When the Trump administration awarded a $1.26 billion contract this summer to build and operate a new tent city detention center in Texas, it made headlines, and not just because the facility, located at the Fort Bliss Army base, was expected to be the biggest of its kind in the country. The company that won the job, Acquisition Logistics, was so small it operated out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia. Almost nobody had heard of it. “A random house…just won $1.26 billion from ICE,” wrote the New Republic.

As it turns out, ICE had tried to award the contract, in April, to the firm Deployed Resources. It canceled the deal days later “for convenience,” according to a government website that cited an executive order about “wasteful spending.” Such a move is extremely unusual, and some current and former ICE officials speculate that ­Deployed lost the job for political reasons. Back in 2023, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the firm had snagged no-bid contracts for immigrant detention under President Joe Biden, and that a member of its board was married to Doug Emhoff’s former chief of staff, who later joined a sister company, Deployed Services. (The DC Enquirer interpreted all of this as “Kamala’s cronyism.”) A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson dismissed the speculation, saying the contract was canceled due to an “inability to meet the specialized needs of the facility.”