Overview
- Rep. Veronica Escobar said on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security has transferred three Socorro warehouses to the General Services Administration so they can be put up for sale and will no longer be used for detention.
- The properties were bought last year for about $123 million and had been planned to hold roughly 8,500 people, a scale local leaders said would overwhelm Socorro’s limited water, wastewater and emergency services.
- Secretary Markwayne Mullin has paused or canceled many contracts made under former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and the department’s inspector general opened an audit into the warehouse purchases.
- Federal judges in Maryland, New Jersey and Michigan previously blocked retrofits at other warehouse sites for failing to complete environmental reviews, and DHS has already scaled down its El Paso plans to use existing facilities and 26 modular cells.
- The transfer clears the way for local economic planning in Socorro and leaves open broader questions about how DHS will find detention capacity, how many other warehouses it will sell, and what price the government will recoup from those sales.