ICE Issued Confident Announcements About Warehouse Purchases in Two States. Neither Was True.
As the beleaguered agency rushes to open detention facilities across the country, it can't seem to get its own announcements right.
Update - Feb. 18, 2026 - 11:00 PM
ICE confirmed — and then quickly denied — buying a warehouse in Roxbury, N.J., marking the third time in a day they walked-back an official announcement.
Reporter Fred Aun wrote at TapIntoRoxbury that ICE issued a statement in response to a story published by Gothamist, which broke the news of the Roxbury sale.
“ICE has NOT purchased a facility in Roxbury, New Jersey,” said an ICE spokesperson via email.
It said the statement that led to the Gothamist story “was sent without proper approval, and this mistake has since been rectified.”
On Tuesday night, hundreds of residents packed the Wilson County Commission meeting in Lebanon, Tenn., to protest an ICE detention facility that the federal government had announced was coming to their community. They did not know — could not have known — that ICE was already drafting the email that would tell reporters the announcement had never been authorized.
That same evening, the agency sent word: “ICE has NOT purchased a facility in Lebanon, Tennessee. That statement was sent without proper approval and this mistake has since been rectified.”
By Wednesday morning, ICE had issued a second retraction, in nearly identical language, for a warehouse it had also claimed to have purchased in Chester, N.Y.
The back-to-back reversals were not isolated stumbles. They capped a week in which ICE distributed an economic analysis for a proposed facility in New Hampshire that appeared to have been copied from a document prepared for another state, ICE’s acting director told Congress something a sitting governor directly contradicted, and the department’s top spokesperson announced she was leaving. Taken as a whole, these episodes reveal an agency issuing confident, specific information — purchase confirmations, job projections, tax revenue figures — that it cannot stand behind.
ICE and DHS did not respond to questions about whether either site remains under consideration, or how authorized statements are distinguished from unauthorized ones.
Officials Blindsided
The Lebanon announcement arrived with the assurance of settled fact. On Feb. 13, an ICE spokesperson emailed the Tennessee Lookout confirming that the agency had purchased a facility in Lebanon. When the reporter asked whether she meant Lebanon, Tennessee — rather than Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where ICE had also recently bought a warehouse — the spokesperson replied: “Hi — Yes, I do mean Lebanon, Tennessee.”
In the days that followed, additional ICE spokespersons confirmed the purchase to The Tennessean, FOX 17 and other outlets, citing specific projections: 7,216 jobs, $829.5 million in GDP contribution, more than $167.8 million in tax revenue. None of that information had reached the officials who would ordinarily be involved in such a transaction. Wilson County Mayor Randall Hutto said he had no knowledge of any detention facility project. State Sen. Mark Pody and State Rep. Clark Boyd — both Republicans — said they had contacted congressional offices, the state administration and the county sheriff without finding any confirmation the purchase had occurred.
The Chester situation unfolded much the same way. Mayor John Bell and Town Supervisor Brandon Holdridge said they had received no communication from the federal government since The Washington Post first reported in December that ICE was exploring a purchase of a former Pep Boys warehouse in the village.
“The incompetence is beyond real and they clearly have no discipline,” Holdridge said. Bell put it more plainly: "From day one, none of us have heard anything from the Department of Homeland Security or ICE. We see and read things in the media like everyone else."
Copy-Paste Missteps
The unauthorized announcements follow a separate but related problem: the quality of the information ICE has been putting out when it does speak on the record.
As this publication reported this week, an economic impact analysis for a proposed ICE facility in Merrimack, N.H., referenced “ripple effects to the Oklahoma economy” and projected millions in sales and income tax revenue — taxes that New Hampshire does not levy. DHS called the Oklahoma reference “a single typo.” State Senator Tim McGough, a Republican who represents Merrimack, called it “clearly a cut-and-paste job.”
The errors raise a specific question about process. ICE made its first-ever purchase of IMPLAN, the industry-standard economic modeling software, on Feb. 4 — just 12 days before releasing the Merrimack analysis. The software’s purpose is to generate accurate, state-specific economic projections, including tax structures. Used correctly, it would have immediately flagged that New Hampshire has no sales or income tax.
ICE did not respond to questions about whether IMPLAN was used to produce the Merrimack assessment, or whether the economic figures attached to the Lebanon and Chester announcements were generated using the same tool.
The Merrimack episode produced a more serious problem. ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons testified before the Senate that he had already shared the economic analysis with Governor Kelly Ayotte. She denied it publicly and directly. “This is simply not true,” Ms. Ayotte said. “Director Lyons’ comments today are another example of the troubling pattern of issues with this process.”
Whether Lyons misspoke or misinformed Congress, the exchange left a Republican governor publicly disputing the account of the agency’s acting director.
A Top Spokesperson Departs
Against this backdrop of errors and retractions, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that Tricia McLaughlin, its assistant secretary for public affairs and the administration’s most prominent spokesperson on immigration enforcement, would be leaving the agency, as first reported by Politico. Her departure was announced the same day ICE was retracting the Lebanon announcement, hours before the Chester retraction followed.
McLaughlin had become the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown, appearing across network television and social media to defend its detention and deportation policies. She had faced sustained scrutiny since January, when she described the federal agents who killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse, as having encountered someone who appeared to be trying to “massacre law enforcement.” Video evidence later contradicted that characterization. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — herself under fire for a reported mishandling of a U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue mission — said McLaughlin “served with exceptional dedication.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries offered a different assessment: “Another MAGA extremist forced out of DHS.”
The office that lost its top communicator this week is the same one that sent unauthorized purchase announcements to newsrooms in two states — and, when those announcements proved false, could offer no explanation beyond a form sentence about proper approval.
ICE is operating under a $38.3 billion mandate and a congressional deadline to build detention capacity for more than 92,000 people by fiscal year end. It has purchased — or has claimed to purchase — nine warehouse properties in recent weeks. Whether Lebanon and Chester are still on that list is a question the agency has not answered.
Note: Project Salt Box updates its ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker using credible reporting, including official announcements from DHS and local governments. Given the agency's recent record of issuing and retracting its own statements, we will now rely solely on tangible property records and confirmed statements from state and local officials.
William Shirer, in his canonical study of Nazi Germany, described the government of the Third Reich as “a vast and sprawling bureaucracy, having little of the efficiency usually credited to the Germans, poisoned by graft, beset by constant confusion and cutthroat rivalries” (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 276).
Sound familiar?
ICE is trying to open a concentration camp, I refuse to call them "detention centers," in Romulus, MI and the Mayor politely ripped them a new one. https://www.romulusgov.com/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/353