“War Zone” Realtors

At an Oklahoma City Council meeting last month, dozens of residents testified in opposition to ICE’s proposal to buy a million-square-foot warehouse southwest of the city. Because municipal officials have little power over the federal government’s land grabs — even if they run afoul of local zoning laws — advocates focused on the corporate actors who stood to profit, including Newmark Group, the broker advertising the warehouse.

“Why is a realtor who is in charge of economic development trying to sell a property to the federal government to turn Oklahoma City into a war zone?” said Mark Faulk, the former chair of the Oklahoma County Democratic Party and current candidate for county commissioner, in public comments at the city council meeting, which stretched nearly five hours.

An online brochure for the Oklahoma City property lists Newmark Robinson Park — a local branch of billion-dollar real estate giant Newmark Group — as the broker. Newmark also represents another industrial warehouse nearby that ICE is reportedly looking to buy. Until President Trump appointed him to be commerce secretary last year, Lutnick served as the chairman of Newmark’s board and CEO of Newmark’s parent company, Cantor Fitzgerald.

Although Lutnick has since divested his business interests to comply with federal ethics law — including his eleven million shares in Newmark — he has passed the company’s torch to his son, Kyle Lutnick. The younger Lutnick, who serves as the executive vice chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, became a director at Newmark Group when his father left. Kyle Lutnick’s business dealings have overlapped with his father’s policy decisions on a host of issues, drawing scrutiny.

For instance, Newmark Group has enjoyed massive windfalls from its data center business, as the New York Times reported in November, while the elder Lutnick pushed for increased data center construction from his post in the Commerce Department. Newmark collected fees and commissions on the $25 billion in data center deals it brokered, as would be the case with ICE real estate transactions.

The Oklahoma branch of Newmark did not reply to multiple inquiries from the Lever about its involvement in the two warehouse sales in the state. According to organizers in Oklahoma City, opponents of the ICE facility flooded the phone lines of the Newmark Robinson Park branch to urge the broker not to go through with the deal.

After days of outcry and campaigning against Newmark and the owner of the Oklahoma City warehouse, Kansas City–based real estate firm Flint Development, Oklahoma City’s mayor, David Holt, announced that the deal was off. In a January 29 statement, Holt wrote that the owners of the warehouse — presumably Flint Development — “confirmed to me this morning that they are no longer engaged with the Department of Homeland Security about a potential acquisition or lease of this property.”

The mayor would not answer the Lever’s questions about the deal, according to a city spokesperson.

Flint Development is involved in another property deal with ICE in El Paso, Texas. The firm’s managing partner, Devin Schuster, is a former Newmark executive, according to his LinkedIn profile. Flint Development recently stripped information about its executive team from its website; those details were available as recently as December, before its dealings with DHS became public.

Schuster and Flint Development did not reply to requests for comment.

While the Oklahoma City deal appears to be quashed, outside the city limits in the township of Durant, Lutnick’s old firm is brokering another proposed sale to DHS.

Newmark Robinson Park is listed as the broker on the property address, a vacant distribution center that local reports indicate is being eyed by Homeland Security. The warehouse, a former Big Lots distribution center, closed last year amid the retailer’s bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of more than 300 jobs in the area. (Bloomberg reported last week that ICE purchased a former Big Lots warehouse for $120 million in Pennsylvania.)

One of the sales agents named on the company’s site listing confirmed that Newmark is the broker but would not comment on the status of the sale.

In January, the Durant City Council passed a local ordinance restricting property sales to ICE. But the federal government has broad authority to override local law through a federal preemption rule known as the Supremacy Clause.

“Local officials have almost no role” in such deals, explained Dan Meyer, a Washington, DC–based attorney focused on federal employment and contracting.

That makes the brokers involved in these deals key points of pressure for city officials. For example, Newmark Robinson Park is a key stakeholder in other Durant city projects subsidized with tax dollars, including a new downtown business development called MAPS. Robinson Park’s CEO, Mark Beffort, is the vice chair of the local chamber of commerce, which works closely with the mayor’s office on economic development.

