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April 29, 2026 · Mark Ramm

The Warehouse Pause and the State Counter-Offensive

Two weeks ago, the site tracked 99 fights across 44 states. After this update — driven by reader tips, a national gap-search, and a fresh ingestion — the catalog covers 129 fights across all 50 states. The map looks different. The story underneath it has changed too.

This is what we found.

The Warehouse Pause

On April 1–2, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security quietly paused one specific track of detention expansion — the direct DHS warehouse purchases Noem authorized in her last months — pending a department-wide procurement review by new Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced her in March.

This is not a national pause on detention. It is narrow. The local-partnership track keeps growing: IGSAs, 287(g) agreements, and county-jail beds rented for federal use are all expanding. Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss continues to operate under a no-bid replacement contract, three deaths in. The CoreCivic facility in Adams County, Mississippi — the second-largest ICE facility in the United States — runs at roughly $3.9 million per month with no procurement review touching it. The “Alligator Alcatraz” Everglades facility was built on $608 million in FEMA funding and a Florida 287(g) agreement, not a warehouse purchase. None of these are paused.

What is paused is the Noem-era acquisition pattern: secret deeds through Delaware LLCs, industrial buildings sized for 1,500 to 8,500 beds, no environmental review, no public notice. That model has stopped — at least for now — across at least six states:

  • In Social Circle, Georgia, DHS canceled an April 2 meeting with city officials with no advance notice. No construction contracts have been awarded. No detainees have arrived.
  • In Salt Lake City, Utah, the city is “hearing crickets.” On April 1, ICE’s deputy director told the mayor’s office, “We have no new information at this time.”
  • In Pennsylvania, two warehouses DHS bought secretly — a former Big Lots in Tremont, bought for $119.5 million from Blue Owl Real Estate LLC on January 29 and slated for 7,500 beds, and a 520,000-square-foot building in Upper Bern, bought for $87.4 million on February 2 for 1,500 beds — are stalled. Pennsylvania DEP issued administrative orders on March 5 barring water and sewer connections. Governor Shapiro says the fight could last “months or even years.”
  • In McAllen, Texas, the federal government’s $66 million warehouse purchase fell under the Mullin review at the end of March.
  • On April 28, Senator Chris Murphy sent warning letters to 21 municipalities nationwide that had been pitched warehouse conversions. Wait, he advised them. The contracts may not be coming.

The Mullin review is the structural reason the warehouse story has gone quiet in the news. The other tracks haven’t gone quiet. Detention is still scaling — through county jails, through IGSAs, through state-supported facilities like Alligator Alcatraz, and through the existing CoreCivic and GEO Group portfolios. The expansion model is shifting, not stopping. We have written a longer treatment of how the warehouse purchases were assembled and what stalled them, specifically: see The Warehouse Pipeline.

April 28: The State Counter-Offensive

If there was a single day this month that captured what is changing, it was April 28. Within a 24-hour window:

  • Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson and Attorney General Nick Brown filed a motion for preliminary injunction in federal court against GEO Group, demanding the right to inspect the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. State inspectors have been denied entry ten times. Detainees have filed 3,500+ complaints. There have been two deaths and six suicide attempts since 2024.
  • The Louisiana Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether Act 314 overrides the longstanding Cacho consent decree governing Orleans Parish jail conditions. Sheriff Susan Hutson — who fought ICE — lost re-election in October to Michelle Woodfork, who takes office May 4. Her stance on ICE cooperation is unknown. The case is now active-litigation-at-risk.
  • In Massachusetts, the People’s PROTECT Action Coalition — 58 organizations — rallied at the State House demanding the Senate version of the PROTECT Act go further than the House bill: ban ICE information-sharing, end fusion centers, expand virtual court access, and eliminate the DOC’s 287(g) agreement.
  • Senator Murphy’s 21-municipality letters went out the same day.

Add the early-April actions and the picture is sharper still: New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez filed an emergency petition with the NM Supreme Court on April 1 to void Otero County’s ICE contract (denied April 16, but Governor Lujan Grisham’s HB 9 Immigrant Safety Act takes effect May 20 and bans new agreements anyway). The Department of Justice sued Connecticut and New Haven on April 14 over sanctuary policies — a defensive fight Governor Lamont and AG Tong are now waging. Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro wrote DHS Secretary Noem directly. West Virginia’s regional jail system suspended ICE intake entirely after federal judges ordered the release of 65 of 71 habeas petitioners.

The pattern is unmistakable. Whatever the Mullin review produces, state attorneys general and governors are not waiting.

