As ICE targets warehouses across the country to buy and use as giant detention centers for immigrants, blowback from residents and local officials has led to some purchases being scrapped — a strategy opponents of a similar proposed facility in east Orlando hope to duplicate.
But just three weeks after a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official toured a massive warehouse off of State Road 528, there are indications a sale there could be imminent.
The federal agency, flush with cash and looking to vastly increase its capacity to hold and process detainees for deportation, has successfully bought a number of facilities similar to the Orlando warehouse in recent weeks, despite local backlash.
Aerial image of the Beachline Logistics Center, a 439,945-square-foot industrial facility located at 8660 Transport Drive in east Orange County, on Wednesday, February 4, 2026. The warehouse could be a future location for an ICE detention center. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)
HLI Partners, the Winter Park brokerage firm marketing the Transport Drive warehouse, removed the commercial listing from its website at some point after Dec. 15, according to the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. The listing also was removed from the commercial real estate listing site LoopNet. That could indicate it may be off the market, though late last week, HLI had a sign posted outside that it was for lease.
The firm’s president, Josh Lipoff, hung up on a reporter this week when reached by phone and didn’t respond to an email.
“I have no comment,” he said.
The firm, as well as the property’s owner, Atlanta-based TPA Group, and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The establishment of such a large detention in Central Florida would supercharge the federal government’s ability to collect and detain immigrants here, at a time when it is tussling with Orange County for merely dozens of beds in the county’s jail. But how it would be used is shrouded in mystery, as — for now — is the apparently long-planned acquisition.
The warehouse is on 40 acres owned by Beachline Logistics Center LLC, which is operated by TPA. It purchased the land in November 2022 for $7.9 million.
It then built a massive 429,000-square foot warehouse in the industrial park off Sunbridge Parkway, which arose amid thousands of mostly undeveloped acres of woods, swamp and marsh.
While ICE has not discussed the facility specifically and no design for its use has been made public, it’s planned to hold roughly 1,500 detainees as part of a nationwide network of warehouses which would expand the agency’s detention capacity by 80,000. Alligator Alcatraz, the state’s notorious Everglades detention center, has 158,000 square feet of housing and state officials have said it has a capacity of more than 3,000 people.
The warehouse is surrounded by giant swaths of land to the south owned by Tavistock, which the development company plans to develop into Sunbridge, a community of about 5,700 homes, 1,600 apartments, more than 5 million square feet of office space and nearly 3 million square feet of industrial space in Orange County alone. That section amounts to only a fraction of the overall plan, which also includes nearly 20,000 acres in Osceola County.
To the east lie thousands of acres of the Deseret Ranches, owned by the real estate arm of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, informally known as the Mormon Church.
Tavistock, also the developer of Lake Nona and formerly owned by billionaire Joe Lewis, has been in touch with local elected officials about the potential detention center, but the company didn’t take a position on it when asked by a reporter.
“We have not been contacted by any agency regarding the site, and we do not own or manage the property being referenced,” said Jessi Blakely, its vice president of marketing and communications. “Our focus as an adjacent landowner remains on supporting long-term economic growth and a stable business environment in Central Florida.”
Farmland Reserve, the real estate arm of the Mormon Church, also hasn’t taken a position, a spokesman said.
So far, local politicians have no consistent strategy regarding whether to oppose an ICE operation at the site.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said this week in a letter to the advocacy group Immigrants Are Welcome Here that county attorneys are researching if they can “prohibit the location of federal ICE detention facilities within unincorporated Orange County.”
The Transport Drive warehouse sits within Orlando’s city limits, however, and its attorney, Mayanne Downs, concluded the city had no course of action to block it. The city’s elected officials appear to have accepted that advice.
The Beachline Logistics Center, a 439,945-square-foot industrial facility, located at 8660 Transport Drive in east Orange County, on Wednesday, February 4, 2026. The warehouse could be future location for ICE. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)
A spreadsheet obtained last month by the Orlando Sentinel shows the east Orlando facility has been in ICE’s crosshairs since at least November, with the document listing the purchase cost to be about $99 million. The document also shows properties across the country that ICE was considering for facilities deemed “processing” or a “mega center.”
Some of the sites listed have been purchased in recent weeks for the same or very similar prices as outlined in the document.
For example, Bloomberg reported last week that the Trump Administration paid $102 million for a warehouse in Maryland and the following week paid $70 million for one in Arizona. Another in El Paso, Texas, was purchased for $172 million.
The Morning Call reported this week that the feds bought a 500,000 square-foot warehouse in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, which was also listed on the spreadsheet, albeit without a price tag.
But elsewhere, public pressure has been effective. Last week, a Canadian company, Jim Pattison Developments, said it wouldn’t sell an Ashland, Va., warehouse to the Department of Homeland Security. The mayor of Oklahoma City also announced that the owners of a proposed ICE facility had backed out of a deal after a firestorm of local opposition.
Pushback is still ongoing against other planned ICE centers, including the all-GOP township council of Roxbury, N.J. unanimously passing an ordinance “unequivocally” opposing a facility there.
In Central Florida, activists still are hoping to overwhelm HLI Partners with their opposition to any sale.
The Orlando chapter of the group 50501 launched a phone campaign this week urging the Winter Park firm not to sell or lease the property to ICE. Michelle Andrade, who heads up outreach for the group, said it has averaged at least 50 calls per day.
She said she reached Joe Hills, the firm’s principal, who pretended to be a man named “Bill” representing an OBGYN office. She established his true identity when she called a second time and his voicemail identified the number as Hills’.
In addition, the phone number listed on the firm’s website now offers a twist on the infamous “Rickroll” meme, with callers hearing only the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
“They’ve been treating it like a joke,” Andrade said. “I’m very worried that it will happen, and it’s sad because a lot of the conditions in these facilities are abhorrent.”
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, said she’s attempted to reach both TPA Group and HLI Partners in recent weeks, but her voicemails, texts and emails haven’t been returned. She said she’s concerned about the impacts such a facility could have on everything from water, transportation and even the region’s thriving tourism economy.
“Yes, it’s a private building, but the impact is huge publicly,” she said. “This is just a terrible idea for Central Florida.”
The proposed facility does have its supporters. U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-backed GOP candidate for governor, held a gathering of Republican activists there last week. He told the Sentinel he thought the detention center was a good idea that could relieve pressure on local jails facing a surge of immigration-related inmates.
On X, the Department of Homeland Security posted last week the facilities were the product of ICE having more new funding to create even bigger spaces to house immigrants.
“These will not be warehouses — they will be well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” the post read.