Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to create "mobile detention facilities" for immigrant detainees in Pennsylvania, according to publicly available government documents. It's part of a massive detention expansion that began last year when the agency turned into the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with a $75 billion supplement from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
This shift in strategy comes after ICE started buying large warehouses nationwide to turn into mega detention centers.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons described wanting squads of trucks rounding up immigrants and having the deportation process run like "[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings."
The plans faced widespread pushback from communities near the warehouses and from immigration activists.
"I don't understand. What do we need this for?" Linda Powell, a resident of Williamsport, Md., told NPR in March.
ICE had recently purchased a warehouse near her home, and she was worried about the impact on the town's infrastructure. She also had humanitarian concerns about conditions in the facility: "We don't need it here."
This was the sentiment in various towns that staged protests. Several states, including Maryland, sued. ICE has since backed off the plans and, according to data gathered by watchdog group Project Salt Box, is selling most of those warehouses, indicating that the project has largely failed.
But the Trump administration is also detaining immigrants at record numbers — roughly 100,000 people arrested in the last two months.
While the warehouse project has flopped, records show that in the last few months ICE has quietly expanded its detention system in other ways.
In an August earnings call for the private prison company GEO Group — one of ICE's main contractors — an investor asked CEO George Zoley whether ICE was still aiming to reach 100,000 operational beds.
"I think so, for the most part," Zoley responded, saying ICE presently has 68,000 beds. "So they have another 30,000 or so more beds to go."
Fast-forward to this week: On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees ICE) signed construction contracts worth over $7 billion to expand immigration detention in New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida and California. It also announced that it will expand in Colorado, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Buried in the paperwork first obtained by Project Salt Box is a document regarding expansion in Pennsylvania. ICE says it's looking for "mobile detention facilities," which it describes as being run by GTI (the transportation subsidiary of GEO Group).
"What they describe is a network of vans that would follow officers into the field as they make these arrests," says Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box. "Very conspicuously missing from this description was: What are the standards? You know, how long a person can be kept in a van. How are people using the bathroom? How are they feeding them?"
The only details about the mobile units provided in the document are that they will be used "until full" or until the operation is done and that women can't be held in them for over 10 hours.
Neither ICE nor the GEO Group responded to NPR's request for comment about the vans.
Wriston, a former military intelligence analyst, thinks the focus on Pennsylvania is because it's such a large state where many police departments are not allowed to work with ICE. That means detained immigrants can't be held at local jails.
Of the tens of thousands of people currently in ICE detention, around 70% have no criminal record. Wriston says the need for mobile detention centers gives a sense of how these crackdowns aren't necessarily going after hardened criminals, as President Trump has said in the past.
"If this were targeted immigration enforcement, if this were truly 'worst of the worst'-type enforcement, it stands to reason that ICE would have a list of a couple of names, and then an officer or a team of officers would go out and make an arrest. This describes sweeps, immigration sweeps."
The mobile detention facilities, he says, are more than just a blip in the paperwork. They show the scope of the mass deportations.
Copyright 2026 NPR
