Detention Pipeline: The May Inflection
Two Homicides, Thirty New Fights, and the Pause That Is Either the End or the Beginning
Forward this to anyone who may be able to use the information.
We cover the fights we know about, but there are more, and readers are already helping us document new detention centers and new facilities.
This piece — and the three site updates it links to — exists because readers tipped us to fights I had missed. Three GitHub issues from a single reader pointed us at three adjacent Mississippi counties, and the investigation that followed surfaced the second-largest ICE detention facility in the United States — a CoreCivic mega-prison in Adams County where a 39-year-old Nicaraguan man was found unresponsive in his cell in December and died two weeks later in a homicide ruled by the county medical examiner. We had no entry for it. We do now.
If someone you know lives in one of the 129 counties with fights tracked by this site — or in one of the nearly 2000 counties where we are still missing signals — forward this email to them.
The system only works if the people who can see what’s happening locally are willing to tell us. Most of what is on the site started as someone in a county knowing something that needed to be written down.
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can’t see:
4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org.
1,988 Counties with signals of potential detention center expansion (Federal contracts, 287(g), real estate traces, etc) at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org my site that tracks signals of potential cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol.
129 Community fights over detention capacity built out tracked.
All of this is self-funded, and paid subscriptions are the only way I can continue to do this long term.
What changed in two weeks
Two weeks ago, the detention-pipeline site tracked 99 county-level fights across 44 states. After this update — a fresh ingestion run to pull all new contracts, search local government meeting minutes, a national gap-search to find fights in high ‘heat’ counties, and the Mississippi tips above — the catalog covers 129 fights across all 50 states.
But the count is not the headline. The headline is that the structure of the fight has changed. In the last six weeks:
DHS quietly paused all warehouse-style detention center procurements pending a department-wide review by new Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem in March.
The Sabot/IGSA model failed its first public test — Bradford County, FL commissioners voted April 16 to table Sheriff Gordon Smith’s proposal to lease the Douglas Building as a 3,000-bed ICE facility. Sabot Consulting told the sheriff they would not proceed unless the lease was signed over to his department; the commission refused. Forty residents spoke against. Zero spoke in favor. The proposal is tabled, not dead — but the mechanism that was supposed to make IGSA bulletproof (sheriff holds the lease, county retains the land) was the exact failure point.
State attorneys general and governors filed simultaneously on April 28, with Washington, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Illinois all in motion within a 24-hour window.
Federal judges across at least six circuits are ordering ICE to release detainees, allow legal counsel access, permit health inspections, and answer for masked-agent unmarked-vehicle arrests. In West Virginia, Judge Joseph Goodwin ordered the release of 65 of 71 habeas petitioners. The state’s regional jail authority then suspended ICE intake.
Two ICE custody deaths in this quarter alone were ruled homicides by county medical examiners — Delvin Francisco Rodriguez in Mississippi and Geraldo Lunas Campos in Texas. ICE recorded 33 in-custody deaths in 2025, the highest annual total since the agency was formed.
The story is no longer just that the warehouses are coming. The story is that they were quietly coming, the procurement collapsed in real time, and the institutional pushback — judicial, gubernatorial, environmental, congressional, tribal — is now visible at scale.
I have written three pieces unpacking what this means. Links throughout. A short summary of each follows.
Three new investigations on the site
1. The National Pause and the State Counter-Offensive
This is the master update. It walks through the Mullin pause (Social Circle GA, Salt Lake UT, McAllen TX, Berks/Schuylkill PA all stalled simultaneously), the April 28 state-AG offensive, the federal-court constitutional pushback, the mortality cluster, and the 30 new fights we added to the catalog this round — including:
Mississippi: Adams County — the second-largest ICE facility in the US, where Rep. Bennie Thompson visited on April 9 and counted 1,400 detainees. CoreCivic told Congress the facility was fully medically staffed. Detainees told Thompson there were two doctors. Thompson observed none.
