The Department of Homeland Security is planning to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into immigrant detention centers, according to documents shared Thursday by New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
Ayotte said in a statement that she received the documents in response to an inquiry about the economic impact on the town of Merrimack, where $158 million will be spent to retrofit a warehouse into a holding facility.
According to an overview of the plan, first reported by the Washington Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to purchase and convert 16 buildings into processing centers. Those facilities would hold between 1,000 and 1,500 detainees for up to a week.
An additional eight large-scale detention centers will be used as base camps for deportations and will reportedly hold as many as 10,000 migrants for up to 60 days.
“The new model is designed to strategically increase bed capacity to 92,600 beds,” the documents read. “For ICE to sustain the anticipated increase in enforcement operations and arrests in 2026, an increase in detention capacity will be a necessary downstream requirement.”
Congress appears ready to approve the funding through the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and ICE plans to activate the new detention centers by the end of November.
Ayotte published the documents after Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said in a Senate hearing on Thursday that he’d “worked with Gov. Ayotte” on the economic impact of the project in New Hampshire. The Republican governor previously denied knowing an ICE center was coming to Merrimack, according to the New Hampshire Bulletin.
“After my office inquired about the economic impact study following today’s Senate hearing, DHS has now for the first time distributed the document,” Ayotte said in a statement. “Once the document was received, we immediately shared it with the Town of Merrimack.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services letter sent to Ayotte estimated the proposed Merrimack Processing Site would “support a total of 1,252 jobs during retrofit” and create up to 265 positions for people in New Hampshire once its complete.
