The ICE Expansion Won't Happen in the Dark

On Tuesday, WIRED published details of ICE’s planned expansion into more than 150 office spaces across the United States, including 54 specific addresses. If you haven’t read that yet, you should, not least because there’s probably one not far from you.

ICE has designs on every major US city. It plans to not only occupy existing government spaces but share hallways and elevator bays with medical offices and small businesses. It will be down the street from daycares and within walking distance of churches and treatment centers. Its enforcement officers and lawyers will have cubicles a modest drive away from giant warehouses that have been tapped to hold thousands of humans that ICE will detain.

Normally a leasing frenzy like this would happen out in the open; it would involve multiple bids, renovations of selected spaces, all the process and bureaucracy that makes government work slow but accountable. Not so here. The General Services Administration, which manages federal government properties, was asked to skip standard operating procedures in favor of speed and discretion. Internal documents reviewed by WIRED make clear that these locations, and the way in which they were acquired or planned, were intended to be a secret from the start.

They should not be. Which is why we published them.

ICE has more than $75 billion at its disposal, along with at least 22,000 officers and agents. Its occupation of Minneapolis is not an anomaly; it’s a blueprint. Communities deserve to know that they might be next. People have a right to know who their neighbors are, especially when they amount to an invading force.

What we’ve reported so far fills in only part of the puzzle. It shows what ICE had planned as of January, not beyond. More than 100 addresses remain unknown, some of them in high-concentration states like New York and New Jersey. The specific nature of the work being done in some of these offices remains unclear, as is how long ICE plans to be there.

The need to resolve these questions is urgent as ICE continues to metastasize. At the same time, the Department of Justice has become increasingly aggressive in its dealings with journalists, and has repeatedly claimed that revealing any identifying information about ICE agents or their activities is “doxing.” In Minnesota and beyond, ICE and CBP agents have treated observers as enemies, arresting and reportedly harassing them with increased frequency. The DOJ has been quick to label any perceived interference with ICE activity as a crime.

The Trump administration moves quickly by design, banking on the inability of courts, lawmakers, and journalists to keep pace. WIRED will continue to report on this story until we have the answers.

Knowing where ICE will go next is not the same as stopping the agency’s campaign of cruelty and violence. But it gives communities time to prepare for a surge of immigration enforcement in their streets. It gives legislators both locally and nationally insight into the unchecked scope of ICE. And it signals to the administration that it cannot act with impunity, or at the very least total secrecy.

So please, go look where ICE is setting up shop near you. And know that there’s plenty more of this story to tell.

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