The Judicial Firewall

Federal judges have stopped pretending these are routine immigration matters. In the last six weeks:

  • West Virginia. Judge Joseph Goodwin issued a “final notice” to the Trump administration over ICE’s “Operation County Roads,” which swept 650+ immigrants across the state in January. Sixty-five of 71 habeas petitioners were ordered released. A separate ruling found masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles violated the Fourth Amendment. By late March, the state’s regional jail authority — which was earning $90 per day per bed, $728K in 2025 — suspended accepting new ICE detainees.
  • Hawaii. Six or more habeas writs have been granted at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center as of April. A ruling in Joaquin David Rico-Tapia — held six weeks without a bond hearing — has been cited over 200 times nationally. Hawaii’s ICE arrests in 2025 quadrupled the 2024 figure.
  • California. A federal court granted a preliminary injunction in Gomez Ruiz v. ICE at the California City Detention Facility — California’s largest, operated by CoreCivic in eastern Kern County — ordering ICE to provide emergency medical care, specialist access, attorney contact visits, warm clothing, and a court monitor. The lawsuit documented denied care for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes; near-freezing temperatures; abusive solitary confinement.
  • New York. Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered ICE to improve conditions at 26 Federal Plaza after detainees were held in squalid short-term cells — including on a secret 9th floor that ICE tried to hide from the court. Trial is scheduled for May 26.
  • Tennessee. Judge Sheryl Lipman ordered the immediate release of Yasser Lopez Soza, a Memphis high school student, on April 23. He was freed April 24.
  • Florida. A separate ACLU class action M.A. v. Guthrie won a federal court order requiring ICE to provide legal counsel access to detainees at the “Alligator Alcatraz” Everglades facility — even as the 11th Circuit invalidated a parallel preliminary injunction on April 21.

This is the architecture of a constitutional pushback. Judges across circuits are issuing orders. ICE is being told no. The defendants are losing on motions.

Mortality

ICE recorded 33 in-custody deaths in 2025 — the highest annual total since the agency was formed. Two of those deaths, plus one that occurred in early 2026, have been ruled homicides by county medical examiners. Both happened at facilities that until this update were not in our fight catalog.

In Adams County, Mississippi — at the second-largest ICE detention facility in the United States — Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, was found unresponsive in his cell on December 4, 2025, transferred to Merit Health Natchez, and died on December 14. ICE’s account: he hanged himself with a sheet. His family disputed it directly. Nurses who treated him told the family his injuries were inconsistent with hanging — including a forehead wound the hanging narrative could not explain. Rodriguez had been moved from the communal housing unit where he normally stayed to an isolated cell shortly before he died. He had agreed to voluntary self-deportation and was scheduled for removal the day before his death. The county medical examiner ruled it a homicide. It was the fourth ICE custody death in four days nationally.

The CoreCivic-operated facility (max capacity 2,500) brings the federal government roughly $3.9 million per month. Representative Bennie Thompson visited on April 9 and counted approximately 1,400 detainees. CoreCivic told Congress the facility was fully medically staffed; detainees told Thompson there were two doctors; Thompson observed none. He has joined a Democratic lawsuit over the administration’s blocking of congressional oversight access.

In El Paso County, Texas — at Camp East Montana, the 9,600-capacity facility on Fort Bliss that opened in August 2025 — three detainees died in 44 days: Francisco Gaspar-Andres on December 3, Geraldo Lunas Campos on January 3, and Victor Manuel Diaz on January 14. The El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled the Lunas Campos death a homicide on January 21 — cause: asphyxia by neck and torso compression. Witness accounts collected by the AP describe guards handcuffing him, tackling him, and placing him in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. ICE’s narrative shifted as the reporting progressed: from “medical distress” to “suicide attempt requiring staff intervention” to, finally, the medical examiner’s homicide ruling.

ICE’s own inspectors found 49 violations of federal detention standards at the facility in February — failures in use-of-force documentation, security protocols, medical care, and self-harm prevention. The operator, Acquisition Logistics LLC, was a Virginia company operating from a single-family home with no prior detention experience and a contract worth up to $1.3 billion. DHS terminated Acquisition Logistics in March and replaced them on a no-bid contract with Amentum Services, Inc.

These are not the only deaths. Newark’s Delaney Hall recorded a detainee death in December 2025; the facility holds 800 people with 7 medical staff. The Tacoma NWIPC has logged two deaths and six suicide attempts since 2024, the basis for Washington’s April 28 injunction motion. An ACLU-led systemic review of in-custody deaths between 2017 and 2021 — the Deadly Failures report, jointly published with American Oversight and Physicians for Human Rights — concluded that 95 percent were “preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care.” That was the baseline before the 2025 expansion.

Mortality is becoming the dominant narrative. We have written a longer treatment of what these deaths reveal about the system: see The Deadliest Year.

What Our Readers Showed Us

On April 15, three GitHub issues — #36, #37, #38 — arrived from a single reader, pointing us to the meeting-minutes portals for Hancock, Harrison, and Adams counties in Mississippi. Submitted as data-source tips, the kind of routine contribution we welcome.

But three adjacent Mississippi counties tipped at once is not a routine contribution. It is a signal.

We investigated. The reader was right.

