Surprise
A city found out their warehouse was sold to DHS by reading the newspaper. That’s not a failure of process. It’s the process working as designed.
On January 23, 2026, a company called RG Surprise AZ LLC sold a 418,000-square-foot warehouse in Surprise, Arizona to the federal government for $70 million in cash.
Mayor Kevin Sartor found out six days later, when the Arizona Republic broke the story. He had not been contacted by DHS. He had not been contacted by any federal agency. The city council had not been notified. No one in Surprise’s government knew the sale was coming.
The warehouse — located at 15555 West Roosevelt Street, in a city of 180,000 people on the northwest edge of Phoenix — was purchased to become a 1,500-bed ICE detention facility. The price was $70 million cash. RG Surprise AZ LLC, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Group and Mitsubishi Estate, had paid $12 million for it in 2023. The markup was 483 percent.
Federal projects are exempt from local zoning laws. The city had no legal recourse.
Hundreds of Surprise residents packed the next city council meeting.
On April 24, 2026, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed suit to block the conversion in Arizona v. Mullin, No. 2:26-cv-02857-SMB (D. Ariz.), naming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons, ICE, and DHS as defendants.
The complaint argues DHS violated the National Environmental Policy Act by skipping every required preliminary step — failing to identify a categorical exclusion, compile an environmental impact statement, or conduct an environmental assessment before proceeding — and failing to take a “hard look” at environmental consequences. Those consequences include the warehouse’s location directly across from a Rinchem hazardous chemical storage facility, where a tank rupture or fire could trap detainees who cannot exit a locked facility.
But the lawsuit, whatever it produces, cannot undo what the silence already accomplished: a $70 million acquisition, a 1,500-bed detention facility, and a city council that learned about it from a reporter.
Here is the question that transaction raises: How does a federal agency buy a 418,000-square-foot building, plan a 1,500-bed detention facility, and refuse to tell the city until a newspaper asks?
The answer is not that someone forgot to make a call. There is no notification requirement they failed to satisfy. There is no oversight mechanism they bypassed without authorization.
The answer is that the system is designed to operate this way. The Surprise warehouse is not an outlier. It is the product. And the NDA that Surprise’s mayor never signed — the informational blackout the federal government imposed simply by owning the exemption — is not the smallest failure of the system. It is the smallest visible unit of an architecture that runs much larger.
Here is what that architecture looks like, layer by layer.
The procurement vehicle
The Surprise warehouse was purchased through a contracting mechanism called WEXMAC-TITUS — a Naval Supply Systems Command contract vehicle originally designed for military logistics, repurposed for domestic immigration detention without congressional authorization, without GSA review, without environmental review, and without competitive bidding.
Surprise was one of at least eleven warehouses purchased through WEXMAC-TITUS between January and March 2026. The total expenditure across those acquisitions has not been publicly disclosed. The contracting vehicle that enables it is not classified. It is simply invisible to the oversight mechanisms that would otherwise apply.
I documented how WEXMAC-TITUS works — and why it was chosen over standard procurement — in The Bypass, which covers the procurement vehicle that requires it. The short version: by routing acquisitions through a Defense Department logistics contract rather than a GSA real-property contract, DHS avoids the congressional committees, environmental review agencies, and competitive-bidding requirements that would slow or expose the acquisitions. Different committees have jurisdiction over defense logistics contracts and civilian detention facilities. The oversight infrastructure is watching the wrong door.
The city of Surprise had no legal right to notice because the procurement vehicle was designed to produce no legal notice requirement. That wasn’t a loophole someone found. It was the specification.
The classification dodge
The contracts accompanying these acquisitions are written as “logistics support services” rather than “detention facility construction” — a classification decision with consequences far beyond semantics.
“Logistics support services” fall under one set of congressional committee jurisdictions, one set of reporting requirements, one set of agency review thresholds. “Detention facility” falls under another. The same physical work — converting a warehouse into a 1,500-bed detention complex with intake processing, medical, segregation, and perimeter security — is either subject to Armed Services Committee oversight or Judiciary Committee oversight, depending on what the contract calls it.
When it is called “logistics support services,” reporters searching Judiciary Committee filings find nothing. Oversight staff reviewing detention-expansion documents see nothing. The structure is transparent only to someone who knows to look in the logistics ledger for a detention facility.
This is not accidental mislabeling. It is the mechanism.
The supervisory gag
On April 30, 2026, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen invoked formal supervisory control over Gallatin County Attorney Audrey Cromwell’s office. His order required her to issue a memo declaring ICE a “law enforcement agency” eligible for confidential criminal-justice information without a court order — and to do so within thirty days.
Cromwell petitioned the Montana Supreme Court on May 1, 2026 (case OP 26-0292), arguing the supervisory-control invocation violated the right to privacy and exceeded the AG’s authority.
Knudsen responded by ordering Cromwell to drop the petition and cancel her outside counsel.
Cromwell retained the Graybill Law Firm and proceeded anyway.
