ICE Is Buying Warehouses. Communities Are Fighting Back.

Filed
12:00 p.m. EST

02.14.2026

The company desires to warehouse immigration detainees. Native residents and officers are elevating issues.

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Down an industrial row in Shock, a suburb of Phoenix, there’s little of the surprising: Beverage vehicles zip out and in of 1 boxy gray warehouse to the best. At one other website to the left, the open lot is stacked with rows of chemical storage tanks. In case you’ve seen one industrial park within the U.S., you’ve actually seen all of them.

Then there’s one constructing sitting empty. In late January, the Division of Homeland Safety purchased it for $70 million in money, a part of a reported $38 billion buying spree for thousands and thousands of sq. toes of economic actual property to be retrofitted as immigration detention bedspace. Bloomberg reported late final month that DHS is eyeing practically two dozen websites that, if totally accomplished, might add sufficient capability to double the present detention inhabitants of about 68,000.

Over 100 native residents spoke out in opposition to the hassle throughout a five-hour Shock metropolis council assembly earlier this month, elevating issues that ran the gamut. Some folks anxious about some detainees with a legal historical past being held locally. Some pointed to the attainable pressure on water, sewer, electrical infrastructure, site visitors and emergency companies. One speaker cited misplaced income — the federal authorities is exempt from native taxes. However most individuals provided broader condemnations of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, and easily didn’t need that challenge to be a part of the city’s legacy.

“It’s disheartening that the primary time our small city makes nationwide information, it isn’t for who we’re, however for one thing that threatens the dignity and security of our personal folks,” a lady stated.

The Shock discussion board mirrored debates occurring in native authorities conferences throughout the nation, and conversations which are making for unusual bedfellows and surprising coalitions. Earlier this week, within the shadow of the sprawling warehouse constructing in Shock, I sat down with Lisa Everett, a neighborhood conservative political activist who has been among the many loudest critics of the plan. A 3-time Trump voter, Everett informed me she was a powerful supporter of tightening the U.S. border, and deportation efforts that focus on folks with violent convictions, however that she had profound points with the broader immigration dragnet.

She stated the crackdown is sweeping up tax-paying, nonviolent group members and increasing detention into indefinite limbo, elevating a blunt query: If deportations are the aim, why construct so many beds?

Like Everett, many different Trump supporters have taken subject with the prospect of a neighborhood detention heart — although for a lot of of them, their objections have been extra in regards to the impacts on the group than in regards to the folks held inside. For Everett, it’s each.

That stance has pushed her into unlikely firm. Everett has just lately been coordinating with the native chapter of Indivisible, a left-leaning nationwide grassroots community based in opposition to Trump’s first presidency. That alliance, and her broader immigration advocacy, led to Everett being censured by native Republican leaders. She informed me she’s undeterred.

“I gained’t keep silent when folks’s dignity is being stripped from them,” Everett stated.

Once I requested what she thought the chances had been of stopping the deliberate detention heart right here, Everett stopped to stifle tears as her voice cracked. “I am afraid we’ll have it right here. I don’t suppose there’s something we will do.”

Her pessimism mirrors Metropolis Corridor’s posture. On Wednesday, Mayor Kevin Sartor despatched a letter to DHS requesting info on the constructing’s supposed use, together with affect research on what it’ll imply for town. However the letter was extraordinarily deferential, acknowledging in a number of locations that “we will’t intrude with federal operations.”

Different Arizona officers are exploring extra aggressive authorized stances. This week, Arizona Legal professional Normal Kris Mayes, a Democrat, stated she was contemplating suing the federal authorities below a state legislation that enables state officers to attempt to block any “public nuisance” that’s at odds with “the snug enjoyment of life or property” by the group.

As in a number of the native efforts to restrain and scrutinize the administration’s operation in Minneapolis, any try to cease the feds by utilizing state legislation in Arizona can be an uphill battle. The Supremacy Clause of the Structure locations federal legislation above state and native statutes. However Mays isn’t the one state or native official seeking to throw authorized roadblocks in entrance of the warehouse detention plans.

Metropolis councils throughout the nation, together with in El Paso, Texas, Merrillville, Indiana, and Durant, Oklahoma, have handed resolutions questioning or resisting plans to make use of warehouses for immigration detention.

In Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, town council voted 12-1 in January to dam federal detention heart permits. Like different native efforts, it’s not clear that the ordinance would have finally held up in court docket, but it surely gained’t should. Platform Ventures, the corporate that was promoting the property, introduced on Thursday that it will not be going ahead with the sale, following a public stress marketing campaign.

An identical dynamic performed out this week in Salt Lake County, Utah, the place county Mayor Jenny Wilson pledged to make use of “all out there authorized and coverage avenues” to oppose a DHS warehouse there. Shortly after, the proprietor of the property introduced it had “no plans” to promote or lease the constructing to the federal authorities, based on MS NOW.

Throughout the nation, this has been an more and more efficient strategy by communities seeking to stymie warehouse detention facilities. In Ashland, Virginia, a warehouse owned by Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison was within the technique of being offered to DHS in late January. After information broke, Pattison was hit with threats of a buyer boycott of his Canadian grocery retailer chain, and from advertisers suspending their contracts together with his firm. Inside a few days, Pattison’s improvement firm issued a press release that the transaction wouldn’t be going ahead.

In some instances, political stress greater up the proverbial meals chain has additionally been efficient. Plans for a detention warehouse in Byhalia, Mississippi, had been scratched after Republican Sen. Roger Wicker raised his issues on to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Wicker wrote in a letter to the company that the conversion would foreclose financial development alternatives in an in any other case up-and-coming area of the state.

Equally, in Hutchins, south of Dallas, native officers fear that DHS’s buy of a 1-million sq. foot constructing will, amongst different issues, imperil the native treasury. The property was producing about $1.8 million in annual tax income that the federal authorities wouldn’t should pay, probably jeopardizing town’s potential to pay again a bond. Related issues have adopted proposed websites in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Chester, New York.

Elsewhere, monetary, authorized and public stress mechanisms could give technique to easy infrastructure issues. An enormous deliberate warehouse detention facility in Social Circle, Georgia, might triple the city’s present inhabitants of 5,000. Metropolis Supervisor Eric Taylor has informed a number of information shops that the native infrastructure, particularly water and sewer, is sort of maxed out and can’t deal with this sort of extra load.