The Trump administration’s mass detention blueprint is shrinking. In at least three states, local governments forced the Department of Homeland Security to the table in 2026, and new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been cutting deals that his predecessor Kristi Noem never put on offer.
Noem’s approach was blunt and largely top-down. Mullin’s looks different. Whether that difference actually protects communities is still being argued out in courtrooms and city halls from Arizona to Georgia.
Surprise finds out it has a detention center. From the news.
Start with the starkest case. DHS paid $70 million in January for a 418,000-square-foot distribution center in Surprise, Arizona, planning to pack in up to 1,500 immigrants as soon as this May. Surprise Mayor Kevin Sartor found out the way everyone else did: through news reports.
That’s not a small thing. You don’t spring a facility that size on a city without consequences, and Sartor said the early process was “very frustrating.” Since Mullin took over, the dynamic shifted. The opening date slid to October at the earliest, the detainee cap dropped to 542, and DHS agreed to pay Surprise $300,000 a year to offset lost property taxes, with more money potentially heading toward local police costs. A two-thirds reduction in planned population. On April 15, Sartor told a local radio show, “With the new leadership there’s been a lot of communication.”
Mullin didn’t shy away from the contrast. In an April 16 CNBC interview, he said directly, “We do have a different leadership style. We want to make sure people understand that we’re here working for the people, not against you.”
Dozens of Arizona Democratic state lawmakers sent a letter in April demanding that Surprise “stop the facility from opening at all costs.” Sartor said he doesn’t see a legal basis for that fight. Republicans outnumber Democrats in Surprise by close to 2-to-1, and the mayor’s office doesn’t carry a party label.
Maryland went to court. Georgia locked the water meter.
The Surprise situation isn’t isolated. In Williamsport, Maryland, DHS dropped $102 million in January on another warehouse, again targeting 1,500 detainees. DHS has since offered the same scaled-back number: 542. An April 15 court order halted most construction on that site while Maryland presses a lawsuit over what it describes as “impacts on the environmental, economic, and public health and safety interests of the state.”
Georgia didn’t wait for a judge. In Social Circle, city officials locked the water meter at a local wastewater treatment facility they said couldn’t handle waste output from a converted warehouse holding up to 10,000 immigrants. No water hookup, no facility. DHS was suddenly doing math on trucking in water and hauling out sewage. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock visited the wastewater facility in March as the standoff drew national attention.
What’s driving all of this
The DHS funding situation isn’t helping anyone negotiate from strength. The Department has been operating past a 60-day funding shutdown as of 2026, and that kind of pressure shapes what compromises are even possible. The administration is trying to build out a detention system that would need to hold far more than the current DHS detention standards were ever designed to handle. Critics, including the ACLU’s national immigrant rights project, argue the standards that exist aren’t being met as it is.
The $45 billion that Congress has been debating for immigration enforcement is part of what funds this whole expansion. That’s a number that sounds enormous until you start counting facilities. At $70 million for a single Surprise warehouse, 17 such purchases would run over a billion dollars, not counting operations. The administration is talking about a system that dwarfs anything the U.S. has run before.
What Mullin’s compromises actually signal is harder to read. In Surprise, 542 detainees is still 542 people in a warehouse. It’s 16 fewer facilities that got blocked entirely. The $300,000 property tax payment is real money to a city budget, but it’s also the federal government buying local cooperation on something that would’ve faced much sharper resistance six months ago.
$45 billion goes a long way toward smoothing those conversations.