The Daily Montanan reported the escalation on May 3 and the attorney general’s order to drop the petition on May 5. At this writing, the Montana Supreme Court has not ruled.
The Montana case is structurally different from Surprise but operationally identical. In Arizona, a federal exemption imposed silence on a city council. In Montana, a state AG invoked supervisory control to impose compliance on a county attorney resisting information transfer to ICE.
Different polarity, same architecture. One suppresses information flowing to the public. The other coerces information flowing to ICE. Both reduce the friction that accountability would otherwise create. The mechanism does not have a fixed direction. It has a fixed purpose: ensure that detention expansion proceeds without encountering the processes that would constrain it.
The judicial narrowing
The executive branch deploys the gag. The judicial branch, in the same weeks, narrows the statutes that would otherwise override it.
On April 2, 2026, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled per curiam for the sheriff in State ex rel. Rosnick v. Geauga County Sheriff — declining to address whether ICE contracts are exempt from Ohio public-records law, and resting on a date-range technicality in the records request. The plaintiff was Jocelyn Rosnick, ACLU of Ohio Chief Policy and Advocacy Officer. The county was, at the time of the ruling, detaining ICE detainees daily and collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars annually through a contract executed before the requested records window opened — the sheriff’s affidavit acknowledged a U.S. Marshals contract executed March 20, 2024, with the ACLU’s request covering June 1, 2024 onward. None of that was responsive to the records request as scoped.
On April 23, 2026, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled 4–2 in Kentucky Open Government Coalition, Inc. v. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources Commission, No. 2023-SC-0524-DG, that officials may shield public business conducted on personal devices from the state’s Open Records Act. The majority opinion was written by Justice Kelly Thompson. Justice Shea Nickell dissented, joined by Justice Michelle Keller, writing that allowing officials to conduct public business on private devices and then withhold it would mean “the essential policy of the ORA to ensure free and open examination of public records would be eviscerated.”
These are not coordinated rulings. The cases are factually unrelated. But they accomplish the same structural move: state supreme courts narrowing the public-records reach that would be the only remaining check when executive agencies refuse disclosure. The federal directive routes around state law from above. These rulings narrow state law from within.
The mechanism now operates across all three branches of government simultaneously.
The 287(g) directive
On May 6, 2026, Monique Madan reported that ICE had emailed hundreds of 287(g)-participating agencies in Florida and Texas a directive instructing them not to respond to public records requests, press inquiries, social-media communications, or press conferences about 287(g) activities without first consulting ICE’s FOIA office or their local Field Office Director.
The directive asserts that information “obtained or developed” through the 287(g) program is “under the control of ICE” — not the local sheriff’s department, not the county government, not the state. ICE.
There is no statute that gives ICE this authority. Adam Marshall, Director of National Litigation at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, put it plainly: “state entities cannot contract out of their obligations under state public records laws.” Former ICE Director John Sandweg (2013–2014) said there are “no law enforcement safety reasons or operational security reasons” for the restrictions. The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper called it “a deliberate policy decision, not a resource constraint.”
The directive operates the same way the Surprise acquisition operated: not through legal force, but through manufactured compliance. A local sheriff who receives the directive and routes public-records requests to ICE’s FOIA office — which is where requests go to die — has done what the architecture required. The public loses access. The records request disappears. The accountability window closes.
The directive did not invent the posture it instructs. Oldham County, Kentucky was already routing public-records requests to ICE without a federal directive. Muscatine County, Iowa was already claiming IGSA non-disclosure provisions and federal preemption. Sheriffs in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee were already referring press inquiries to ICE. The directive is a formalization of a tactic that had already propagated through the system by ambient instruction.
The coroner switch
The architecture does not only suppress what governments know. It suppresses what coroners know.
When the first Camp East Montana detainee died in custody and received a civilian autopsy, the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide.
After that ruling, subsequent bodies were rerouted to a military hospital — where autopsies are not publicly released.
I covered the mechanism and what it suppresses in Autopsy Shopping, which documents the body-disposal layer of the same architecture.
The coroner switch is the most concrete illustration of engineered hiddenness because its purpose is physically unmistakable. No administrative complexity. No classification ambiguity. No jurisdictional dispute. A civilian examiner ruled homicide. The next body was sent somewhere else.
The NDA, the procurement vehicle, the classification dodge, the supervisory gag, the directive, the judicial narrowing — all of them suppress information that might reach the public. The coroner switch suppresses the determination that a detainee was killed. It is the architecture at its most direct. It is also the architecture doing what it has been doing at every level: ensuring that the moment of accountability — the autopsy ruling, the records disclosure, the city council vote — arrives after the moment when it could change anything.
The agent-level layer
Above the procurement, the classification, the gag, the directive, the ruling, and the coroner switch, there is the layer at which individual federal agents choose, repeatedly and operationally, to be unaccountable.
BORTAC Commander Gregory Bovino’s twelve-month escalation — refusal to identify agents, refusal to confirm operations, refusal to release internal records, 84 documented operational incidents in which accountability mechanisms were actively evaded rather than passively unavailable — runs through The Hammer, which covers operational secrecy at the agent level.