Mississippi: Hancock County — where ICE detained 15-year-old and 18-year-old Republic of the Congo students at the Hancock High School bus stop on April 21, zip-tied in front of their host father. Republican Rep. Mike Ezell issued a statement on April 29 monitoring the case.
Texas: El Paso / Camp East Montana — three deaths in 44 days at a single facility, including the chokehold death of Geraldo Lunas Campos.
South Dakota: Pine Ridge Reservation — Oglala Sioux President Frank Star Comes Out formally banished both ICE and Border Patrol from the reservation on January 29, invoking treaty law and tribal sovereignty.
Florida: “Alligator Alcatraz” — the $608M FEMA-funded Everglades facility now in active 11th Circuit litigation.
The post also flags counties that just breached significant heat for the first time but have no fight entry yet — Muscogee County GA (Columbus), Waukesha and Milwaukee Counties WI, Galveston County TX, Cumberland County NC. These are leads. If you live there and see something, tell us.
2. The Deadliest Year: What the 2025 ICE Custody Deaths Reveal
This is the deep-dive on mortality. It opens with a witness account — Salvadoran detainee Santos Jesús Flores, watching from the window of his isolation cell at Camp East Montana, telling the Associated Press what he saw guards do to Geraldo Lunas Campos: handcuff him, tackle him, place him in a chokehold until he was unconscious. At least five guards held him down. Lunas Campos was 55, Cuban, in the United States since 1996. He died on January 3, 2026. The El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled it a homicide.
The piece then situates the homicide in context. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detainees since the agency was formed: 33 in-custody deaths according to ICE’s own count. An ACLU systemic review of in-custody deaths between 2017 and 2021 — the Deadly Failures report, joint with American Oversight and Physicians for Human Rights — concluded that 95% were preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care. That was the baseline before the 2025 expansion.
It tracks how ICE’s narrative shifted in real time as reporting progressed: from “medical distress” to “suicide attempt requiring staff intervention” to, after a Washington Post leak forecast the autopsy result, an admission that the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide. It documents the medical-staffing fictions: CoreCivic told Congress the Adams County facility was fully staffed; Thompson saw no doctors. Newark’s Delaney Hall holds 800 detainees with seven medical staff.
And it argues that mortality is becoming the dominant frame. Constitutional litigation in Washington, Florida, California, New York, Hawaii, and West Virginia is converging on the same legal theory: ICE cannot detain people in conditions that produce preventable deaths. The May 26 cluster of trials and hearings will be the first real test.
3. The Warehouse Pipeline: How DHS Spent $700 Million on Secret Detention Buys
This is the procurement story. Between January and March 2026, DHS spent more than $700 million buying industrial warehouses across the country to convert into ICE mega-detention facilities. The transactions ran through Delaware LLCs and private equity real-estate vehicles. Local governments learned the federal government held title only when the deeds were recorded.
The piece walks through the transactions table — Tremont PA ($119.5M from a Blue Owl subsidiary, 7,500 beds), Upper Bern PA ($87.4M, 1,500 beds), Socorro TX ($123M from a Delaware shell LLC, 8,500 beds), McAllen TX ($66M, 500 beds), Social Circle GA ($128.5M), Romulus MI, Howard County MD, Kansas City MO. It documents how the model collapsed in three ways:
Environmental law: Pennsylvania DEP issued administrative orders blocking water and sewer connections at both Berks and Schuylkill sites. Lower Valley Water District in Socorro pointed out an 8,500-bed facility would consume more water than 21,000 existing customers combined.
County FOIA litigation: El Paso County Attorney Christina Sanchez sued ICE in federal court on April 6 over withheld Socorro planning records. AG Dana Nessel is fighting Romulus. Mayor Demings of Orange County FL is considering one.
The Mullin pause: Quietly imposed April 1–2, 2026. Salt Lake City “hearing crickets” from ICE. Social Circle’s scheduled meeting canceled with no notice. Senator Chris Murphy’s April 28 letters to 21 municipalities considering ICE warehouse deals: wait.
