Image Credit: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only.
By Anita Wadhwani [Tennessee Lookout -CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] –
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking co-working spaces in Nashville and Knoxville as it expands its administrative outposts throughout the country, according to a federal solicitation posted last week.
The request for 12-month leases in shared, furnished office spaces in nearly 100 U.S. cities is part of a broader expansion of the agency’s bureaucratic footprint as the Trump administration pushes a mass deportation agenda. ICE received an unprecedented $75 billion budget boost last year.
An agency spokesperson declined to answer questions about the purpose or level of staffing expected at coworking spaces in Nashville and Knoxville.
“Is it really news that when a federal agency hires more personnel that they need more space?” a spokesperson for ICE said via email. “Thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we have an additional 12,000 ICE officers and agents on the ground across the country. That’s a 120% increase in our workforce.”
The expansion of ICE’s brick-and-mortar locations has, in recent instances, been met with local pushback when details have emerged publicly.
In February, Wired magazine reported that ICE had leased two office buildings in Nashville: one in the Estes Kefauver Federal Building in downtown Nashville and a second in Metro Center. News that ICE was the new tenant at the Metro Center office location took its owner by surprise.
Bob Freeman, a Tennessee Democrat legislator and owner of Nashville real estate firm Freeman Webb, which owns the Metro Center space, said last month he would never knowingly lease space to ICE; his attorneys were exploring legal remedies to halt the agreement, he said in a statement.
An announcement by ICE that it intended to build a mega immigrant detention center in Lebanon, Tenn. was withdrawn after the plan met fierce opposition from residents and federal, state and local Republican leaders, who have otherwise expressed support for Trump’s immigration policies.
ICE’s published notice seeking coworking spaces specifies workstations or private offices with Wi-Fi access and printing privileges. The solicitation does not detail the nature of work to be conducted in the offices.
The federal notice is seeking responses from coworking space owners and managers by March 31.
