The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Wriston:

Our newsletter sort of got a lot of subscribers kind of unexpectedly because we were doing a very boring thing, which was going to the Maryland Land Records website, MD Land Rec, and going through the plat book page by page for about three hours until we landed on the deed for a warehouse in Williamsport, Maryland that ICE had bought for $102.4 million on January 16th. Boom. Yeah. That warehouse was built in 2021 for the purpose of holding freight. It used to be on a farm or it is sitting on what used to be a farm in a very lovely plat of Western Maryland. It is now an 823,000 square foot empty shell with minimal air conditioning, minimal insulation. It has four toilets, two water fountains, a shower, and one drain. And that is what it is built to accommodate. And ice is expecting in the next two months to outfit it, to hold 1500 people for seven days at a time in what they’re calling detention pods, which according to the plans, are essentially just cages with mats on the floor.

They will be fed MREs, meals ready to eat, which are troop rations, which even the troops don’t eat, honestly. I say that after 20 years of being in the service, we don’t eat those except for field exercises. And that is what they are feeding to detainees that they are going to round up across the state of Maryland. And they are expecting to do that as soon as April. And the way that we found that out, again, was just by doing very boring things. Looking at the Maryland Land Records website, reading contracts, reaching out to people, reading the land deed, who sold it, who owned it, when was the last time that it was appraised? When was the last time that it was tax valuated? And pulling in all this data that really paints this holistic picture of a warehouse, this industrial shell, as something that was going to turn into detention space.

And you can see that within a thousand feet of this warehouse in Williamsport, there’s a senior health center where retirees go to get specialized care. There’s a food processing plant right behind it where people are out bringing in the food that they’re picking in Washington County and getting it ready to ship. It sits 10 feet from the CSX railbed. It’s built to accommodate the rail line. And the roads that lead up to it aren’t developed enough for trucks or vans or buses to lead to it. And you can tell all that by looking at a map. So by placing these warehouses that ice was looking all over the United States, by putting them onto a map, you begin to localize it and you begin to understand how it fits into the cultural and the geographic context of space. And at the same time that ICE was buying this warehouse in Western Maryland, they were also searching for 24 other warehouses across the United States and towns like Roxbury, New Jersey, and Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Surprise, Arizona.

But the first one that sold was here in the state of Maryland. And the reason that it sold wasn’t because of a lack of diligence or a lack of awareness or a lack of trying. It was just we didn’t know. No one knew to look for it. And by just refreshing the page over and over and over again and doing this very boring task of just looking through and seeing when someone by the name of the United States government was buying property, we found it. And it’s a very boring job. But that is a job that people are paid good sums of money to do on a daily basis if you work in property appraisal or if you’re a realtor or if you’re X, Y, Z. Everyday people doing everyday jobs. Those are the skills that are necessary to track what our government is doing in our name and with our tax dollars.

Because if you understand what an organization like ICE is doing, and you can quantify it, and you can speak in the language of an organization that thinks data driven, you can resist. You can resist effectively. To organize effectively and to meet this moment and to rise to this moment, it will take the work of ordinary people with very boring skills and the strength and the bravery to step forward, to use those skills for good and to use data for good. Data only matters when it drives action. And so we have data and we have lots of it and we are putting it out on the internet on a daily basis. We are keeping these maps updated. We are providing information, but the question then becomes what action derives from that data. This is the thing that I am most concerned about. If there is one thing that keeps me up at night that I think everyone should be kept up at night about, it is this one thing.

It is Wexmack Titus. And if you go home tonight and you research this and you Google it, it is worldwide expeditionary, multi-award contract, territorial integrity of the United States. It’s two words, WexMac, Titus. And the WexMAC part of that is essentially a Navy program that was stood up under the Biden administration for good in 2021. It was a way for the United States Navy to rapidly award contracts in the event of natural disasters in Peru. There’s an earthquake and we need to rapidly move a fleet down there. We don’t have time to bid for contracts. We need to hire people that are local, that are trusted, that are vetted and that can provide. And so that was the impetus of Wexmac Titus. It divided the world into 22 geographic regions. In the Trump administration just this year, in August, they added two more regions to the globe.

Region 23, which is the United States small business and region 27. Don’t ask me why they skipped a few. They went straight from 23 to 27, but region 27 is the territorial United States, just Alaska, mainland America, Hawaii, and the territories as region 27 large business contracts. That’s CoreCivic, that’s GeoGroup. Those are private prison providers. Those are the ones that ICE primarily deals with, and they added a clause in that contract that said, for the purpose of rapid detention, ICE can use the contracts that the Navy is pre-vetted. And the first thing that they did with that was they built a tent city in El Paso, Texas on Fort Bliss called Camp East Montana, where they are holding people in literal softsided tents and feeding them MREs and they’re sleeping on mats and cages. If you’ve heard of what’s happening at Dilly, what is happening at Camp East Montana is worse, and they are awarding contracts to the tune of $65 billion.

And that’s the ceiling right now. The ceiling is $65 billion. And the reason why that keeps me up at night is because there is no formal bidding process. They drop a contract at the drop of a dime and then 90 days later we find out about it. And so by the time we know about it, they’ve already executed the work. I suspect, I cannot say authoritatively, but I suspect that that is what’s happening in Williamsport right now, that if you look at the timing, they bought it in January, they dropped a task order. By the time we know about it 90 days later, it’ll be April and a source that I’ve spoken to that is intimately familiar with these contracts and how they affect ICE has said that the stand up date for that facility, whether it is ready to go or not from a civic perspective is March or April of this year.

If they have to bus toilets in for people to use like porta-potties, they will do it. If they have to bus drinking water in, they will do it. They will not wait to hook it up to the county septic and they will not wait for it to be hooked up to clean water. They will do it in the most inhumane fashion possible because that’s what’s expedient to them. If we are going to be successful in a mounted resistance, in a protective sense for our immigrant neighbors and the people that are vulnerable to what ICE is planning to bring to our state, we have got to have a big tent. We have got to have an inclusive mindset that you are going to be working with people who might not hold the same political belief or that might not hold the same ideological belief, but they have the same end state as you.

And we can find commonality in that. And so if we are going to effectively resist, we are going to effectively resist as anarchists, as neoliberals, and even conservatives. In some sense, we are finding a lot of conservatives in Washington County who do not want this in their backyard, not because they think, oh, this is bad for the tax base, but because morally as conservatives, it speaks against what they believe. And we will find commonality with our brothers and sisters there too. When we are thinking about data for good, we are thinking about data for good in the sense that we are all going to be in this together relatively soon and we are all on the same team.