Funny, People Don't Want ICE Concentration Camps In Their Towns — Or Anywhere
But at least ICE is also inflating the supposed economic benefits of proposed camps.
Yet another attempt by ICE to buy a giant empty warehouse that it can turn into a deportation prison fell through Monday, when the owners of a million-square-foot warehouse in Hutchins, Texas, announced they wouldn’t sell the building after all. A protest that had been planned ahead of a city council meeting turned into a celebration instead.
Hutchins is a city of about 8,000 people south of Dallas; if the deal had gone through, the deportation prison could have held 10,000 prisoners. Monday, Majestic Realty, the California company that owns the warehouse, said in a statement it had been contacted about the building, but that it “has not and will not enter into any agreement for the purchase or lease of any building” to DHS for use as a prison.
Hooray for that, but here’s a chilling little detail in KDFW’s report, and it’s so goddamn typical of how Trump’s ethnic cleansing program operates half in secret. The company’s statement that it had rejected the sale “marked the first public confirmation that DHS had expressed interest in the property.” Until Monday, there had only been rumors and media reports based on document leaks, such as a December Washington Post story (gift link) on ICE’s plan to go on a warehouse-buying binge.
Hutchins Mayor Mario Vasquez said at a city council meeting earlier this month that he hadn’t been contacted by the federal government, and that no building permits, applications, or other paperwork had been filed. After all, DHS wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise when trucks show up and start converting a warehouse into a prison to house more than the existing population. Why would the ICEstapo bother communicating with the locals, or applying in advance for water and sewage and roads to service the new larger city inside the city?
It’s not much of a secret police if people know what you’re up to, after all.
If You Give A Fascist $42 Billion …
Despite the partial shutdown of DHS funding as Democrats try to force changes to the deportation agenda, the agency is still flush with cash thanks to the $42 billion earmarked for concentration camps in last summer’s Big Ugly Bill. In fact, nearly all of that new money will be going into ICE’s warehouse gulag archipelago. Documents obtained by the Washington Post (another gift link) show the total cost of purchasing buildings and retrofitting them as prisons is $38 billion, before cost overruns. (For a sense of scale, the Post notes that’s more than the total annual spending of 22 states combined.)
Why yes, ICE will be farming out the operation of the people warehouses to private prison companies. But even as those companies want a place at the money trough, some are already warning that the logistics of turning a giant warehouse into a prison are, ahem, challenging. George Zoley, founder and chair of private prison giant Geo Group, said on an earnings call with investors last week that of course it wants to support ICE’s planned warehouse prisons, but said the project will be “more complicated than you may think.”
Geo Group once converted a warehouse into a holding center for 500 people about 30 years ago — nothing like the enormous size of the facilities being proposed now, Zoley said. “The operational implications of how you manage such a facility, particularly a large-scale facility, is going to be concerning,” Zoley said.
Then again, doing a half-assed job that puts detainees’ health and lives at risk is already cooked into the Trump plan, because the prisons won’t contain people, they’ll hold “ILLEGALS.” That includes those here legally until Trump changed their status with a pen, so any suffering that results will be the victims’ fault, just part of their punishment for coming to America at all.
Hell No, Not Here, Not Anywhere
But while the project is monstrous, residents in cities where ICE wants to try warehouse prisons have been fighting to block them, and in many cases, they’ve won — even in states where Donald Trump won in 2024. Here are just a few:
A Canadian company backed out of selling a warehouse in Virginia, following protests and local opposition, as well as a threat by Canada’s Green Party to launch a boycott of the company.
After huge protests in Oklahoma City, the owners of a warehouse there decided not to sell a warehouse there to ICE, and Republican Mayor David Holt applauded the move.
ICE dropped plans to warehouse up to 8,500 people in a Mississippi warehouse after Sen. Roger Wicker (R) complained about the plan directly to Kristi Noem, possibly while offering her a new blanket.
In red, red Utah, the government of Salt Lake City is nonetheless Democratic, and Mayor Erin Mendenhall warned the owner of a warehouse that ICE’s plans to convert it into a prison would likely violate city code, as well as put a huge strain on the city’s water and sewer systems. There too, the owners of the warehouse said they had no intention of selling or leasing the building to DHS.
