Speed Over Value: How ICE Has Quietly Snapped Up Scores Of U.S. Offices

The federal government has signed scores of leases over the past six months for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement away from the public eye.

The General Services Administration, the government's real estate arm, has sidestepped its traditional bidding process, doing deals with an emphasis on speed over value.

“They're giving good deals for landlords, they're getting them done quick,” according to the owner of a Midwestern building where ICE has taken space, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their ongoing work with the federal government. 

With ICE receiving $75B in new funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it needed real estate fast. The GSA signed 17 leases worth nearly $9.3M combined between September and January.

The pace of office leasing has accelerated, with the number of new leases reportedly up to 150 as of January.

Office leasing for ICE administration and attorneys is ongoing and in addition to a $38B push by the federal government to purchase industrial properties for conversion to detention centers.

Details of the original 17 office leases were listed on federal databases analyzed by Bisnow. The GSA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The vast majority of the landlords in this group oversee smaller, even one-building, portfolios, but the group also includes landlords with a national presence, such as Bridge Investment Group, KORE US REIT and Nationwide Realty Investors. Bridge and KORE declined to comment, and Nationwide did not respond to a request for comment.

Seven of the leases were signed for monthly rental rates between $3 and $20 per SF above the submarket average in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to a Bisnow analysis of market data from CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers and other brokerages. Five are as much as $9 below the market average, and three are within $1 of what other tenants are paying.

Two others were in small submarkets — Harlingen, Texas, and New Windsor, New York — for which market reports from major brokerages were not available. 

The GSA’s norms involve posting notices when it needs new space and choosing lease offers according to price. But the agency has a lot of room, even without special outside authorization, to sidestep those processes, said Dan Mathews, who was head of the GSA’s Public Buildings Service during the first Trump administration. 

The GSA is allowed to do things that brokers and owners have reported seeing in the ICE leasing process, including not posting leases publicly or choosing leases based on factors other than price alone, Mathews said. 

Usually, the agency elects to choose leases based on lowest price because it is the most objective metric. Skipping those pieces is allowed but can leave the GSA open to protest or legal challenges over its decisions, Mathews said.

“The GSA has broad authorities, and they use those authorities when they feel like they need to,” Mathews said. “But most people that deal with GSA, the lessor community, they probably haven't seen that, so this looks different. They're not used to doing things in different ways.”

Mathews said nothing he’s seen in relation to these leases seems to be beyond the scope of the GSA’s authorities.

“It’s not the normal process, but it’s not atypical either,” he said.

Aside from natural disasters, Mathews said the last time he could remember the GSA not advertising leases and accelerating the traditional leasing process timeline was after 9/11, when the agency had to replace the space it had leased in the World Trade Center. 

At a Congressional subcommittee hearing on March 4, GSA Administrator Ed Forst told members of the House of Representatives that the GSA hasn’t publicized the leases since September because of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, proclamation declaring a national emergency at the southern border. 

“We received instruction from the agency that under that executive order we were not to publish certain upcoming lease awards,” Forst said. 

Forst declined to elaborate on why the determination was made that “the full and open competition of these contracts” was neither necessary nor feasible, saying he would answer in writing. 

“ICE is a very controversial topic right now, so I think a fair number of people see this and think, ‘Oh, there must be something nefarious there,’” Mathews said. “But really, they just don't like what the space is being used for.”

The rush to find space that could be occupied quickly sometimes pushed the GSA to prioritize move-in-ready, furnished space, even if it meant paying more.

While price was a factor, the offer that came with the most furniture and was the quickest to move into was generally the offer that was awarded the lease, according to a landlord representation broker who has worked on some of the ICE leases.

“If they were $5, $10, $15 a square foot higher than everyone else, I truly believe the government would have chosen expediency of occupancy over price in that situation,” he said. “I don't think that's a stretch at all.” 

The GSA went office hunting at a good time for tenants, with office landlords largely worn down by years of depressed demand that left many buildings with large chunks of vacant space.

At the end of 2025, office vacancy averaged nearly 19%, according to CBRE. Although some office workers are returning, they require less space than they did pre-pandemic. Average leased square footage was down 23% compared to 2019, and leases 100K SF or larger were down 40% from 2019, according to CBRE. 

“They're not asking for six months of free rent,” the Midwestern landlord said of the ICE leasing process. “Right now, you give somebody a five-year deal, they want seven months of free rent and six months of improvements — maybe more. They're not asking for that.” 

But now, as public opinion of ICE has deteriorated, some landlords are wishing for a way out of those same leases. After the first group of leases were signed, an ICE crackdown in Minneapolis resulted in the deaths of two Americans and the deportation of thousands of people.

“Just given what has happened since we signed our lease, I think we would love to get out of it,” the landlord said.

Others don’t understand why office space for administrators and lawyers is anything out of the ordinary. Landlords who responded to Bisnow emphasized that no detentions were happening at their properties, noting that it was lawyers, paralegals and administrators at the desks. 

“It's for general office purposes,” a representative for one ICE landlord told Bisnow. “It's office space. It's a bunch of attorneys in suits.”

A Department of Homeland Security division called the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor was among the tenants for which ICE reportedly sought space. It provides a range of legal services to ICE, including prosecuting cases the agency brings to court, and is a key part of the immigration detention and removal process. 

The scrutiny has the potential to be very disruptive to business and was not something owners anticipated when signing the lease for space for lawyers that work with ICE.

“A lot of landlord companies, you have done maybe dozens of leases with the GSA before,” the Midwest office building owner said. “It's never been a big deal, right? It's our own federal government. When has that ever been wrong? Now, times have gotten weird and crazy, and there's a lot of different feelings to have about what we're seeing on TV, and it's happening real fast.”