The detention story keeps splitting into tracks. The warehouse purchases stalled under federal review; the local-partnership track kept growing; the courts kept saying no. This update adds a fourth track that has been building quietly underneath the others: communities banning detention by zoning, before any facility is proposed. Three jurisdictions did it this month. At the same time, we found a federal detention center being built in secret east of Gilroy, California — through a real-estate-LLC pattern that also appears in Texas — and two more detainee deaths at facilities we had never documented.

Here is what we found.

The Zoning Playbook

The most interesting structural move this month is preemptive. Instead of waiting for a facility to be proposed and then fighting the permit, jurisdictions are amending their zoning codes to make detention a prohibited use — closing the door before anyone knocks.

In Baltimore, Maryland, Council President Zeke Cohen introduced a bill on March 10 to establish “private detention center” as a prohibited land use citywide. It cleared the Land Use & Transportation Committee without opposition on April 30 and moved to the full Council, co-sponsored by 12 of 15 members. It is the third layer of an unusually complete municipal stack: the Safe Spaces and Communities Act passed 14–0 on March 23, barring ICE from city buildings, and a pension-divestment proposal is in parallel. The zoning ban reaches private contractors but not federal property — so the federally owned Fallon Building hold rooms remain a separate fight — but it removes the as-of-right pathway for any private operator entirely. That is the strongest form of the defense.

Next door, Baltimore County went faster. In February, ICE leased about 16,365 square feet at 201 International Circle in Hunt Valley for its Office of the Principal Legal Advisor — an attorneys’ office, not a detention site, with room for roughly 34 staff. The disclosure alone was enough. County Executive Kathy Klausmeier requested an emergency session, and on February 17 the County Council passed an emergency zoning ban 6–0, barring permits for “detention centers, jails, or other facilities used for involuntary confinement” and granting itself authority to revoke certain permits issued since January 1, 2026. A legal office triggered a detention ban. That is how charged the ground has become.

These build on the reactive precedent in Howard County’s Elkridge fight, where a stealth facility was caught after the permit issued. Baltimore is doing the same thing earlier, by statute, in the state’s largest jurisdiction.

The Secret Lease East of Gilroy

The freshest fight in this update is the one that shows where the warehouse model went after the federal review stalled it.

A federal immigration detention center is being built at 7240 Holsclaw Road, an unincorporated parcel in southern Santa Clara County just east of Gilroy, about eight miles from the Monterey County line. The federal government leased the land in January 2025 — a GSA-awarded lease, $26.5 million over 20 years — but the project was not publicly known until April 2026, when community members spotted activity and alerted Santa Clara County. By mid-May, crews were demolishing the property’s greenhouses and erecting privacy fencing.

The landlord is ECG 6 LLC, a Beverly Hills entity sharing an address with Elmwood Capital Group — a real-estate firm founded in 2020 that acquires industrial properties and procures GSA leases. Elmwood took ownership of the Holsclaw Road parcel weeks after the federal contract award. It is reportedly tied to another immigration-detention proposal in Texas. This is the same secret-deed-through-an-LLC pattern that built the Pennsylvania and El Paso warehouses — but routed through a real-estate intermediary holding a government lease rather than a prison operator holding a contract. The deny-then-build posture is intact: DHS said only that it has “no new detention centers to announce at this time… ICE is actively working to expand detention space.”

The site is not zoned for detention. On May 19, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution opposing the facility — the second county to formally line up against it — directing the county to send opposition letters, join any litigation by Santa Clara County or the California DOJ, and review its own zoning laws. A facility in one county, opposed by the county next door, on land that local zoning does not permit. It is the zoning playbook and the secret-lease pattern colliding in a single fight.

Two More Deaths

Two detainee deaths entered the catalog this month, both at large Texas facilities we had never documented — counties that scored high on the heatmap for years with no fight or facility file at all.

At the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall (Frio County, heat 123 — a 1,904-bed GEO Group facility), Kai Yin Wong, a 63-year-old Chinese national, died on October 25, 2025. He had been transported from the facility on October 11 for shortness of breath and weakness, then airlifted to San Antonio for heart failure and possible pneumonia. Pearsall has drawn a growing chorus of complaints over medical care, food, prolonged detention, and obstacles to legal counsel.

