Notable Signals

The construction awards went to counties already on the map. On September 20, DHS signed five construction IDIQs with ceilings totaling $7.32 billion: El Paso, TX and Batavia, NY to Rapid Deployment Inc.; Florence, AZ and Miami, FL to GardaWorld Federal Services; El Centro, CA to Rudiarius Holdings Corp. Project Saltbox identified the winners. It also traced Rudiarius, registered in Wyoming in 2025, to a Boston developer whose related company, SK2, already held an ICE contract to help acquire warehouses. Here is where those counties stood among the map’s 2,032 scored counties the day the contracts were signed: Miami-Dade 2nd, El Paso tied for 3rd, Pinal (Florence) tied for 11th, Genesee (Batavia) tied for 36th, Imperial (El Centro) tied for 42nd. USAspending shows $0 obligated on all five so far, so they don’t move any scores yet. The task orders will.

GardaWorld’s other new contract. One of the records this ingest brought in is a $100.5 million ICE contract to GardaWorld Federal Services, running from September 1, 2026 to August 31, 2027, for “24/7/365 armed ground transportation for individuals placed into ICE custody under the 287(g) program across all 254 Texas counties.” Texas accounts for 277 of the 1,311 287(g) agreements in our dataset. USAspending codes the contract to Virginia, where the contractor is headquartered, so it shows up on no Texas county page. That is one way a county-level map undercounts.

GAO on the first wave of spending. GAO-26-108663 (September 24): ICE bought 11 warehouses for about $1.07 billion and now plans to sell 7 of them, after more than $20 million in costs it can’t recover. Florida was reimbursed through a $608 million FEMA grant at $249 per detainee per day, against ICE’s $92 median. ICE says its strategic plan for the expansion will be done on August 31, 2027.

Moshannon. On September 22, Clearfield County commissioners voted 2-1 to extend the Moshannon Valley IGSA six months (Spotlight PA). An attachment to ICE’s Philadelphia-area detention RFP (70CDCR26R00000026), titled “Moshannon Enhanced Transportation”, asks for GEO Transport teams staged in Philadelphia, York, Pittsburgh, Williamsport, Pike County and Dover, DE, to act as a “mobile detention facility” until the vans are full (NPR first reported the van plan); nothing had been awarded as of September 29. The RAMM’s deeper piece on the vote and the RFP, “The County Gets $200,000. Nobody Will Tell It What It’s Giving Up.” , publishes October 1 on theramm.transparencycascade.org. The RAMM on what the county gets and what it gives up: The County Gets $200,000. Nobody Will Tell It What It’s Giving Up.

Coverage Updates

Local agenda items the scanner picked up, including items the scanner missed while the ingest was stuck:

• Santa Barbara County, CA (July 7): supervisors took a report on land-use rules for immigration enforcement facilities and detention centers. They told planning staff to watch for private developers and come back about a possible moratorium.
• Baltimore, MD (June 22): the City Council took up a bill making private detention centers a prohibited use anywhere in the city.
• Galveston County, TX (September 14): commissioners certified $1,125,000 in revenue for the sheriff’s DHS ICE 287(g) Task Force.

Outside the scanner’s portals: Pierce County, WA extended its detention moratorium by six months on August 25 (Spokesman-Review). Hall County, GA paused rezonings for data centers and detention centers in a single vote (Gainesville Times).

Why there was no new data from July to September

Every weekly ingest from July 14 through September 29 silently rolled back: two USAspending contract IDs it re-pulled were already filed elsewhere in the knowledge base, so the validator rejected each batch. That’s fixed, and this refresh adds 946 entries — 755 ICE contract awards (128 detention-related) and 191 commission agenda items.

Two keyword bugs surfaced in the same pass and are now fixed. The scanner read “ICE” case-insensitively, counting National Ice Cream Day and an ice-rink contract as enforcement activity. A looser closed-session/real-estate rule, meant to catch quietly negotiated ICE facility deals, was matching ordinary municipal business with no detention content at all — it had added a Newark community center’s funding agreement to Essex County, NJ’s score. Tightening that rule removed 218 commission entries across the corpus that no longer qualify, which is why the commission-item count below nets lower than what this ingest added. We also moved two GEO Group/Valor Network contracts that had been miscategorized as Alaska Native Corporation awards into the ICE-contracts directory where they belong.

Numbers

Data current as of September 30, 2026. Contribute what you know. Local knowledge is what turns signals into stories.