By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH

Federal immigration officials plan to spend $38.3 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,600 beds, a document released Friday shows, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly purchases warehouses to turn into detention and processing facilities.

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Republican New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte posted the document online amid tension over ICE’s plans to convert a warehouse in Merrimack into a 500-bed processing center.

It said ICE plans 16 regional processing centers with a population of 1,000 to 1,500 detainees, whose stays would average three to seven days. Another eight large-scale detention centers would be capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees for periods averaging less than 60 days.

The document also refers to the acquisition of 10 existing “turnkey” facilities.

Plans call for all of them to be up and running by November as immigration officials roll out a massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by President Donald Trump’s recent tax-cutting law.

More than 75,000 immigrants were being detained by ICE as of mid-January, up from 40,000 when Trump took office a year earlier, according to federal data released last week.

The newly released document refers to “non-traditional facilities” and comes as ICE has quietly bought at least seven warehouses — some larger than 1 million square feet — in the past few weeks in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Warehouse purchases in six cities were scuttled when buyers decided not to sell under pressure from activists. Several other deals in places like New York are imminent, however.

City officials are frequently unable to get details from ICE until a property sale is finalized.

Tensions boiled to the surface after interim ICE Director Todd Lyons testified Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security “has worked with Gov. Ayotte” and provided her with an economic impact summary.

Ayotte said that assertion was “simply not true” and the summary was sent hours after Lyons testified.

The document mistakenly refers to the “ripple effects to the Oklahoma economy” and revenue generated by state sales and income taxes, neither of which exist in New Hampshire.

“Director Lyons’ comments today are another example of the troubling pattern of issues with this process,” Ayotte said. “Officials from the Department of Homeland Security continue to provide zero details of their plans for Merrimack, never mind providing any reports or surveys.”

DHS did not respond to questions about Ayotte’s comments or the new document. But it previously confirmed that it was looking for more detention space, although it objected to calling the sites “warehouses,” saying in a statement that they would be “very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

Associated Press writer Holly Ramer contributed.

New York City buildings constructed before 1960 are presumed to contain lead paint. While only proper testing can confirm its presence, a new tool allows users to enter an address and see when a property was built—what its creators say is a “starting point” for tenants and building owners to investigate further.

A lead paint testing tool. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography)

It’s been more than

In 2024, according to the city’s Health Department,

“Education around lead, and especially lead paint hazards, is something that still is really necessary,” said Kielbasa. “People think of it as something that’s been dealt with already, and there’s still about 5,000 kids a year who are poisoned in New York City. And we’re finding out more and more every day about how it’s bad for adult health, and that’s not really being tracked, honestly.”

The information is definitely intended to be a starting point. And you know the truth is, is that even buildings that are supposed to not have any lead paint in them that were built after 1960 turn up after being tested to have lead paint in them, because the national band was 1978 and New York State, I believe, was 1970 even so, oh, wow, yeah. So I think you have contractors that you know came in from or had stockpiles of the lead paint and just decided to use it. Might have had contractors working in other states, in New Jersey or Connecticut, who brought in whatever they had and just decided to use it.

the kind of rule of thumb that we use as advocates is, the older the building, the more there is typically, you know, because there’s stronger chance that it was used further back, and there might be more layers of it too

“friction surfaces” — window and door frames

even though, in many cases, if you have an old property where the paint is kept up, the friction surfaces are particularly dangerous, because over time that the abrasion that happens between the door and the door frame wear down the paint, and you can then expose the under layers of paint and create microscopic dust that, you know, basically gets, you know, sits down into the area below the door or window and then gets tracked through your old apartment. And, you know, it’s not the best scenario for anybody in the home, but if you have a child in the home, it’s particularly dangerous.

if you have a child in the age of six, landlord is already supposed to be doing an annual inspection of that unit, so coming in each year and looking at the painted surfaces, making sure they’re intact, to make sure there’s no chips appealing paint. So they should be doing that too

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