The pipeline starts with demand. Under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, ICE can deputize local law enforcement to act as immigration agents. Since January 2025, these agreements have exploded — from 135 to over 1,637, a 641% increase. Nearly a thousand of these are Task Force Model agreements, which put street-level officers in the deportation business.

The agreements are concentrated in specific states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina — and they create a structural demand for detention beds. Every arrest requires a bed. Every bed requires a facility. And every facility requires a county willing to build one.

Performance incentives accelerate the cycle. Arrest bounty systems tie bonuses to immigration enforcement volume — an estimated $1.4 to $2 billion in potential 2026 distributions. The more arrests, the more beds needed. The more beds, the more facilities. The more facilities, the more contracts. The machine feeds itself.

To house the arrests, DHS launched a stealth purchasing spree. Beginning in late 2024, the federal government began buying warehouses — empty distribution centers, bankrupt retail hubs, industrial parks — and converting them into detention facilities. No local votes. No public hearings. Often no advance notice.

The purchases followed a pattern: distressed commercial real estate, owned by institutional investors, sold to the government at enormous markups. The federal purchase extinguishes bank debt on otherwise underwater assets, generating windfall profits for Wall Street.

The warehouse blitz provoked immediate, visceral opposition. Communities that had no voice in the purchase — no vote, no hearing, no notice — organized rapidly.

In Romulus, Michigan, 700 to 800 people packed City Hall after ICE quietly purchased a warehouse near schools and in a floodplain. The state attorney general filed a lawsuit. The facility sat near a site that had flooded the previous year.

Surprise, Arizona passed a five-year ban on federal detention warehouses. The city had been told nothing before DHS purchased a property. (The ban may be legally unenforceable under federal preemption — but it sent a signal.)

Maryland passed the Dignity Not Detention Act. Congressional members were denied access to facilities despite valid court orders. Social Circle, Georgia threatened to cut water service to a planned facility.

By April 2026, 13 planned warehouse purchases were canceled and 11 more were under review. The direct federal purchase model — stealth, fast, no local buy-in — had generated too much resistance.

With the warehouse model stalling, the system pivoted. Former Border Patrol agent and whistleblower Jenn Budd flagged the shift:

The new model: instead of the federal government buying property directly, a consulting firm staffed by former ICE officials pitches rural sheriffs on building detention facilities as economic development. The county votes. The county owns the land. A private operator manages the facility. ICE pays for beds. It looks like a local decision. It's designed to.

The company driving this pivot is Sabot Consulting, a former IT firm that reinvented itself as the "only dedicated Criminal Justice Compliance and ICE Integration practice in the country." They attended the National Sheriffs' Association conference in Fort Lauderdale in July 2025. They claim "several counties have already enlisted Sabot."

Bradford County, Florida is the documented case study of the intermediary model — the one county where a leaked briefing package reveals the full playbook. Population 28,000. A $5.5 million tax shortfall. And a 30-acre site with a contaminated warehouse.

A leaked Sabot Consulting briefing package, dated December 16, 2025 and marked DRAFT, outlines a 3,000-bed detention campus to be built in three phases over 38 weeks:

The timeline shows how the playbook unfolds:

July 2025: Sheriff Gordon Smith is approached by a former Osceola County chief deputy working with Sabot.
December 16, 2025: Sabot delivers the briefing package to commissioners.
January 15, 2026: Commission votes 3-2 to advance the proposal.
February 28, 2026: WUFT reports groundwater contamination — volatile organic compounds have spread to 30 surrounding properties, monitored by Florida DEP for 15 years.
March 3, 2026: Sheriff dismisses opposition as "hate-filled vigor," personally attacks critics by name.
April 7, 2026: Commission agenda includes both a DEP environmental monitoring agreement and a lease for "temporary ICE detainment facility" — the lease before the environmental studies are complete.

Sabot's ongoing role: "Office of ICE Integration" — compliance coordination, communications discipline, issue tracking, and "County-ICE-operator alignment." The service they advertise is "managing the noise" — handling NGO scrutiny and press inquiries so agencies can "focus on the mission."

The intermediary model works because the consultants are the former system. The people pitching counties on detention were, until recently, the people running federal detention. They know the contracts, the compliance requirements, the political pressure points — because they designed them.

Johnson isn't alone. The network visualization documents the full revolving door:

Daniel Bible, Deputy Executive Associate Director for ERO, left ICE in October 2024 — directly to GEO Group, the largest private detention operator. David Venturella, former ICE Assistant Director, now advises both GEO and DHS simultaneously via an ethics waiver. Matthew Albence, former Acting ICE Director, went to GEO. Daniel Ragsdale, former ICE Deputy Director, went to GEO.

The conflict matrix shows the financial ties: at least 15 senior officials with stock holdings, pension interests, or prior compensation from the companies now receiving billions in detention contracts.

The warehouse pause doesn't mean the pipeline stopped. It means the pipeline changed shape. With 13 direct federal purchases canceled and 11 under review, expect the intermediary model to accelerate. Sabot claims "several counties have already enlisted" beyond Bradford. The question is which ones.

This site tracks 986 counties with at least one pipeline signal. Of those, 886 have only automated data — no one has checked commission agendas, searched local news, or filed a FOIA request. Some of those unresearched counties score as high as 110.

The early warning system works only if people use it. A high heat score with automated-only signals is a flag, not a finding. The coverage gaps dashboard shows where investigation is needed most. The FOIA generator produces ready-to-send public records requests. The contribution guide explains how to feed findings back into the system.

The pipeline depends on silence — closed sessions, NDAs, "managing the noise." The counter is transparency. Early detection. Democratic response.