For the past several months, the Department of Homeland Security has been on a real estate shopping spree. Using the billions of dollars in funding Republicans handed them last year, DHS has been purchasing former warehouses to hold tens of thousands of immigrants before deporting them. But a proposed expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention capacity is facing a major challenge as residents in red and blue states alike say: “Not in My Backyard.”
It seems obvious that there’d be more pressure in Democratic-led states such as Minnesota against new ICE facilities. But a stronger-than-expected pushback from areas under Republican control underscores a widespread discontent with President Donald Trump’s deportation blitz.
NIMBYism is more commonly deployed as an impediment to more humanitarian goals, such as affordable housing, public transit, renewable energy sites and homeless shelters. It’s encouraging then to such energy in opposition to facilities that would not only do harm to the communities where they’d be built, but also to the massive number of people ICE would be incarcerating within.
The Washington Post reported in December that the combined facilities under consideration from ICE would be able to hold roughly 80,000 detainees at any given time:
Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation.
The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.
The Associated Press compiled a list of the states where federal officials have been touring locations, including Florida, Indiana and Mississippi. Several sites have already been purchased; Bloomberg News reports that DHS has spent millions of dollars on facilities in Arizona and Maryland. But in other areas, residents and local officials have hoped to deter warehouse owners from selling to ICE.
For example, a plan to convert a former Pep Boys distribution center in Chester, New York, into a deportation center was met with a bipartisan outcry. The tiny town in Orange County usually votes Republican. But The New York Times reported that “Republican and Democratic elected officials and residents across the Hudson Valley region lambasted the plan, expressing fears that the immigration operation would overwhelm scarce local resources and unleash a torrent of fraught encounters with federal agents.”
In several cases, the protests over a property’s potential sale to ICE has caused owners to back out of a potential deal. Republican Mayor David Holt of Oklahoma City issued a statement last month to “commend the owners for their decision” not to engage in talks with DHS after the city objected. “As Mayor, I ask that every single property owner in Oklahoma City exhibit the same concern for our community in the days ahead,” Holt wrote.
There’s at least one case in which NIMBYism has reached the federal level. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to “strongly oppose DHS’s proposed plan to turn a warehouse in Byhalia, Mississippi, into an ICE detention center.” He added: “This site was meant for economic development and job creation. We cannot suddenly flood Byhalia with an influx of up to 10,000 detainees.”
ICE has been working to tamp down the negative reactions their efforts have sparked. “These will not be warehouses — they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” an ICE spokesperson told USA TODAY. But that response downplays the likely difficulties in transforming buildings built for industry to safely house thousands of people. ICE already struggles to uphold those standards at its existing facilities, with multiple reports of unsanitary conditions, spoiled food and too many people crammed into small spaces. As has been stressed before, the vast majority of people ICE is holding haven’t committed a violent crime, and many don’t have a criminal record at all. It is only in pursuit of Trump’s goal of a million deportations a year that this many people have been rounded up. But there’s no guarantee that the Trump administration won’t fill up these converted industrial buildings past their capacity to satisfy an arbitrary quota. The most illuminating insight into the smattering of GOP resistance comes courtesy of Orange County executive Steven Neuhaus. “Everywhere that this has happened has been kind of a real dumpster fire,” Neuhaus, a Republican, told the Times about the proposed facility in Chester. “It’s been greeted with controversy, protests, violence, and it’s not something that we want in this sleepy county.” His statement shows where the NIMBY comparison must reach its limit. It’s all well and good that he’s opposed to the disturbance of the peace that Trump’s immigration sweeps have caused coming to Orange County. But his phrasing suggests he’s not opposed to the facility on principle; he just doesn’t want to deal with the consequences. Likewise, it is for the best that Sen. Wicker came out against a tiny town near his state’s border with Tennessee playing host to ICE’s modern-day concentration camps. It doesn’t detract from the fact that Wicker cast his vote alongside his fellow Republicans to authorize and fund the construction of these sites in the first place. It is for the best that we’re seeing conservatives rejecting these detention centers in their own hometowns. The next step is for them to stand firm against such centers’ very existence.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
