ICE Awards Billion Dollar Contracts for Detention Center in Texas and Training Center in Georgia
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded two contracts collectively worth $2.2 billion for the construction of a training center in Ft. Benning, Georgia and a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas, according to procurement records reviewed by Heavy Weather.
Both contracts were awarded on September 12 to a company called Burrow Global JV LLC.
The award for construction in Ft. Benning is worth $1 billion while the award for construction in Los Fresnos is worth $1.2 billion.
Both contracts are set to start on September 18.
The solicitation referenced by both awards was first reported by Project Salt Box (go subscribe!) earlier this year, which is where I first learned about it. I started following everything that came out about the solicitation because it contained two funded projects and seven scenarios, one of which was the construction/expansion of a detention center in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico (misspelled "Aquadilla").
The solicitation was for "Secure Housing Units" (SHU), essentially a wing of new cells at several Service Processing Centers (SPC) across the United States and its colonies. The solicitation mentions an a funded project Ft. Benning but did not say what was supposed to be built there. The solicitation also mentions building a new SHU at St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands SPC, which literally does not exist, as Project Salt Box reported. Overall, the original solicitation was a hot mess, non-existent detention center notwithstanding.
As Project Salt Box reported in August, documents updating the solicitation showed that ICE wanted these detention centers built in a year, half of its own deadline, as well as correcting several errors throughout the original solicitation. The updated solicitation clarified that an "advanced training and operations complex" was to be designed and built in Ft. Benning, Georgia.
Since the Trump administration entered office in 2025, they've attempted to aggressively expand their detention capacity throughout the US, including through a Navy construction program called WEXMAC TITUS, which was dropped fairly quikcly, and buying warehouses that are now being sold off.
