Although the Kansas City real estate firm Platform Ventures has received most of the attention this month, a five-year-old Prairie Village company has also been active in efforts to turn warehouses into massive immigrant jails.
Flint Development, led by founders Devin Schuster and Hunter Harris, has also proved itself a player offering property for sale to the Department of Homeland Security for use by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The Prairie Village connection, first reported in the Kansas City Star, consists of two potential Department of Homeland Security deals in other states — one in Oklahoma City that the company withdrew from and another in El Paso, Texas, that appears to have been finalized.
Flint Development also owns property in De Soto, Kansas and Blue Springs, and Liberty, Missouri, but there have been no public discussions of tendering any of those sites for the purpose of holding ICE detainees.
Mark Long, president and CEO of Newmark Zimmer, representing Flint as the broker for the De Soto property, told the Post an ICE facility is not on the horizon there.
ICE detention center in Kansas City falls through
The federal government has been seeking warehouse property across the country, with the aim of turning the space into detention facilities.
The prospect of the federal government using local warehouses to hold the people they picked up in immigration raids became Kansas City news several weeks ago.
Local developer Platform Ventures had reportedly been approached with an unsolicited offer on a vacant 920,000-square-foot warehouse at the former Richards-Gebauer Air Force base.
The news prompted public outcry, including protests and rallies, and shortly after federal officials arrived to tour the facility in January, the Kansas City Council banned approvals for non-municipal detention facilities.
That was followed by an announcement from Port KC, a city economic development agency, that it would no longer engage with Platform Ventures. Port KC had made the original deal with Platform in 2022 to build the warehouse. In return for the logistics and manufacturing jobs the warehouse was expected to create, the project was to receive a 95%, 10-year property tax abatement.
Last week, Platform Ventures announced that it would not continue to pursue the sale.
Flint Development in the news elsewhere
Meanwhile, another area developer, Flint Development, had been negotiating to sell a warehouse in Oklahoma City to the government. But after public objections, including emotional testimony to the city council, Flint dropped the plan.
The Oklahoma City site does not appear on the company’s online portfolio.
However, the company was also working on a deal to sell property near El Paso, Texas, and reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security for $123 million, according to El Paso Matters.
The property, dubbed the Eastwind Logistics Center, is comprised of three warehouse buildings of roughly 296,000 square feet each. Per a report in Bloomberg, the El Paso space, at 8,500 beds, could become one of the largest such jails in the country.
That proposal has also sparked strong resistance.
The Socorro City Council, where the warehouse would be built east of El Paso, last week voted to ask city staff to look into ways the city could block the construction of a detention center. Before the vote, councilmembers heard two hours of testimony against the warehouse plan.
'An affront to human dignity'
In Johnson County, Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, told the Post why warehouse detention should be a concern.
He called warehouse jails “an affront to human dignity, because the buildings are built without adequate concern for human needs.
“ICE warehouses are industrial buildings that are lightly repurposed to hold thousands of immigrants in inhumane conditions, without access to adequate food, water, toilet facilities, and other necessities of life. It is an affront to human dignity,” Rieber wrote in an email.
“Flint Development may not be selling their properties in the KC area to ICE but it doesn’t make it more acceptable when they do it somewhere else. If they continue with this plan they will attract a lot of unwelcome attention,” he added.
Kansas Interfaith Action is a multi-faith advocacy organization focusing on social, economic and climate justice issues.
Flint was founded in August, 2020 by Schuster and Harris. Both list backgrounds that include Lane4 Property Group in their experience and education at the University of Kansas.
The company builds industrial and multi-family residential buildings, but has more in its website’s portfolio on the industrial side.
It also developed the Leawood Village apartments at 8660 State Line Road and Novel Place Overland Park, a senior living space at 9651 Barkley Street, Overland Park.
Flint property in De Soto not up for ICE conversion
The Flint Development website lists one warehouse property in Johnson County — the Flint Commerce Center Building C at 10200 Edgerton Road. But any sale to DHS would come with some potential complications.
That 1-million-square-foot building is already about 50% leased to Panasonic, which is less than a mile away, according to announcements on Schuster’s LinkedIn page.
The remainder is currently being advertised as business space.
Of note is the $3.1 billion data center on the site of the Flint Commerce Center, which the De Soto City Council approved in August 2025. De Soto and the city’s economic development council have also been working to develop that 370-acre site for industrial uses, ultimately selecting Flint Development as master developer for the site, according to the city’s website.
The Post has so far not received a response directly from Flint officials about their plans for Kansas City area buildings and their reasons for working with DHS in other cities.
But Long, who is brokering the property for Flint, said it’s not part of any negotiations with the federal government.
“Flint has no current plans to lease or sell this facility to the government,” he said in an emailed response to questions.
Flint’s company website also lists two other Kansas City-area properties, both near interstates on the Missouri side, and both smaller to the De Soto space.
The Liberty Logistics building, at 2551 S. Liberty Parkway, is about 709,000 square feet, and Blue Springs Logistics, at 2700 NE Jefferson St., has about 585,000 square feet.
No information was available about any future plans for those spaces.
This story was originally published by the Johnson County Post.
