This may be the most horrifically under-reported story in the country today; but you need to know about it, because while it’s phenomenal news at face value, it also means we’ve got some follow-up work to do.
Because I can guarantee Trump wants us arguing over algae blooms when really we need to be digging deeper and exposing the structural rot beneath DHS.
Now, you should all know that about six months ago, Kristi Noem’s DHS went on a spending spree, buying up luxury jets for her own use and spending over $1 billion on empty warehouses they planned to remodel to serve as concentration camps for immigrants.
But what has flown under the radar is an exclusive report from The New York Times detailing how DHS has begun the process of selling 7 of the 11 facilities purchased; apparently in an effort to recoup up to $700 million in taxpayer dollars due to public backlash, internal investigations, and environmental lawsuits.
Hilariously, after purchasing these properties only a few months ago, DHS now says they’re doing this because they don’t need them to carry out mass deportations.
But that sounds like a horseshit excuse. So I chased down some numbers, and you will absolutely believe what I found.
First, a commercial real state analytics firm looked at the contracts and found that ICE paid between 11-13% over market value for the first 10 properties it purchased, wasting over $100 million on inflated purchase prices alone.
One absurd example being a warehouse in Salt Lake City that was just assessed at $97 million last year, but that ICE bought for an insane $145 million in March of this year. That’s the same month Noem was fired after ProPublica reported they spent over $220 million on ads through a marketing agency personally connected to Kristi Noem’s staff.
On top of that, it was expected that turning old storage warehouses into immigrant camps could cost billions more to remodel because these were hollow buildings used for storing merchandise, not humans.
In other words, not only does the math not make sense, it is so absurd it requires us to ask the question: was this concentration camp scheme ever the actual plan? Or was this, as many have asked, just another laundering scheme?
My response: two things can be true at once.
Because these people are this reckless, this wasteful, and this incompetent, and their hate does indeed run this deep. But why stop at hate when you can help your friends turn a profit at the same time?
So I started digging.
And based on a mix of reports, including a ton of heavy investigative work by Project Salt Box, what I’ve learned is that a majority of these properties were owned by companies that had recorded them as financial losses in SEC filings in the years before ICE bought them.
This means not only did taxpayers massively overpay for these facilities because of DHS, but the sellers desperately wanted to offload them. Trump’s DHS was in a position to get bargain basement prices, but instead, they paid a premium, doing a huge favor for the sellers in the process.
So who were the sellers who benefitted?
Investigators are still digging, given many of these properties are co-owned by shell companies that are difficult to pin down.
But one facility was owned by a commercial real estate firm that was originally incorporated in Russia.
And another was owned by Blue Owl Capital—whose owners are heavy Republican donors—and who employs a guy who previously served on the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts. That facility was reportedly assessed at $60 million when purchased, but thanks to Kristi Noem’s DHS, the sellers bagged $120 million for the property.
And if I had to guess, based on the initial results, I’d imagine we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.
So while we should of course celebrate the end of Noem’s tenure and the quiet defeat admitted as they sell off facilities that would have otherwise hosted horrific abuses of human rights, a new era of accountability begins.
In this era, our job is twofold; first, track the sale of these facilities one at a time to see exactly how much of a loss taxpayers are forced to eat, after overpaying for buildings we never needed in the first place.
And second, shine a spotlight hotter than the surface of the sun on the swamp rats who benefitted along the way in what was always going to be just another Trump grift.
