Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking nearly 300 new office spaces across the United States to accommodate plans to hire more than 10,000 new officers and lawyers, according to records obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with federal officials.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal property, has formed special planning teams to coordinate what internal records call the "ICE Surge." Standing meetings have been scheduled to fast-track the expansion, with ICE staff pressing for urgent speed.
One internal message reviewed by The Post read: "We're off to the races with the ICE effort. I'm trying to pack an hour's worth of material into 30 mins." A federal official directly involved in the planning described the agency's demand bluntly: "It's like, we want this yesterday."
The new offices are intended to house thousands of incoming hires within the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), which prosecutes immigration removal cases, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which handles arrests and deportations.
Furnished spaces are being sought nationwide, with some sites expected to be in red states and smaller cities. Officials said ICE may take over leases from other agencies or move into vacant federal offices.
The hiring drive follows a dramatic increase in ICE's budget. Over the summer, Congress tripled the agency's funding for enforcement and deportation to $29.9 billion and approved $45 billion for detention center construction.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this week that ICE has received more than 150,000 applications from what she called "patriotic Americans," with 18,000 tentative job offers already issued.
Recruitment incentives include bonuses of up to $50,000, the lifting of age caps, and a program to bring retired ICE and law enforcement officers back into service.
The expansion is part of the Trump administration's broader immigration crackdown. Internal ICE planning documents reported by The Washington Post in August outlined a target of over 107,000 detention beds by early next year, with 125 new or expanded facilities under consideration.
Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told the Washington Post that ICE's rapid expansion suggests "a much broader, pervasive enforcement apparatus that's going to be part of everyday contact between individuals and law enforcement" and compared the scale of the buildup to expansions of federal power after the 9/11 attacks.
The GSA said in a statement it was "proud to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in fulfilling their mission to protect America."
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