Trump voters are blocking his ICE warehouses — and Republicans are leading the fight
WASHINGTON — New Hampshire’s Republican governor, frustrated with little information about the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to put a new detention facility in her state, joined local Democrats to oppose the move and disclosed DHS plans to retrofit warehouses across the nation to expand immigrant detention.
Two Republican members of the U.S. Senate, one who chairs the Armed Services Committee and another running for governor, personally lobbied DHS to find other locations for planned large-scale detention centers in rural Byhalia, Mississippi, and Lebanon, Tennessee.
And a city manager for a small town in Georgia that overwhelmingly voted to put President Donald Trump back in the White House placed a lock on a meter to prevent water access to a newly purchased warehouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At every turn, DHS has faced pushback from Republicans in its drive to quickly scale up immigrant detention to 92,600 people by September, a pillar of the president’s mass deportation plan as Trump aims to remove 1 million immigrants without legal status each year. Republicans warn that the move to convert warehouses into hulking detention sites in rural areas will strain local communities’ water, sewage, electricity, heat and health care.
Yet Republicans also cheered Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric on deportation, voted to return him to the White House and in Congress last year, GOP lawmakers spearheaded $45 billion for ICE detention.
Experts on detention say the growing burden on communities and the subsequent uproar should be no surprise to members of the GOP.
“You cannot have a successful deportation agenda, which is the president’s obsession of wanting to have 1 million a year … unless you scale up detention,” said Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute senior fellow and director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law.
Billions for detention
Last year, congressional Republicans provided a separate funding pool of $175 billion for immigration enforcement through the massive tax cuts and spending package, with $45 billion set aside specifically for the detention of immigrants.
Of that sum, the Trump administration plans to use $39 billion to overhaul its current detention model of using existing jails and prisons and instead consolidate 34 facilities owned by the federal government for detention.
That would include eight mega-sites of refurbished warehouses to hold as many as 10,000 people each; 16 processing centers, also refurbished warehouses, to each hold 1,000 to 1,500 people; and 10 “turnkey” facilities, which would be the preexisting jails and prisons with ICE contracts.
Those plans for DHS to expand immigrant detention became public after New Hampshire’s GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte released documents about a now-canceled site planned for Merrimack, as well as sites across the rest of the country.
The eight large-scale sites would hold more people than the largest federal prison in the United States, which houses roughly 4,000 inmates.
“I think for a lot of people, it sounds and looks a lot like we’re building an infrastructure for concentration camps,” said Elliott Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College.
The Trump administration’s rapid expansion of detention — as many as 68,000 immigrants, as of February — has proven deadly. In 2025, there were 31 known detainee deaths, the highest in 20 years. This year alone, more than a dozen immigrants already have died in detention, and advocates are concerned the plans to detain up to 10,000 immigrants in mega-sites will only lead to more deaths.
This is not the kind of economic development many rural communities may have envisioned.
“Having such a big amount of people detained in one place comes with its own issues, but the second thing is that industrial warehouses are just not equipped, and they will never be equipped, to be able to detain that many folks,” said Luis Suarez, the senior field advocacy manager at Detention Watch Network.
“With the current facilities that ICE is managing, we have seen an unprecedented amount of inhumane conditions and deaths, and we feel that with this large-scale expansion that we’re going to continue to see it on a larger scale,” Suarez continued.
Public opinion on detention centers
The GOP pushback on warehouses in communities grew after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota, and public opinion ratings on ICE and the president’s agenda took a dive.
“This is just coming off the heels of what happened in Minneapolis,” Suarez said. “I feel like for people it’s sending a signal that if these facilities open up, there might be increased enforcement, and they don’t want to continue to see the violence that DHS and ICE has been inflicting on communities.”
How the DHS push to acquire warehouses develops over the coming months could also be affected by the newly confirmed Homeland Security secretary, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem.
