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Brian Barrett: They have 80 billion or so to spend of which 75 billion, which I think they have to spend in the next four years. So, yes, they will continue to expand. And when you think about the influence of 3,000 client officers in Minneapolis alone, that’s the price of influence, they can replicate a version of that in a lot of different locations.
Leah Weiger: And I’ve been directing myself to many local reporters around the country who have contacted me in the last day or so, just asking questions about the sites we mentioned that are located near them or in their states or cities. And the thing that keeps recurring for me is that in addition to new buildings, they’re being put into pre-existing government buildings, or pre-existing leases, or that seems to be the plan. And then we also found that a bunch of ICE offices are located near plans for giant immigration detention warehouses, and we’re looking at setting up offices 20 minutes, an hour, 20 minutes away from them. Yes. So we’re looking at something different, and triangulating that around your attorneys, your agents, has to have a place to take their orders and put their computers and do in some ways very normal things that are required for a process like this.
Brian Barrett: Well, Leah, that’s a good point. I think when people hear ICE offices or when I do instinctively, I think of ICE as people with guns and masks and all that, but that’s not exactly what we’re saying here. Would you mind talking about what these desks look like in the queue to be used and by whom? Because ICE isn’t just masked guys with bad tattoos.
Leah Weiger: Yes, of course. So what we reported on in this story as well was some of the specific parts of ICE that actually reached out to GSA and asked them to expedite the process of getting new leases, et cetera, including, for example, representatives from Ola, Ola is ICE’s office of lead legal counsel. These are the lawyers, these are the ICE attorneys who work with the courts and argue deportation orders or answer yes, no, etc., sign documents, put everything in front of the judges. This is a really important part of this whole process, and we don’t talk about a lot. There is a lot of focus on the Department of Justice. There is a lot of focus. There was an excellent article this week in Politico about all these federal judges who are really upset that DHS and ICE are ignoring their requests to no longer detain immigrants.
The missing level of that is the attorneys who are part of this and who represent ICE to the United States government here, so that’s first. So they have reached out to GSA extensively as we report on the acquisition of these lease sites, specifically through the OLA’s legal request. I just want to know how big this is. How big is this company ICE has repeatedly stated its expansion into cities around the US and this one memo we got from Ola states that ICE will expand its legal operations in Birmingham, Alabama, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Tampa, Des Moines, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, Louisville, Kentucky, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Grand Rapids, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, Raleigh, North Carolina, Long Island, New York, Columbus, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Richmond, Virginia, Spokane, Washington and Cordillera, Idaho and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have other sites as well throughout the rest of the article, but these are the submissions from OLA.