ICE Wants to Buy Warehouses for Mass Detention. Communities Are Fighting Back.

Across the country, communities are fighting a network of warehouses the Trump administration is buying up to hold immigrants.

Platform Ventures, an investment firm which owns a warehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, said on February 12 that it had pulled out of a deal with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to convert the nearly 1 million-square-foot-sized building into a “mega center” slated to hold 7,500 immigrants.

“[T]he people of Kansas City forced Platform Ventures’ hand,” Ryan Sorrell wrote for the Kansas City Defender, a Black-led abolitionist newspaper started after the George Floyd uprisings.

“This was not a corporate change of heart,” Sorrell continues. “Ultimately, it was a calculated business decision made under extraordinary pressure from a community that refused to be complicit in the machinery of mass incarceration and deportation.”

Kansas City is one of 23 cities where DHS has been quietly purchasing warehouses in remotely located office parks, as a document leaked earlier this year revealed. The Washington Postfirst reported that the Trump administration was planning to imprison 80,000 immigrants in warehouses, in addition to the nearly 70,000 people who are already detained. The warehouses will significantly expand the existing network of more than 230 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.

ICE acting Director Todd M. Lyons put the administration’s strategy bluntly at a Border Security Expo last year in Phoenix, Arizona: Mass deportations should be treated “like a business … like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

Since ICE agents shot and killed Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as well as Silverio Villegas González in Chicago, people have been focusing their outrage on stopping these warehouses from opening. This is one way people are driving “ICE OUT” of their communities.

People across the political spectrum are realizing these federal detention warehouses will harm their communities. Since federal agencies pay no taxes, local municipalities will lose valuable tax revenue paying for public schools and services. Federal agencies do not have to follow local zoning ordinances, so the warehouses will place a serious strain on the local water and sewer systems.

Putting thousands of people in makeshift facilities not meant for habitation will only worsen human rights abuses by federal immigrant agencies, warned Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network.

“All immigration detention is inherently inhumane and rife with abuse, and yet the warehouse model currently being pursued is particularly horrifying,” said Suh, whose organization is leading efforts nationally to end immigration incarceration.

Weapons of Trauma

The warehouse in Kansas City is located between an Amazon building and Walmart distribution center. Several organizations mobilized against the facility, including the Missouri Workers Center, Stand Up KC, Decarcerate KC, and Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation. They paid for billboards denouncing the warehouse, marched on the offices of Platform Ventures, and made hundreds of phone calls to the company’s owners.

When Chair of the Jackson County Legislature Manny Abarca visited the warehouse on January 15 after finding out that federal officials were touring the site, he was confronted by six ICE agents and threatened with arrest. That same day, the city council passed a moratorium on any permits for nonmunicipal detention sites. The moratorium was based off one passed in nearby Leavenworth, Kansas, where over the last year organizers have been fighting the opening of a private immigration prison owned by CoreCivic, a leading for-profit prison company that holds many contracts with ICE.

Karla Juarez, executive director of Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, an immigrant-led organization, told Truthout, “The Latino community is traumatized after years of ICE violence. The proposed ICE detention center is another attempt to continue using the weapon of trauma.”

“When you treat a country like a business, every person then becomes a dollar sign.”

The decision by Platform Ventures to cancel the warehouse contract, said Juarez, “sets the example” to hold this “abusive system” accountable. “When you treat a country like a business, every person then becomes a dollar sign. No one is a ‘package.’ No one is exempt from human hardship, and they should not be treated as a sum of money a few will enjoy from causing them more hardship.”

ICE Prisons Bring Problems

In early January, rumors had been circulating that ICE was eyeing a warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey. When local activists saw Roxbury in the leaked document of 23 warehouses, they presented it during a town council meeting one evening and called on the council to stop it. The address of the warehouse was just half a mile away from the town hall building. It was a 470,000-square-foot warehouse with a planned capacity for 1,500 beds.

On January 13, the township council voted unanimously to pass a resolution opposing a possible detention facility which would disregard land use regulations and place “unanticipated burdens” on infrastructure, resources, and service.

Roxbury is a bedroom community about an hour away from New York City and 90 minutes from Philadelphia. Just 15 minutes outside of town, the landscape is dominated by farmland. The council is entirely Republican and Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo gave a speech at a vigil for Charlie Kirk this past summer.

The township council is “extremely conservative,” William Angus, an organizer against the warehouse in Roxbury, told Truthout. “But one thing I like to say is that it doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum, you don’t want a prison in your town, let alone an ICE prison, because prisons always bring problems.”

