The phrase is ICE's own, and it is in a federal contracting document anyone can read. Amendment A0001 to solicitation 70CDCR26R00000026, “Turn-key Detention Facilities,” was posted to SAM.gov on September 3, 2026. Buried in an attachment on enhanced transport for the Philadelphia field office is this description of how arrest teams would work: “These assets would be assigned to arrest teams at the hub site that would remain in a staging location nearby from the arrest teams. These teams would act as 'mobile detention facility' until the vans are full and/or all operations in the area are completed.” The same sentence is repeated for six ICE offices.
The stated purpose is efficiency. Keeping a van nearby “helps not to disrupt at-large teams by having 1 LEO leave operations to transport aliens back to the Philadelphia Field Office.” Elsewhere the document asks for a hub “so that Deportation Officers are not in charge of transporting aliens to overnight holds,” because officers “are better utilized as a force multiplier in the field to make more arrests.” The document requests at least twelve transport teams a day across the region, seven days a week, three of them in Philadelphia.
What the document does not contain is the part that matters to the people in the vans. It sets one durational limit: “Except in emergency situations females may not be transported by bus for more than ten hours.” That is buses, not vans, and transport, not detention. There is no limit for men, none for vans, and nothing in the attachments on food, water, restrooms or medical care while someone is held in one. The performance work statement lists “transporting detainees in a safe and humane manner” as a duty without defining it.
Two corrections to the coverage, because NPR is the only newsroom that has written this up and its account is off in two places. NPR reports that women “can't be held in them for over 10 hours”; the document says females may not be transported by bus for more than ten hours, which is a different limit on a different vehicle. And NPR presents the language as part of the five construction contracts worth up to $7.3 billion that DHS signed on September 21. It is a separate procurement, posted in late August, and the watchdog Project Salt Box reported it on August 29.
This is a solicitation, not a contract. Nothing has been awarded. Phase 1 proposals were due September 11 and each resulting contract is anticipated to run for a 120-month ordering period. ICE did not respond to NPR or to Project Salt Box. On a related question about one Pennsylvania facility, DHS said it does not discuss potential acquisitions and that “the long-term solicitation process remains ongoing.”
One more clause in the same performance work statement is worth quoting, because it says plainly what the contractor is to do when state law gets in the way: “Otherwise, applicable or more stringent state or local laws or regulations shall not apply to the performance under this contract when they would directly or indirectly regulate, dictate, or control the contractor's performance under these standards.”
Michael Wriston of Project Salt Box read the transport request as a description of method: “If this were targeted immigration enforcement, if this were truly 'worst of the worst'-type enforcement, it stands to reason that ICE would have a list of a couple of names, and then an officer or a team of officers would go out and make an arrest. This describes sweeps, immigration sweeps.”
For what has been documented inside ICE's existing holding rooms, see Whistleblowers Say an ICE Office Rated for About 50 People Held 342, Sleeping in the Garage Entrance.