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Contracting paperwork obtained by watchdog group Project Salt Box shows ICE building a fleet of mobile detention units in Pennsylvania, to be operated by GTI, GEO Group's transportation subsidiary, and run "until full."
- The only operating rule on record limits how long women can be held in a van to 10 hours; nothing addresses meals, bathroom access or maximum stays for anyone else.
- DHS just signed construction contracts worth more than $7 billion to expand detention capacity in New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida and California, with further expansion announced in Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania.
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Those states include every one of the five U.S. metro areas with the largest Hispanic populations, and roughly 70% of people currently in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, according to TRAC.
Buried inside routine contracting paperwork for an ICE build-out in Pennsylvania is a request most people would scroll past: a call for "mobile detention facilities." The document, first surfaced by the watchdog group Project Salt Box, lays out almost nothing about how the vans will actually operate day to day.
A detention plan with almost no rulebook
According to the paperwork, the units will be run by GTI, the transportation arm of private prison contractor GEO Group, and kept in service "until full" — meaning until a van reaches capacity or an operation wraps up. The single documented limit anywhere in the filing is that women cannot be held in one of the vans for more than 10 hours. Nothing in the record addresses bathroom access, meals, or how long anyone else might sit in custody before being transferred somewhere else.
Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box and a former military intelligence analyst, has been tracking the filing closely. He argues the gap is the story: a system built to move detainees straight from arrest to a vehicle, with none of the oversight that comes with a fixed facility. Neither ICE nor GEO Group responded to requests for comment on the plan.
Why Pennsylvania — and why that might not last
Wriston's read on the location is straightforward: Pennsylvania is a large state, and many of its local police departments decline to cooperate with ICE, which leaves agents without jail space to hold people after a sweep. A van fleet solves that problem without requiring a fixed building or a friendly local government.
That same logic doesn't stop at the Pennsylvania border. The pattern of expansion suggests the model could travel anywhere agents run into the same jail-access problem.
Correcting the record on which Latino hubs are exposed
Contrary to an earlier version of this story, Chicago is not among the five U.S. metro areas with the largest Hispanic populations. Based on Census Bureau data compiled by Pew Research Center, that list runs Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston and Riverside-San Bernardino, California — with Chicago trailing in seventh place. What holds up is this: those five metro areas sit in California, New York, Florida and Texas, and all four of those states are named directly in DHS's newest detention construction contracts. The country's largest concentrations of Latino residents already live inside the states receiving the fresh funding, regardless of how the mobile-van model itself eventually spreads.
Tracing the money behind the buildout
None of this expansion is happening cheaply. ICE became the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added a $75 billion supplement to its budget. That money originally financed a strategy built around converting warehouses into detention centers, a plan then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons once described by saying the deportation system should run like "Prime, but with human beings."
That warehouse strategy largely collapsed under local pushback. Residents near proposed sites organized protests, and several states sued, including Maryland. Project Salt Box's tracking now shows ICE selling off most of the warehouses it had purchased.
But the agency hasn't abandoned its capacity target. On an August earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley told investors ICE is still working toward 100,000 operational beds, with roughly 68,000 already in place. As he put it, "they have another 30,000 or so more beds to go."
The enforcement numbers behind the shift
This buildout is landing during a record stretch of enforcement activity: roughly 100,000 people were arrested in the two months leading into September, a pace DHS itself has confirmed set a new record. Against that backdrop, TRAC's detention data shows the overwhelming majority of people currently held have no criminal conviction at all.
Wriston argues that detail undercuts the administration's public framing of enforcement as targeting the "worst of the worst." A narrowly targeted operation, he says, would work from short lists of specific names rather than deploying a mobile fleet designed to sweep through an area. In his words, "this describes sweeps, immigration sweeps."
What to watch next
For now, the mobile-detention concept exists only on paper in Pennsylvania. But the surrounding conditions — new construction funding, a private contractor scaling up transport infrastructure, and an enforcement pace still setting records — give the model an obvious runway into other states, including the ones home to the largest Latino populations in the country. Whichever state adopts it next will likely come down to the same test driving the Pennsylvania pilot: wherever local police won't hold ICE's detainees, the agency will keep looking for a vehicle that can.