The agent-level layer matters here because it shows the architecture is not only structural. It is also behavioral. The individuals operating inside the architecture have learned what the architecture rewards. The architecture rewards non-disclosure. The architecture rewards unaccountability. The architecture has trained the people inside it to operate the way it operates.
The database layer
The architecture also operates in the other direction — not by hiding what government knows, but by accumulating what it knows without the public understanding the accumulation.
ICE’s targeting infrastructure runs on Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, which fuses 23 government databases with commercial surveillance feeds. An ICE agent opens the system’s mapping interface — called ELITE — and draws a shape around an area on a map. The system returns everyone inside it. No warrant is sought before the shape is drawn. No subpoena. The agent picks a polygon. The system picks the people.
I documented the inputs in ICE Agents Drew Shapes on a Map: IRS records (over a million pulled in the program’s first months), license-plate readers (5 billion data points), Zignal Labs social-media ingestion (8 billion posts daily). The architecture that hides what government does also accumulates what citizens do. The hiddenness runs both ways. The polygon is the NDA’s twin — one keeps the public from seeing in, the other lets the government see out without telling anyone what it sees.
The May 12 question
Six days from now, at 9:30 a.m. on May 12, 2026, Judge Jamel K. Semper of the District of New Jersey will hear arguments in State of New Jersey et al. v. ICE et al. — the lawsuit challenging the planned conversion of a 470,000-square-foot Roxbury Township warehouse into a 1,500-bed detention facility.
The warehouse was purchased for $129.3 million through WEXMAC-TITUS — 137 percent over market value, sold by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The same procurement vehicle, same classification, same absence of local notification, same architecture as Surprise. Roxbury just got to a federal courtroom first.
NJ Solicitor General Shankar Duraiswamy has documented that DHS’s account of the project’s timeline has, in his filing’s language, “zig-zagged over the past two months.” On March 10, 2026, DHS told local officials it would award a construction contract by month’s end and achieve full operational status within ninety days. On March 30, DHS counsel emailed that no construction would begin before May 28. The two representations, twenty days apart, contradict each other on every material fact the court needs to decide.
New Jersey AG Matt Davenport’s emergency motion seeks depositions of the DHS officials behind those contradictions — two hours each, enough to test the record. DHS has opposed.
If Judge Semper grants the depositions: the architecture breaks at a point it did not anticipate. A federal court will force the accountability moment — the moment that procurement classification, contract language, local-notification exemptions, 287(g) directives, supervisory gags, and coroner switches all exist to prevent. The DHS account of what it is building at Roxbury becomes testable under oath.
If he denies them: the architecture holds. DHS’s zig-zagging record survives unfalsified into the preliminary-injunction ruling. The wall stands.
Either outcome is informative. A federal judge is being asked whether a federal agency must defend its factual representations under oath. That question exists because the architecture created it — by producing representations that needed testing, by designing a procurement process that avoids the testing mechanisms that would otherwise exist, by operating in a darkness deep enough that the only remaining check is a court with deposition power.
What this is
The city of Surprise had no legal right to know their warehouse was being bought. The county attorney in Gallatin County, Montana had no legal protection from her state AG ordering her to transfer criminal-justice data to ICE. The ACLU of Ohio had no legal claim that survived the date-range technicality in the Geauga County records request. The 287(g) sheriffs who rerouted public-records requests to ICE had no legal requirement to refuse.
None of those outcomes are accidents. They are the architecture producing what it was built to produce.
The NDA that Mayor Sartor never signed is the smallest visible unit of a system designed to operate in darkness. Above it: the procurement vehicle that requires no notification. Above that: the contract classification that routes to the wrong committee. Above that: the state AG who can invoke supervisory control over a county attorney who resists. Above that: the state supreme courts narrowing the statutes that would override the resistance. Above that: the federal directive telling a thousand local sheriffs to treat their public-records obligations as federal property. Above that: the coroner switch that reroutes the homicide ruling to a room without a public record.
Every layer of the architecture serves the same purpose. Every layer keeps the next-larger silence invisible. The warehouses become facilities. The facilities fill with people. The people disappear into a system the public cannot see.
The mechanism is a clock. The detention expansion is what runs while the clock is being challenged.
The microphone was never on. That was the design.
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can't see — 4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org. And the ICE/Border Patrol cooperation and detention buildout database: The Detention-pipeline Tracker.
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For the full map of what The RAMM has documented across this architecture — the recruitment, the operations, the money, the deaths — see The Detention Architecture: An Investigation and The Darkness Is Infrastructure.
Thank you for this. I need to read it a few more times. I honed in on a sentence you wrote at the beginning. "Federal projects are exempt from local zoning laws. The city had no legal recourse." I am familiar with the mechanics of a certain set of federal infrastructure project (public housing) and local zoning laws have been interpreted to apply. There is nuance in the statement about federal projects being exempt from local zoning laws around fascists interpretations. This seems more about the lengths the fascists will go to do whatever they want.