under President Donald Trump’s hardline deportation campaign.
However, the large warehouse was valued by tax assessors in 2025 at $97 million, meaning Noem and DHS paid nearly 50 percent more than the property was worth, The Atlantic reported.
The deal to buy the Salt Lake City building was finalized on March 11, six days after Trump fired Noem as Homeland Security secretary, but before she officially left DHS on March 31.
Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, took office on March 24 and ordered a pause on plans to convert the Utah building into a mega-jail, as well as on 10 other warehouses Noem purchased across the country as part of a $38 billion plan to overhaul ICE detention centers.
In the same month, a report from commercial real estate firm CoStar found that ICE had overpaid by an average of 11 to 13 percent above market value for the other 10 properties. The huge discrepancy for the $145 million Utah warehouse, which may now never even be converted into an ICE detention center, was not featured in the CoStar report.
“As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals,” a spokesperson for the DHS told the Daily Beast when approached about the Utah warehouse.
“As Secretary Mullin said in his confirmation hearing: ‘I will work with the community leaders and make sure that we are delivering for the American people what the president set out… We want to work with community leaders. We want to be good partners.’”
The overpriced warehouse purchase in Utah and other states is now part of an internal DHS investigation into acquisitions and contracts made by Noem and Corey Lewandowski, the top Trump ally with whom Noem has long been rumored to be having an affair.
Lewandowski—who effectively served as Noem’s de facto chief of staff at DHS despite officially working as an unpaid “special government employee”—was previously blamed for introducing a policy requiring Noem to personally approve DHS contracts exceeding $100,000.
The move was intended as a cost-cutting measure but was also blamed for a three-day delay in deploying Urban Search and Rescue teams to assist with disaster response in areas of Texas devastated by flash flooding in July 2025, which left around 135 people dead.
Earlier this month, CBS News reported that Mullin has scrapped the $100,000 bottleneck policy as part of plans to “re-evaluate the contract processes” and ensure the department is “serving the American taxpayer efficiently.”
