The Atlantic | The $97 Million Utah Warehouse ICE Bought for $145 Million by Nick Miroff
The empty warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City had a lot of potential but no buyers. Built in 2022, it was one of the largest warehouses in the area, with 833,000 square feet of space—14 football fields under one roof. The surrounding industrial zone had been promoted by the state as “Utah’s Inland Port,” a logistics hub smack-dab in the middle of a desert but only a few minutes to the freeway and the international airport.
Demand for big warehouses had softened, however, and the property remained vacant, a white elephant by the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Then, suddenly, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security snapped it up for $145.4 million—paying nearly 50 percent more than the property’s 2025 assessed value to a private investment fund controlled by a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Bank.
The deal went through six days after President Trump announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary. Noem and her team had been racing to buy up industrial properties as part of a $38 billion overhaul of the ICE detention system in an effort to supercharge Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. DHS officials described the acquisitions as a crucial step to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations a year, after ICE carried out fewer than half that many during Trump’s first year back in office. The warehouses would be reconfigured and remodeled into megajails, with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees each.
Spenser Heaps
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/utah-ice-dhs-warehouse/686706/?utm_source=feed
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