Megabrokers

The proposed deals in Oklahoma are just two of more than twenty proposed sites where DHS is actively trying to build out infrastructure for mass detentions and deportations.

When the federal government wants to buy a piece of real estate, federal agencies can shop on the commercial market to purchase properties, as Homeland Security has done for ICE detention centers.

In these instances, the government typically uses a realtor to buy a property from its broker, a “standard” process for government purchases of commercial real estate, according to Joshua Harris, a real estate professor at Fordham University.

For the brokers advertising these warehouses, the sales payoff can be lucrative. Brokers’ fees and commissions on such deals can vary widely based on the type of property and size of the sale, but rates typically range from 4 to 8 percent of the total sale price, with commissions typically lower for massive industrial warehouses.

Along with Newmark, a handful of large real estate firms have been listed as brokers for properties purchased or under consideration by ICE, according to commercial listings. They include CBRE Group, the world’s largest real estate investment firm, and Jones Lang LaSalle, a global real estate company based in Chicago.

Representatives at CBRE and Jones Lang LaSalle, both of which were listed realtors for properties purchased by ICE, did not respond to detailed questions from the Lever about their potential involvement in the deals.

And Newmark isn’t the only big brokerage firm involved with ties to the Trump administration.

In Hutchins, Texas, just outside Dallas, ICE reportedly bought a vacant Amazon facility for $80 million to expand its detention processing in the region. The broker’s contact cited on the property listing was Majestic Realty, a Los Angeles–based firm owned by billionaire real estate mogul Ed Roski Jr, a longtime GOP donor and Trump campaign contributor as well as a partial owner of the Los Angeles Lakers. In the 2024 election cycle, Roski donated a combined $200,000 to the Trump campaign and related Republican spending vehicles.

The Majestic Realty realtor listed on the address did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A Government-Backed Boom

During the pandemic-era e-commerce boom, speculators rushed to build and lease warehouse space. Many of the far-flung warehouses now being scouted by ICE were built for a handful of e-commerce behemoths — such as Amazon and Walmart — that require specialized high-volume distribution facilities.

“A ton of money is put into these buildings under the concept that they are going to be handling frequent in-and-out trucking, heavy materials,” Harris explained.

But these investments have sometimes failed to pay off, as tariff uncertainty has caused commercial real estate demand to falter (although it began to recover at the end of 2025). In one case, the owner of a vacant Maryland warehouse recently acquired by ICE for over $100 million complained in earlier Securities and Exchange Commission filings about the property’s toll on its investment portfolio, per reporting by Project Salt Box, an ICE watchdog in the state.

Now DHS’s unprecedented spending spree opens a promising new avenue for owners and brokers holding on to flagging warehouse investments.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my time in real estate,” Harris said of the agency’s acquisitions.

The first indication that ICE was planning to buy up commercial warehouses to detain immigrants came in early November, when NBC News reported, citing internal sources, that the agency was considering such a plan, which would dramatically expand ICE’s detention apparatus.

Then, in December, as the Lever first reported, ICE inked a $29.9 million contract with design firm KPB Services for “concept design” for “mega processing centers” throughout the country. (The vendor, a tribally owned company in Kansas, backed out of the deal after community backlash.)

Over the next several weeks, the full scope of ICE’s planned acquisitions emerged. The agency has acquired at least four warehouses, each for tens of millions of dollars. Another twenty or so sites are reportedly under consideration, though community pushback has foiled several of the deals, including in Virginia and in Salt Lake City.

The brokers overseeing these properties are often named in advertising commercial listing materials but are not typically included on resulting sales deeds. Therefore, it’s difficult to determine how much revenue firms like Newmark are generating from these deals and the extent of their involvement in final sales.

Nevertheless, it appears that these politically connected companies are well positioned to profit from Homeland Security’s ambitious new plan to supersize its detention process.

As acting director of ICE Todd Lyons put it last April, “We need to get better at treating [detentions] like a business, like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”