Angus said the warehouse is located in a watershed area with eight adjacent towns that share the same water supply. “We are talking about how to reach out to these other towns to let them know that they are on the hook too,” he shared.

After Donald Trump took office for his second term, Angus felt he needed to “do something.” He volunteered at a food pantry but wanted to “join the activism part of things.” He got involved with the Visibility Brigade, a group that began in New Jersey and has spread across the country. Members promote “rush hour resistance” by putting up pro-democracy, anti-Trump signs along overpasses above busy highways.

Although he now resides 30 minutes away, Angus used to live in Roxbury and still has friends and family there. He helped to organize the No Ice North Jersey Alliance (Project NINJA) along with immigrant aid organizations, liberal groups, and other local Visibility Brigades. They now have more than 1,500 people on their email list and 700 members on their Facebook group.

On February 20, it was announced that DHS had purchased the warehouse from Dalfen Industrial. The news was demoralizing to organizers, but they vowed to continue. “Our goal remains the same,” Angus stated in a NINJA press release. “Both public protests and pressure on elected officials and involved parties will continue — because the only acceptable outcome is for the property to remain a warehouse for goods, not people.”

The group is now shifting to a corporate-shaming campaign and networking with other communities. The same day the deal was announced, protests were held outside the Dalfen headquarters in Dallas, Texas, by Indivisible Dallas, Dallas Visibility Brigade, and Yellow Rose Resistance.

Widening the Net

As the Trump administration has vowed to round up the “worst of the worst,” the majority of those arrested have no criminal backgrounds. It is increasingly clear that ICE is going after all immigrants, regardless of their legal status.

Seth Kaper-Dale is a pastor in Highland Park, New Jersey, who runs a resettlement organization and has been working with refugees and immigrants for more than 20 years. He is worried that the expansion of migrant jails, including the warehouse in Roxbury, indicates a willingness to go after a widening net of immigrants.

“New Jersey has one of the largest non-detained docket groups in the country,” Kaper-Dale explained to Truthout. “You have over 100,000 people in New Jersey who are detainable and deportable.” These are people who must report to an ICE office every three to six months. They may be put on electronic monitors, check in on voice-recognition phone calls, or use a SmartLINK app that relies on facial recognition technology.

Targeting this group is “the easiest way for ICE to drive up its quotas,” said Kaper-Dale. “People are so catchable.”

We are witnessing the “Amazonification of detention centers.”

We are witnessing the “Amazonification of detention centers,” said Kaper-Dale. The Roxbury warehouse “is a human sortation center,” he surmised.

As James Kilgore, author of the 2024 visual primer entitled The Warehouse, told Truthout, “Today, Donald Trump’s immigration gestapo are buying up real warehouses to cage migrants, taking us into another level of dystopia.”

A Surprise Warehouse in Arizona

In the city of Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, the community learned in late January about the purchase of an empty warehouse by DHS when it was reported in a local newspaper. As suspected, the 418,400-square-foot warehouse is to be used as a processing site to hold 1,500 people.

When the story broke, Chris Judd, the city council representative for the district where the warehouse is located, claimed the city was “helpless” and the matter was “out of our hands.” Kevin Sartor, the mayor of Surprise, sent a letter to DHS and ICE admitting that the city “cannot interfere with federal operations.”

Residents are rejecting the tepid response of elected officials. “ICE needs to be abolished,” said Erica Connell, who spoke to Truthout. “There’s no need for any of these additional concentration camps.”

Surprise is a growing retirement community. “Up until 10 years ago,” Connell said, “you would drive out to Las Vegas, end then ‘surprise,’ there’s a city here.” The facility looks like a “standard” warehouse or call center, Connell described. It is close to homes, local businesses, and a nearby high school. “They’re not trying to hide it out in the middle of the desert like other detention facilities,” she observed.

Connell describes herself as being “very politically involved.” Last year, when there was a call put out by the 50501 group, she attended a rally at the Arizona state capitol and became involved with the 50501 movement.

The local chapter of Indivisible is holding weekly protests against the warehouse facility. On February 3, more than 100 people spoke at the city council meeting expressing their concerns and more demonstrated outside.

“Local communities are making it clear from coast to coast,” said Detention Watch Network’s Stacy Suh, “they don’t want detention centers of any kind, and they will fight tooth and nail to block ICE and ensure all people are protected and safe.”