The World’s Biggest Banks May Be Benefiting from the ICE Warehouse Craze
DHS is likely overpaying for warehouses owned by some of the world’s largest financial institutions.
By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union
President Trump has claimed many times that his mass deportation efforts will boost economic prospects for America’s working class. But the Department of Homeland Security’s recent spending spree on Immigration and Customs Enforcement warehouses may actually be padding the margins of some of the world’s largest financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, according to financial records viewed by More Perfect Union.
DHS, which oversees ICE, has sought to acquire $38 billion worth of warehouses around the country to expand immigrant detention to hold more than 92,000 people. Records show that the federal government has already spent $1 billion so far this year to acquire dozens of warehouses, although newly-appointed DHS Secretary and former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) has temporarily paused these deals and signaled that the agency will review the purchases.
Data compiled by the activist group Project Salt Box demonstrates that some of these purchases were made at many times their estimated market valuation, and that the sales involve some of the world’s largest investors.
“In several of the ICE warehouse purchases Project Salt Box reviewed through property records, financing documents and lien filings, the properties were owned by institutional real estate funds and financed with bank debt, and when the federal government purchased the properties, those sales coincided with loans being paid off and liens being released,” said Michael Wriston, a researcher at Project Salt Box.
In other words, some of these warehouse sales are effectively acting as a vehicle for these institutions to sell off otherwise distressed assets and profit from taxpayer-funded investment.
Examples of overpayment for these warehouses are numerous. In Social Circle, Georgia, DHS paid almost $129 million for a property previously valued at $29 million, a 333 percent overpayment. In Surprise, Arizona, a warehouse previously valued at nearly $12 million in 2023 was purchased for $70 million, a nearly 500 percent markup. And in Socorro, Texas, a property previously valued at $11 million sold for $123 million, a 1000 percent increase.
One warehouse that DHS acquired in Tremont, Pennsylvania was formerly a Big Lots distribution center that sat empty after the company went bankrupt in 2024. Its ownership was transferred to a subsidiary of a real estate fund managed by investment firm Blue Owl Capital, a major New York City-based private equity group, and was sold to DHS for $119 million, at double its estimated market value.
Blue Owl Capital, which manages an estimated $157 billion in assets, is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, software, and financial services. Its owners heavily donated last election cycle to Republican congressional groups, and one of its directors, Edward D’Alelio, previously served on the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts.
The Tremont warehouse is not Blue Owl’s first foray into ICE contracting. Through their real estate subsidiary, the private equity group owns a parcel of warehouses, including one in Durant, Oklahoma, that was recently the subject of sustained local opposition against ICE from Oklahoma City residents. That warehouse was ultimately bought by the Choctaw Nation in subversion of DHS’s planned purchase.
At least 33 members of the Trump administration reported investing in Blue Owl’s various private equity funds, including President Donald Trump — who holds more than $5 million in investments — and John Russell McGranahan, who previously served as general counsel at the General Services Administration until November 2025, the agency that typically brokers these types of government real estate deals.
Blue Owl did not respond to a request for comment.
Another proposed facility in Williamsport, Maryland, a rural county in the Western part of the state, would convert a long-vacant warehouse into a 1,500-bed ICE detention center. The warehouse had served as a series of failed food processing and industrial facilities and was most recently owned by Fundrise, a direct-access alternative asset manager that allows investors to buy a portion of a property. But the facility never took off, and its owners consistently considered its continued vacancy a liability on their financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In late 2025, Goldman Sachs intervened by refinancing the property as part of a $352 million loan, just months before the property was sold to the Department of Homeland Security.
Goldman Sachs was also the former majority owner of a 470,000-square-foot vacant industrial warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, that was purchased by ICE in February for $129.3 million — 137 percent over value, according to Project Salt Box.
Goldman Sachs has had close ties to Trump, particularly in his first term. This includes Gary David Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who served as the National Economic Council Director and Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer, who served as the Treasury Secretary. Former Goldman Sachs employees have also been appointed to Trump’s cabinet in his second term and advised on his transition.
“As a lender, we are not involved in the operations and management of the portfolios of assets we lend to. Those decisions are made by the owners of those assets,” a Goldman Sachs representative told More Perfect Union. “We are also not involved with the sales process of individual assets and would not share in the profit of an asset’s sale if there were one.”
Another new 10,000-bed warehouse project in Salt Lake City, Utah, has received significant pushback from the city’s mayor for its proposed water use as the mountain city faces down a historic drought. Before that facility was purchased by DHS on March 11 for $145 million — more than 50 percent over its estimated market valuation — the warehouse belonged to Deutsche Bank through a series of subsidiaries.
Germany-based Deutsche Bank has conducted extensive business with the Trump family, loaning him a cumulative estimated $2.5 billion over the past two decades, and continuing to make loans to him even after he sued them for a loan he defaulted on. The institution has also come under scrutiny for its ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who held around 40 accounts with the multinational bank.
In effect, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary may be pocketing nearly $50 million in extra taxpayer cash. Deutsche Bank declined to comment for this story.
On March 30, 54 Congressional Democrats launched an investigation into the government contractors, real estate brokers, and property owners potentially profiting from the fast-tracked expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive new warehouse detention facilities. They noted the secretive, rushed deals, and staggering overpayments for warehouses far beyond their market valuation.
In their letter, lawmakers also identified multiple conflicts of interest between Trump’s cabinet and ICE’s private contractors, an abuse of the defense-focused contracting system used to acquire these facilities, and inappropriate non-disclosure agreements signed with local officials.