At the Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Los Fresnos (Cameron County, heat 112 — an ICE-owned facility holding ~1,200, processing ~9,500 a year), Randall Gamboa Esquivel, a 52-year-old Costa Rican, entered the US in good health in December 2024. He was first held at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, then transferred to Port Isabel. By July 2025 his records showed roughly ten conditions including sepsis; weeks later a doctor described him as catatonic, in a vegetative state. The custody pipeline that moved him — Laredo to Port Isabel — is itself the signal, and there is now an active SAM.gov RFI seeking to re-procure or expand Port Isabel’s operations.

These join the homicide rulings at Adams County, Mississippi and El Paso’s Camp East Montana from last month. Mortality remains the dominant narrative of the expansion. See The Deadliest Year.

The Counties That Kicked ICE Out — and Couldn’t

Two of this month’s entries document the limit of local control.

Broward County, Florida is the highest-scoring county in the entire system (heat 202), and until this week it had no fight file. Sheriff Gregory Tony resisted publicly — “I didn’t sign up to be ICE” — then backed down under AG James Uthmeier’s suspension threat, assigning about two staff to the county’s 287(g) programs as a minimal-compliance posture. The GEO-run Broward Transitional Center runs at 105–108% capacity, roughly 80% of detainees with no criminal record. Marie Ange Blaise, 44, died there on April 25, 2025; 911 calls doubled year-over-year. Broward and Miami-Dade are the only large Florida agencies that did not apply for the state’s $60M enforcement grant — reluctance even under compliance.

Williamson County, Texas is the textbook case. Commissioners voted 4–1 in 2018 to terminate the county’s agreement at the CoreCivic-run T. Don Hutto facility. ICE simply re-contracted directly with CoreCivic to keep it open — and commissioners learned of it from reporters. Terminating an intergovernmental agreement does not close a privately owned facility if ICE can contract around the county. Hutto has shifted from a family facility to a women’s facility to, now, adult men — the same footprint repurposed to whatever demand exists.

(In Oklahoma County, which carries the heaviest county-commission signal load in the system, we found the opposite of what the heatmap implied: not a confirmed ICE contract but an $835M jail-financing crisis, with the jail trust voted dissolved 6–1 in March. The real federal story in Oklahoma is the statewide 287(g) wave — 28-plus agencies, up from three. We documented both, and were careful not to claim more than the sourcing supports.)

Automated Ingest Is Now Running

A note on our own infrastructure. We’ve been building a weekly automated data ingest — a job that pulls fresh records from USAspending, county Legistar portals, and the other public sources behind the heatmap, then opens a pull request for review. It’s a new piece of the pipeline, and for a stretch it was broken: the job was collecting data correctly but failing at the final step, so nothing reached the site.

That’s fixed. The ingest now runs cleanly end to end, and we merged the backlog it had quietly accumulated — a wave of new county-commission records and ICE contract data, 257 new entries in all. We also corrected the heatmap’s scoring engine so it now counts IGSA detention contracts directly, which is why several counties (Broward and the South Texas cluster among them) score higher than they did a month ago. The signal was always there; the engine just wasn’t counting it.

This is the part of the project that is supposed to be boring. When it works, the map updates itself every week and we spend our time investigating what moved. It’s working now.

The Site Now

After this update:

• 140 fights documented across all 50 states (was 129)
• 18,002 entries total
• 2,016 counties scored
• 146 facility profiles

The highest heat scores, with IGSA contracts now counted: Broward, FL (202), Miami-Dade, FL (179), Williamson, TX (158), Orange, FL (157), San Diego, CA (155), and the South Texas cluster — Frio (149) and Cameron — climbing fast.

The methodology is unchanged. We watch where the signals are. We watch where readers visit. We investigate, and the findings go back into the system. If you live in one of these counties and know what is happening on the ground — especially the South Texas facilities, or anything near Gilroy — tell us. Most of what is on this site started as someone in a county knowing something that needed to be written down.

Mark Ramm, May 27, 2026