Canadian Firm With No ICE Experience Just Won $704 Million Arizona Warehouse Contract
GardaWorld Federal Services is reshaping America's deportation infrastructure — and the government barely blinked.
WASHINGTON — Before GardaWorld became a household name in the immigration enforcement industrial complex, it was moving cash between banks. Armored trucks. Vaults. Coin counting. Now it’s moving people.
The Montreal-based private security conglomerate — through its U.S. arm, GardaWorld Federal Services LLC — has quietly muscled its way into one of the most lucrative and consequential federal contracting arenas in a generation: the mass detention and processing of migrants inside the United States.
In March 2026, the Department of Homeland Security awarded GardaWorld a contract to convert a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona — an industrial building never designed for human habitation — into an ICE processing and detention center capable of holding roughly 1,500 people. The initial one-year award: approximately $313.4 million. With options extending through February 2029, the potential total value reaches an estimated $704 million.
That is not a typo. A company whose primary federal resume included guarding U.S. embassies abroad is now being handed the equivalent of a small city’s annual budget to warehouse human beings in a former industrial facility in the Arizona desert. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations branch is listed as the awarding office, federal contracting records show — confirmation, if any were needed, that this isn’t migrant services. This is removal infrastructure.
A Company With a Record
GardaWorld did not arrive in this space without a trail. The American Friends Service Committee’s Investigate project, which tracks private contractors in immigration enforcement, documents GardaWorld’s operation of migrant shelters across the U.S. and immigrant detention facilities in Canada — where its record includes hunger strikes and at least one custodial death at an immigration holding center.
At Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, GardaWorld was among the contractors that staffed what became a tent city for thousands of unaccompanied children during the 2021 border surge. The HHS Office of Inspector General later found that children went weeks without seeing case managers, experienced panic attacks, and showed signs of serious mental health deterioration. AFSC researchers described GardaWorld’s management there as “gross mismanagement.”
In South Florida, GardaWorld is a central contractor at the facility the public has come to know as “Alligator Alcatraz” — the state-run detention site carved into the Everglades. Court documents identify the company as providing “detention operations” there, with contracts reaching up to $80 million.
Senators Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., called for a federal investigation into conditions at the facility after reports surfaced that detainees were shackled in the sun inside a cage-like structure called “the box,” without food or water. A federal court later issued a preliminary injunction requiring ICE and Florida officials to ensure detainees had access to legal counsel.
GardaWorld’s name is on the contract at that facility.
The Shift No One Announced
What makes GardaWorld’s rise particularly significant is not just its size — it’s what it signals about where ICE is taking its detention network.
For decades, the private prison industry’s role in immigration detention was dominated by two companies: GEO Group and CoreCivic. They had the infrastructure. They had the relationships. They had the beds.
Now, DHS appears to be deliberately expanding the contractor pool — awarding warehouse conversion contracts in Arizona and Maryland to firms like GardaWorld and KVG LLC, neither of which had previously operated as a primary ICE detention contractor. The Arizona and Maryland awards combined could exceed $1.3 billion.
The message from ICE is unmistakable: the old guard has competition, and the new players are willing to move fast and ask few questions.
Members of Congress from Arizona have already sent letters to GardaWorld’s federal president demanding to know how the company plans to meet local zoning codes, health and safety standards, and how it intends to use subcontractors. They have not received satisfying answers.
Community members in Surprise have organized in opposition, raising concerns about property values, neighborhood safety, and what it means when a suburban community wakes up one morning to find a federal detention center next door.
The Canadian Complicity
There is an uncomfortable irony embedded in GardaWorld’s expansion into American immigration enforcement: the company is substantially backed by Canadian public money.
Protesters who marched on GardaWorld’s Montreal headquarters in February 2026 — roughly 1,000 strong — carried signs linking the company’s ICE contracts to a reported 300-million-Canadian-dollar investment by Investissement Québec, the provincial development agency. A multibillion-dollar Canadian federal security contract adds another layer.
In other words: Canadian taxpayers are helping capitalize a company that is now profiting from Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Student groups at McGill University have demanded their institution sever its campus security contract with GardaWorld. The protests have not stopped the contracts. But they have rattled GardaWorld’s boardroom in ways that American demonstrations rarely reach foreign-headquartered firms.
What Comes Next
With ICE’s budget growing and DHS planning to pour tens of billions into detention infrastructure in the years ahead, GardaWorld is positioned to become one of the central architects of what mass detention looks like in America going forward — not some relic private prison company from the 1990s, but a globe-spanning security conglomerate that learned how to speak the language of federal procurement.
The Surprise, Arizona facility is expected to open. Alligator Alcatraz is still operating. Fort Bliss remains part of GardaWorld’s recent history.
The questions that remain unanswered — about conditions, about subcontractors, about the political and financial relationships that made this rise possible — are not academic. They are the questions that determine what happens to 1,500 people inside a converted warehouse in the Arizona desert.
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I just lost some respect for Canada. This company is disgustingly corrupt.
I thought Canada was on our side. What's up, PM Carney?