The company awarded Surprise ICE warehouse contract doesn't have background in detention work

The Trump administration has awarded the contract to operate the ICE facility in Surprise to a company called GardaWorld Federal Services. The firm will need to retrofit the former warehouse into a detention facility designed to hold around 550 people.

According to Project Salt Box, whose mission is to watch procurements and purchases the Department of Homeland Security is making due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the GardaWorld contract runs for a year, through early March of 2027, though it could extend into 2029. The total contract is worth more than $313 million.

Mike Wriston is a government procurement analyst and reporter with Project Salt Box. He spoke with The Show more about what he found and he started with who GardaWorld Federal Services is.

Full conversation

MIKE WRISTON: Yeah, GardaWorld is an international company, and they're not exactly small either. They're essentially a security firm that you'll see them in shopping malls and grocery stores. And what they provide are trained security personnel. They provide, you know, store surveillance, building surveillance. They are a major player, both commercially and federally. They have a lot of contracts with the federal government as well. But this is their first major what I would call retrofit project.

MARK BRODIE: Do we have a sense of why DHS decided to go with a company that really hadn't done this before for this project?

WRISTON: No, and it's interesting. We've actually seen this happen in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is I think the closest analog to the Surprise facility, both in terms of size and sort of the run up to the retrofit contracts. So in Hagerstown, or technically it's Williamsport, Maryland, which is a suburb of Hagerstown, similar situations warehouse was purchased, now it's being retrofitted. There's a temporary restraining order that's been filed by the state to stop that work.

But the company that was granted that contract, KVG, LLC, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, similarly does not have a background in detention work, nor do they have a background in facility conversion work. We do know that in both the Surprise case and the Hagerstown case, within the contract vehicle that controls those spaces, multiple companies were competing for the for the chance to do this work, but the work ultimately got awarded to GardaWorld in Surprise and KVG in Hagerstown.

What we would expect to see next is hiring staff for medical services, guards, obviously I think that's within the wheelhouse of GardaWorld to provide, but processing staff, people that actually interact with detainees as they come into the facility and process them in, that sort of staff I think would tend to be subcontracted.

BRODIE: Okay, so you mentioned subcontractors, and I wanted to ask you about that, because you referenced that, for example, retrofitting an existing space into something else is not really something GardaWorld does. Do they have the ability? Do we know if they have the ability to, for example, hire somebody else to come in and actually do that work and maybe they oversee it?

Or some of the other work that they have to do in terms of operating this facility, could they subcontract that out? Or is this work that GardaWorld is going to have to figure out how to do.

WRISTON: Yeah, so that's captured in the contract vehicle is something called wraparound services. And so what they were basically brought on board to do, GardaWorld, KVG, and a number of others, was actually provide logistics support to the U.S. military.

What they are doing and what they can do, and we've seen this with KVG in Hagerstown, we've not yet seen it in Surprise yet, is that they are subcontracting certain elements of it. KVG is a construction firm, so I have no doubt that they would be able to do the construction element, but the health care piece is not within their wheelhouse.

So they have contracted out with an international health care firm that would bring in nurses and doctors to do frontline triage care and sick call. They have subcontracted with Anovaeon LLC out of Austin, Texas, which is going to be providing the processing staff. We have not seen similar subcontracts yet in Surprise, so we don't know what GardaWorld can or cannot provide at this time.

But we are continuing to watch that, and if those contracts do drop or the subcontracts drop, we would obviously want to record that and make sure that information is available publicly so that people can be informed about what's happening in their neighborhood.

BRODIE: Is it notable in any way to you that unlike sort of the previous model, DHS will own these buildings as opposed to contracting with a company to operate them who also owns it?

WRISTON: Yes, that is notable. And so this is something that we, uh, you know, in, in the course of our investigation into this network of warehouses, I've talked to a number of sources, both within DHS and within the contracting world, who have all basically intimated that, uh, the reason that ICE is making such a concerted push for ownership over contracting. Typically, ICE would contract a detention center out to CoreCivic or Geo Group. Ownership gives them the federal supremacy to essentially run that site without direct state interference.

So a good example of this, in Maryland, there's a number of state laws that are being drafted and have already been drafted that would essentially ban private detention facilities from being operated. So if the site were owned by GardaWorld or CoreCivic or Geo Group, and they were running them on behalf of the United States government, state law would be able to intercede and stop them from operating in such a way and could potentially shut them down much easier.

The sort of the hierarchy of a commercial vendor having to adhere to state law and federal law applies. In the case of direct ownership by the Department of Homeland Security, supremacy doctrine essentially allows them to say, we own this site, it is a federal enclave, we are not bound by state laws. We can do pretty much whatever we want. You know, again, this is DHS' thinking, as long as it fits within the property that we own.

But when their activities leave that property line, and they have to connect to state utilities or state—owned roads, or essentially have to rely on some form of interagency agreement with law enforcement or medical providers, the state has direct power over that.

And so what we saw in Social Circle Georgia just recently was the locality saying you may own that land and you may be converting it into a detention center, but we control the water. And so we aren't going to hook you up to it. And now you have to go back to the drawing board to figure that part out. So there is this this tug of war that's happening between state governments, city governments and the federal government to essentially exert control over what they can to slow this expansion down.

BRODIE: Does that point to a goal of making these facilities kind of self-contained, maybe with things like water or generators right on site so the federal government can basically do what it wants without giving cities or states any say in what happens there?

WRISTON: Right, and we've heard them say as much here in county council meetings and in their interactions with local lawmakers essentially speculating that even if they weren't able to hook up to the water, they have enough money under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Again, $38 billion for their detention expansion, but they have enough funding to run them for the next four years that even if they don't hook up to the water, they will just purchase water.

But that's all water that has to come in and come out. And so this is my estimation here, it would be advantageous for the Department of Homeland Security to cooperate and try to partner with localities, but they completely issued that step. They absolutely went ahead and just did. And now they're trying to figure out the logistics of just water.

And I think even within a budget of $40 some million, or $40 billion, that's a lot of logistics just to get water onsite and offsite and sewage offsite. And then the question then becomes, where does it go? So there are a lot of unknowns there.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to clarify the number of people officials expect to be held in the Surprise facility. According the Surprise mayor on March 31, the facility had been scaled back to hold around 550 from earlier DHS reports of a 1,500-bed processing site.