Hancock County has operated an Intergovernmental Service Agreement with ICE since 2020. The facility’s daily ICE detainee count has nearly tripled since January 2025. Then on April 21, 2026, ICE detained two brothers — Max Makoka, 15 and Israel Makoka, 18 — as they waited for the school bus to Hancock High School in Diamondhead. F-1 visa students from the Republic of the Congo, attending the local high school, zip-tied in front of their host father and classmates. Israel was transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Facility in Jena. Max was transferred out of state to Office of Refugee Resettlement custody in Texas. In a county that voted roughly 80 percent for Trump, the backlash was immediate and bipartisan. Republican Representative Mike Ezell issued a statement on April 29 — today — confirming his office is monitoring the case. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s office is providing immigration attorney assistance.

Adams County is the homicide story above. The second-largest ICE detention facility in the United States, with a documented history that includes a 2012 riot, a “Zulu” solitary unit, and a 2020 complaint alleging torture of Cameroonian detainees. We had no entry for it.

We do now.

The Charleston/Dorchester SC tip filed in issue #35 added new ground-truth to a fight we already track. The Roxbury, NJ tip in issue #39 confirmed reader awareness of an active fight with a May 12 preliminary injunction hearing.

This is how the system is supposed to work. Five tips this round. Three were already tracked. Two surfaced fights we had completely missed — including one of the largest, deadliest facilities in the country.

Thirty New Fights

The gap-search produced 30 new fight entries across 16 states. The full additions are below by region. Each fight page carries its own timeline, key actors, and tier-1 sources.

Northeast and Mid-Atlantic

Midwest

South

West and Pacific

Where the Heatmap Is Pointing Next

The fresh ingestion produced 1,086 new entries — mostly budget-distress signals from USDA and BLS — and rescored 2,012 counties. The maximum heat score is now 184 (Broward County, FL), up from 166. The biggest heat-score jumps:

But the more interesting movement is the counties that breached significant heat for the first time — counties scoring above 50 today that scored below 25 the last time we ran the engine, and that have no fight entry yet:

  • Muscogee County, GA — Columbus. 287(g) participation; the city council is amending its zoning code’s special-permit chapter; ICE contracts addressed to local addresses.
  • Waukesha County, WI — 287(g) at the sheriff’s office; an IGSA at the county jail; the Redevelopment Authority discussed property-acquisition goals on April 20.
  • Milwaukee County, WI — Milwaukee Holdroom IGSA; commission activity tracking.
  • Galveston County, TX — eight 287(g) agreements; commission activity in March.
  • Cumberland County, NC — 287(g); commission action authorizing the county manager to provide formal notice in November; sits inside North Carolina’s “Operation Charlotte’s Web” enforcement zone.

We do not know yet whether these are quiet expansions, contested votes, or noise. We are looking. If you live in one of these counties and you know what is happening, tell us.

A separate cluster: eleven West Virginia counties were scored for the first time — Nicholas, Fayette, Hardy, McDowell, Summers, Morgan, Wood, Harrison, Pleasants, Ohio, Lewis. The pattern matches the Operation County Roads sweep that Judge Goodwin’s rulings have now mostly unwound.

What to Watch in May

The next four weeks contain more decision points than any month since the site launched.

  • May 4 — Michelle Woodfork takes office as Orleans Parish sheriff. Her position on the Cacho consent decree and ICE cooperation will determine whether the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling matters.
  • May 11 — Cook County Chief Judge Erica Reddick rules on the petition to appoint a special prosecutor for ICE conduct during Operation Midway Blitz.
  • May 12 — Judge Jamel Semper holds the preliminary injunction hearing in the Roxbury, NJ warehouse case.
  • May 12–13 — Pima County Board of Supervisors reviews Sheriff Nanos’s non-sworn response.
  • May 20 — New Mexico’s HB 9 Immigrant Safety Act takes effect, banning new and renewed civil immigration detention agreements statewide.
  • May 26 — Three trials/hearings on the same day: the Broadview Six federal trial; the Washington State preliminary injunction hearing; and the 26 Federal Plaza conditions trial in SDNY.

The Site Now

After this update:

  • 129 fights documented across all 50 states (was 99 across 44)
  • 17,697 entries total
  • 2,012 counties scored, up from 1,192
  • 143 facility profiles

The methodology remains the same. We watch where signals are. We watch where readers visit. We investigate. The findings go back into the system. The cycle continues.

Two notes for readers:

If you live in a county we cover, your tips are how we find what the data alone cannot show us. The Adams County and Hancock County fights — including the second-largest ICE facility in the United States — were not in the catalog until you pointed us at them.

If you are a journalist, advocate, or local official watching one of the fights above and you have ground-truth we are missing, the same is true. Most of what is on this site started as someone in a county knowing something that needed to be written down.

The next update will come after the May 26 cluster of decisions. By then, Mullin’s review may have a public outcome, the WA injunction hearing will have happened, the Broadview Six trial will be underway, and the Orleans Parish transition will be a month old. We will be watching all of it.

Mark Ramm, April 29, 2026

The investigation behind the data

The Detention Pipeline is the data layer for an ongoing investigation by The RAMM.

Read the investigation → Start here
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Last updated: Apr 29, 2026