After federal officials toured a large warehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, the city council passed a moratorium on construction of any non-municipal detention facilities in the city until January 15, 2031. The owners of the warehouse initially said they had a “fiduciary duty” to consider an offer that had already been made on the building, but last week issued a statement that they’re “not actively engaged” with any prospective buyer for the property. The company also grumped that it normally wouldn’t comment on “potential transactions,” and that “baseless speculation, inaccurate narratives and serious threats toward our leadership, our employees and our families have prompted us to issue this statement.”
The same day as the company said it wasn’t going to sell the facility, an as-yet unidentified woman tried to set fire to the warehouse by spraying what looks like lighter fluid on it, but it quickly burned out without doing any damage or injuring anyone. No arrests have yet been made. Please do not do arsons, folks. We like firefighters, who are far more valuable to America (and far more likely to be hurt in a building fire) than ICE goons or anyone in the Trump administration.
If you want to stay on top of the evolving state of ICE’s warehouse-prison program, we recommend checking out Project Salt Box, which has a map of the ongoing fights over proposed warehouse purchases (nine), the sales that have been canceled (also nine!), and those that have been bought (10). The site also estimates the economic hit that municipalities will take when a commercial warehouse, which would normally be a source of tax revenue, is acquired by the federal government, removing it from the tax base.
Evil AND Incompetent
Continuing another theme that permeates every part of the second Trump term, ICE’s warehouses-to-concentration camps program is also incredibly sloppy and hastily thrown together. Consider the proposed ICE facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, which would convert a warehouse into a relatively small “processing site” that would house between 400 and 600 people grabbed by ICE before sending them on to one of the bigger warehouses, or directly to deportation.
A DHS “economic impact analysis” about the Merrimack site released on February 12 is a dog’s breakfast of errors, starting with the first damn paragraph, which was clearly copy-pasted from a similar document about the now-cancelled Oklahoma City warehouse site.
As Project Salt Box points out, even leaving aside that obvious copy-paste error, there are all sorts of problems with the “analysis,” which also estimates there’ll be millions of dollars in sales and income tax from the prison, even though New Hampshire doesn’t have either form of tax. It also inflates the potential job gains by “counting theoretical grocery clerks and gas station attendants as positions ‘supported’ by the project.”
DHS later sniffed that it was silly to make a fuss over a “single” error and posted a “corrected” version that removed “Oklahoma” — but left in the big revenue from taxes that in New Hampshire’s case it has not got.
The “corrected” document still claims that “approximately $10.7 million in local, state and federal tax revenue would be generated by annual operations, including sales tax and income tax.” Hey, maybe they mean in Merrimack, Oklahoma.
The estimate does acknowledge that the state would lose its property tax revenue — $281,765 for 2025 — if the building shifts to federal control, but projects a big boost of $410,123 a year in city and township taxes. Of course, that would only be generated if the 162 expected workers actually live in the community.
Needless to say, ICE insists that its numbers are based on “detailed data on New Hampshire’s economy,” despite the inclusion of estimated revenue streams the state entirely lacks.
But don’t worry. If any of the estimates are a little off, they can easily be fixed with a Sharpie. ICE’s plan to spend $38 billion on warehouse prisons in the next six months is sure to be a huge success, and if Tricia McLaughlin wasn’t leaving DHS, we’re sure she’d mercilessly mock you if you suggest otherwise.
Besides, by the time ProPublica or some other investigative journos find out where all the money ended up, a year from now, many of the principals will have relocated to countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the US.
[KDFW / CBS News / Project Salt Box / WaPo (gift link) / WaPo (gift link) / NOTUS / USA Today / Time / WBUR / Project Salt Box]
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George Takei@georgetakei.bsky.social
I spent my childhood inside of American concentration camps.
I know one when I see one.
And that is what ICE is building.
I guarantee that the only actual construction being done to convert these warehouses will be to create facilities for the guards. The rest is just chain link fenced holding pens.
Evil AND grifting of government funds. It’s the Republican way