Accidental Metadata Leak Exposes Authors of ICE’s Mega Detention Center Plan

A PDF document shared by U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials with the office of New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte accidentally reveals the full identities of everyone involved in drafting a sweeping new plan to build large-scale “mega” immigration detention and processing centers across the country, thanks to unremoved embedded comments and hidden file metadata left intact in the shared document.

This unintended exposure of DHS personnel behind Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) mega detention proposal comes as widespread public opposition grows over the expansion of ICE detention facilities and the agency’s harsh immigration enforcement tactics.

The document, which outlines ICE’s flagship “Detention Reengineering Initiative” (DRI), lists Jonathan Florentino — director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office in Newark, New Jersey — as the file’s official author in its embedded metadata.

In a comment attached directly above a frequently asked question reading “What is the average length of stay for the aliens?”, Tim Kaiser, deputy chief of staff for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, left a note asking David Venturella to confirm the 60-day average stay cited for the new mega facilities. Venturella, a former GEO Group executive who The Washington Post has identified as an advisor overseeing an ICE division that manages detention center contracts, left his reply visible in the final published document: “Ideally, I'd like to see a 30-day average for the Mega Center but 60 is fine.”

Details of Kaiser and Venturella’s involvement in the DRI plan were first flagged by independent reporting project Project Salt Box. DHS has not responded to multiple requests for comment: the agency declined to clarify what roles the three men hold on the DRI project, and refused to answer questions about whether Florentino had access to a paid PDF processing subscription that would have allowed him to scrub metadata and comments from the file before sharing it with the governor’s office. (The Trump-administration-aligned Department of Government Efficiency cut tens of thousands of paid software licenses across the federal government last year.)

The plan itself lays out that ICE aims to finalize its overhauled national detention model by the end of September this year. ICE says the goal of the initiative is to create “an efficient detention network by reducing the total number of contracted detention facilities in use while increasing total bed capacity, enhancing custody management, and streamlining removal operations.”

“ICE’s surge hiring effort has resulted in the addition of 12,000 new law enforcement officers,” the DHS document notes. “For ICE to sustain the anticipated increase in enforcement operations and arrests in 2026, an increase in detention capacity will be a necessary downstream requirement.”

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ICE’s proposed model splits facilities into two tiers under what it calls a “hub and spoke” system. Smaller regional processing centers will hold between 1,000 to 1,500 detainees for an average stay of three to seven days, and feed detainees into the larger mega facilities. The mega detention centers will hold an average of 7,000 to 10,000 people, with an average stay of 60 days.

“ICE plans to activate all facilities by November 30, 2026, ensuring the timely expansion of detention capacity,” the document states.

As first reported by WIRED, the initiative extends far beyond new detention centers: ICE plans to buy or lease office space and other auxiliary facilities in more than 150 locations, across nearly every U.S. state.

The unremoved comments in the PDF sent to New Hampshire’s governor are not the only embarrassing error in the released set of documents, per the New Hampshire Bulletin. An earlier draft of an accompanying economic impact analysis for a proposed processing site in Merrimack, New Hampshire, incorrectly opened with generic text referencing “the Oklahoma economy.” The flawed draft remains hosted on the governor’s public website as of this publication.

Across the country, ICE’s mega detention projects have sparked fierce local controversy. After ICE purchased a warehouse for a new facility in Surprise, Arizona, hundreds of local residents packed a city council meeting to oppose the project, per Phoenix-based public radio outlet KJZZ. In Social Circle, Georgia, local city officials have pushed back against DHS’s proposal to build a mega center there, arguing the city’s existing water and sewage infrastructure cannot support the large population the facility would add.

Updated 3:37 pm ET, February 20, 2026: Added attribution to Project Salt Box, which first reported on the metadata revealing Kaiser and Venturella’s work on the DHS document.