Metadata reveals authors of ICE’s ‘mega’ detention center plans

PDF that Department of Homeland Security officials who provided to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s office about new efforts to build “mega” detention and processing centers across the United States contain comments and metadata identifying the people who worked on them.

The seemingly accidental revelation of the identities of the Department of Homeland Security employees who drafted the plan for ICE’s massive detention center comes amid widespread public backlash against the expansion of ICE detention centers and the administration’s brutal immigration enforcement tactics.

Metadata in the document, which relates to ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative (DRI), lists its author as Jonathan Florentino, director of ICE’s Newark, New Jersey, Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office.

In a note embedded above one of the FAQs, “What is the average length of stay for foreigners?” Tim Kaiser, deputy chief of staff at USCIS, asked David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive described by The Washington Post as a consultant overseeing the division of ICE that manages detention center contracts, to “please confirm” that the average stay in the new mega detention centers would be 60 days.

“Ideally, I would like to see a 30-day average for a mega position, but 60 days is fine,” Venturella responded in a note that remained visible in the published document.

Details of Caesar and Venturella’s involvement in the document were first reported by Project Salt Box. DHS did not respond to a request for comment about the role of the three men in the DRI project, nor did it answer questions about whether Florentino had access to a PDF processor subscription that may have enabled him to erase metadata and comments from a PDF file before sending it to the governor of New Hampshire. (The so-called Department of Government Efficiency spent the last year reducing the number of software licenses across the federal government.)

The same document says that ICE intends to update a new detention form by the end of September of this year. ICE says it will create an “effective detention network by reducing the total number of contract detention facilities used while increasing total bed capacity, strengthening detention management, and streamlining removal processes.”

“ICE’s increased hiring efforts have led to the addition of 12,000 new law enforcement officers,” the DHS document says. “For ICE to sustain the projected increase in enforcement and arrests in 2026, an increase in detention capacity will be a necessary downstream requirement.”

ICE plans to have two types of facilities: regional processing centers, which will hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees for an average of three to seven days, and mega detention facilities, which will hold 7,000 to 10,000 people for an average of 60 days. It has been referred to as a “hub-and-spoke model,” where smaller facilities would feed into larger facilities.

“ICE plans to activate all facilities by November 30, 2026, ensuring timely expansion of detention capacity,” the document says.

Beyond detention centers, ICE plans to buy or lease offices and other facilities at more than 150 sites, in nearly every state in the United States, according to documents first reported by WIRED.

An erroneous caption in a PDF sent to the New Hampshire governor isn’t the only problem the batch of documents appears to have; According to the New Hampshire Bulletin, an earlier version of the accompanying document, an economic impact analysis of the processing site in Merrimack, New Hampshire, referred to “the Oklahoma economy” in the opening lines. The erroneous document remains on the governor’s website until the date of its publication.