The piece also pulls on the Blue Owl thread. The Tremont warehouse was sold by BIGTRPA001 LLC, a subsidiary of Blue Owl Real Estate Net Lease Property Fund. Blue Owl Capital was hemorrhaging cash when DHS paid $119.5 million for that vacant Pennsylvania warehouse — exactly double the county’s fresh assessed value. As I documented in The Blue Owl System on April 21, 33 Trump administration officials held Blue Owl stock, funds, or carry interests at the time of the transaction — including the President, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Comptroller of the Currency. That investigation focused on the rescue mechanic. The new piece situates Blue Owl in the broader pattern: it is one of seven similar transactions, each routed through an opaque shell, each closed before disclosure.
What’s coming in May
The next four weeks contain more decision points than any month since the detention-pipeline project launched.
Yesterday, May 4 — Michelle Woodfork took office as Orleans Parish sheriff, replacing Susan Hutson — who fought ICE detention coordination and lost her re-election bid. The transition is a loss for the resistance coalition in one of its most visible local fights, and a test of how quickly ICE moves to formalize cooperation with a new administration.
May 11 — Cook County Chief Judge Erica Reddick rules on appointing a special prosecutor for ICE conduct during Operation Midway Blitz.
May 12 — Federal Judge Jamel Semper holds the preliminary injunction hearing in the Roxbury, NJ warehouse case.
May 12–13 — Pima County Board reviews Sheriff Nanos’s non-sworn response on ICE cooperation.
May 20 — New Mexico’s HB 9 Immigrant Safety Act takes effect, banning new and renewed civil immigration detention agreements statewide.
May 26 — Three federal proceedings on the same day: the Broadview Six conspiracy trial in Illinois, the Washington State preliminary injunction hearing on Tacoma NWIPC inspections, and the 26 Federal Plaza conditions trial in SDNY before Judge Lewis Kaplan.
These are not isolated cases. They are connected fronts in a single story: whether the United States can detain people in the conditions DHS has constructed without the federal courts intervening, the states pulling out, and the procurement model collapsing. The judicial firewall is holding — for now.
How to help
If you have read this far, you are exactly the person who can make this work better. Three concrete asks:
Forward this email to anyone you know who lives in or reports on a county we cover. The detention-pipeline tracks signals locally; readers spot what national datasets miss.
If you live in Muscogee County GA, Waukesha or Milwaukee County WI, Galveston County TX, or Cumberland County NC — these are counties whose heat scores spiked in the latest ingest but where we have no fight entry yet. Open a tip on GitHub or reply to this email. Anything you know about local meetings, contracts, or arrests is useful.
If you can support The RAMM, a paid subscription is what makes this kind of investigation possible. Every paid subscriber lets us spend more time on counties that don’t make national news.
The next update will come after the May 26 cluster of decisions. By then, Mullin’s review may have a public outcome, the Washington injunction hearing will have happened, the Broadview Six trial will be underway, and the Orleans Parish transition will be a month old. We will be watching all of it.
For now, the homicide rulings stand. The warehouses are stalled. The judicial firewall is holding. And readers in Mississippi found the second-largest ICE facility in the country to add to our documentation.
Forward this to someone who needs to know.
Three new investigations referenced in this piece:
The National Pause and the State Counter-Offensive — master update, 30 new fights catalogued
The Deadliest Year: What the 2025 ICE Custody Deaths Reveal — mortality deep-dive, ~2,400 words
The Warehouse Pipeline: How DHS Spent $700 Million on Secret Detention Buys — procurement deep-dive, ~3,300 words
Related earlier RAMM investigations:
The Blue Owl System: The $119.5 Million Rescue (April 21, 2026)
The Detention Architecture: An Investigation (April 8, 2026)
The Blueprint for America’s Detention (April 7, 2026)
The detention-pipeline site itself is at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org. It’s free, open, and built by readers like you.
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can’t see:
4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org.
1,988 Counties with signals of potential detention center expansion (Federal contracts, 287(g), real estate traces, etc) at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org my site that tracks signals of potential cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol.
129 Community fights over detention capacity built out tracked.
All of this is self-funded, and paid subscriptions are the only way I can continue to do this long term.