ICE Spent $700 Million on 7 Warehouses. Now It Wants to Get Rid of Them.

The idea was meant to supercharge President Trump’s mass deportation plan.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement would purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses across the country to massively expand its capacity to detain people deemed to be in the country illegally, which in turn would spike deportations. A year into Mr. Trump’s term, it had bought 11 facilities at a cost of $1 billion.

But in a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The decision to sharply scale back the warehouse plan is a rejection of a signature initiative under the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, who pushed the boundaries of what the government can do to aggressively round up potential deportees. The new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who had privately expressed skepticism about the warehouse plan, has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.

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The agency appears to still be moving forward with four of the warehouses purchased for detention purposes. It was not immediately clear why the agency decided to move forward with those four spaces for detention. ICE also plans to buy immigrant detention facilities from private prison companies that it already contracts with, according to documents.

But the move to offload most of the warehouses raises questions about the agency’s ability to deport high numbers of immigrants.

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The lack of detention space had already caught up with ICE as it sought to meet the White House’s aggressive goals to detain thousands of people a day. A federal judge ruled that the agency needed to cut down the number of people it was detaining in an office in a New York City building last year.

But the reality of creating a new detention apparatus has been challenging, much like how the promises of mass deportation have run into the complicated bureaucracy of trying to remove large numbers of people.

ICE targeted warehouses for purchase because so many were empty, and they could be bought up and turned into detention sites. In particular, the agency wanted some of the warehouses for processing purposes — to take immigrants who were arrested, process their information and quickly move them to areas where they could detain them for longer periods.

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But as soon as the agency bought the warehouses, local communities began to rebel, including in conservative areas that worried about the toll on local utilities and the economy, and the potential to draw protests. Even Republican politicians wrote to homeland security leaders urging them to turn away from the idea in their communities.

Obstacles mounted when the department’s inspector general announced its investigation. Some of the sites cost upward of $145 million — before costly renovations.

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But the biggest challenge has been the proliferation of environmental lawsuits across the country.

For months, ICE has faced serious legal challenges over whether the agency adhered to a federal environmental law that requires federal agencies to examine the impact of their projects on the local environment. The lawsuits have set the agency back significantly.

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