No. of Recommendations: 12
One of the things that has emerged about the warehouse purchases the administration has been making for its prison camps is that for some reason the government appears to have been eager to wildly overpay.
In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth. It was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million. In Roxbury, New Jersey, one warehouse was assessed at $62 million, but the Trump administration came in and offered $129 million for it — more than double the cost. In Georgia, one of the properties valued last year at $26 million was purchased for $129 million.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported on an internal department memo that circulated last week, the day after Mullin was sworn in as the new head of Homeland Security. The memo reportedly said that the process of turning these warehouses into Trump prison camps was going to be slowed down and that the proposals for these facilities are going to be revised to start incorporating feedback from stakeholders — whatever that means — before they move ahead.
Simultaneously, CNN reported that there is a new inspector general investigation into alleged corruption at the department concerning the soliciting and handling of contracts, including the involvement of Noem and her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski.
There was already an audit that had been sparked in the department; now, on top of that, there’s a new and apparently urgent investigation, which reportedly included investigators searching the offices of one Homeland Security official who had been placed in a job at the agency by Noem and Lewandowski.
That investigation came after NBC News reported on March 19 that Lewandowski reportedly sought multimillion-dollar payments from companies contracting with Homeland Security, including companies that operate immigration prisons.
