Brian Barrett: They have 80 billion or so to spend and 75 billion that I think they should spend in the next four years. So yes, they will continue to expand. And if you think about how much of an impact 3000 agents have in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of, they can repeat some version of that in a lot of different places.

Leah Feiger: And I’ve been fielding, actually, yelling at a lot of local reporters around the country who have contacted me in the past day or so, just to ask about the locations that we’ve named that are close to them or their states or cities. And the thing for me that keeps coming up is that in addition to the new buildings, they are placed in the previous government buildings, previous leases, or that is the plan. And then we also found a bunch of ICE offices located near the plans for giant immigration detention warehouses, and we looked at the offices being set up, say 20 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes away for this. Yes. So we looked at the variety, the triangulation of it around you should have your lawyers, your agents, have a place to get their orders and put their computers and do some of the mundane things that an operation like this requires.

Brian Barrett: Well, Leah, that’s a good point. I think when people hear ICE offices or when I do instinctively, I think of ICE as guys with guns and masks and all that, but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. Have you ever wondered what these offices seem to be lined up for and to whom? Because ICE isn’t the only masked men with bad tattoos.

Leah Feiger: Yes, absolutely. So what we’re reporting in this story is also some of the specific parts of ICE that actually reached out to GSA and asked them to speed up the process of getting new leases, etc., which included, for example, where the representatives from Ola, Ola is the ICE office of the chief legal counsel. Those are the lawyers, those are the ICE lawyers that work with the courts and argue back or deportation orders that say yes, no, etc., sign the documents, put everything in front of the judges. This is such an important part of the whole operation that we don’t talk about a ton. Many are focused on the DOJ. Many are focused. There was an excellent article this week in Politico talking about all the federal judges who are, frankly, angry that DHS and ICE are ignoring their pleas for immigrants to stay out of jail.

The missing level of that is the lawyers that are part of it representing ICE in the US government here, and that’s ola. So they reached out to GSA extensively reporting to get these rental locations, especially at OLA’s legal request. I just want to know how big it is. How big is this ICE has repeatedly outlined its expansion to cities around us And this one piece of memorandum that we got from Ola says that ICE will expand its legal operations to Birmingham, Alabama, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Des Moines, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, Louisville, Kentucky, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, St. York, Columbus, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Richmond, Virginia, Spokane, Washington and Cord Delaine, Idaho and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We also have other locations throughout the article, but those are requests from OLA.