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The Trump administration is in the process of overhauling the immigration detention apparatus in this country.

This is the system for holding, processing, and ultimately deporting people.

And at the center of that effort is a plan from U.S. immigration and customs enforcement, ICE, to deport as many as one million people a year.

Now, at that scale, detention space becomes a critical part of the operation.

So ICE is changing how it handles that.

The agency is moving away from a patchwork of locally run jails and privately contracted facilities to something more centralized, something owned by the government itself. The plan is called the Detention Reengineering Initiative, and it calls for eight huge detention centers and up to 16 regional processing

sites. It means more than 92,000 detention beds nationwide. And to pull this off, ICE has been

buying these big industrial buildings, warehouses basically, and converting them from places designed to store

goods into places designed to hold people. And as you probably know by now, one of those buildings

is here in Utah. Earlier this year, the federal government paid about $145 million for a warehouse

on the industrial west side of Salt Lake City.

Now, they didn't tell anyone they were buying it, not the governor, not the congressional delegation,

not the mayor. It was secretive. And as the Salt Lake Tribune reporter Jose Davila

the 4th told us, it was really, really complicated.

Davila learned about the sale on a Thursday, and the very next day, he and his colleagues tried to find the seller.

On Friday, our question was, well, who sold it?

How do we actually figure out who stands to benefit from this thing? You know, sometimes it'll be a company that has one owner. Great. Let me call the

owner. But that wasn't the case. So you didn't find a single owner. What you found was this alphabet

soup name. Correct. R-R-E-E-E-F, C-P-I-F,

60-20 W-300 S-L-L-C. Immediately the first thing I think about is that, okay, this company is held

by another company. Another alphabet soup. R-R-R-E-E-F, Core Plus Industrial, R-E-I-T-L-C. That business was not listed in Utah. It was listed in Delaware. You don't have to name people who work for the company nor people who own the business. R-R-E-F, real estate investment company, the DWS, a German asset management firm, make money from renting that real estate or selling not real estate. Really rich people, institutional investors.

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