While NBC reported on March 31 that Homeland Security is pausing plans to buy more warehouses, quoting two senior DHS officials, the officials “stressed the decision may only be temporary.”
During Mullin’s confirmation hearing, he agreed to work with local communities concerned with large detention centers after New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim raised the issue.
Kim said in the town of Roxbury, New Jersey, which has a volunteer fire department and 42 police officers, DHS purchased a warehouse as a processing center to detain up to 1,500 people.
Roxbury is in western Morris County, where Trump gained 50% of the presidential vote in 2024. City officials filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to prevent the conversion of the warehouse.
“Does that sound like the kind of town that has the resources to take on a warehouse of this magnitude?” Kim asked Mullin during his confirmation hearing.
Mullin pledged to personally visit the facility himself, if confirmed.
Out west, red states object
In Mullin’s own Republican-led state, officials in Oklahoma City met with the owners of a warehouse that DHS was looking to purchase, and the owners eventually backed out of talks with the federal government.
Oklahomans were only made aware of the potential warehouse because of a local law requiring a mandatory disclosure that any property purchased will not impact the historic preservation of certain buildings.
But not all officials have received warning.
Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, along with congressional lawmakers from both parties, were blindsided by the sale of a warehouse in Salt Lake City to the federal government.
“When the sale went through, we were not given any notice,” Cox told reporters during a press conference. “No members of our congressional delegation were given any notice. No locals were given any notice. That’s, I think, a little frustrating for everyone. We want to work closely together to get things right.”
In response, Salt Lake City officials have placed restrictions on how much water ICE can use.
So far, DHS has purchased 10 warehouses among the 34 planned.
But communities and lawmakers have been able to end the bids of another 13 proposed detention centers, according to Project Salt Box, which is tracking the purchases of warehouses by the federal government.
In Social Circle, Georgia, and Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, located in counties that gave Trump more than 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, local leaders are opposed to the government’s purchase of two large-scale warehouses.
Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor said a lock would remain on the water meter at a recently purchased facility until ICE officials can demonstrate that the warehouse can operate without overburdening water and sewer services. DHS plans to use the warehouse as one of its mega-facilities to detain up to 10,000 immigrants, which is double the entire population of Social Circle.
The GOP lawmaker who represents that area, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, also raised concerns about the huge detention center in Social Circle. He voted for the tax cuts and spending package that added billions for detention.
“I’m all for helping DHS, and I’m behind that to make sure we get rid of these illegal criminals that have been throughout our country, but I also understand Social Circle’s concerns, from not just the infrastructure but the resources that may be needed,” Collins said in an interview with a local TV station.
Collins also shepherded a bill through the House, now law, that requires mandatory detainment by DHS of immigrants charged with local theft, burglary or shoplifting. The bill was named after Georgia college student Laken Riley, whose murder by a Venezuelan immigrant conservatives blamed on the immigration policies of the Biden administration.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he’s opposed to the detention center in Schuylkill and another proposed facility, and noted the pushback did not come from Democrats alone.
“I’m going to do everything in my legal power and my regulatory power to see to it that these facilities are not sited here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said at a press conference. “After concluding this meeting here today, I’m even more determined … To hear from Republicans and Democrats alike expressing opposition to this, I think speaks volumes about how unwanted these facilities are in our communities.”
Rural America as a home for detention centers
It’s no surprise to Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College, that the federal government is aiming to place detention centers in rural areas, which often lean Republican.
“I think there’s a number of reasons for that,” he said. “One, these rural areas tend to be poorer areas where space is available cheaply, but it’s also areas where the local community might be lobbying for jobs that would come as a result of it. I think the other reason why they put them in these remote areas is it makes it very difficult for lawyers and advocates to access immigrants.”
Two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, petitioned DHS to halt its plans to acquire warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants.
Wicker wrote a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem, asking that ICE look elsewhere for its proposed 8,500 bed-space detention center other than the rural town of Byhalia, which has a population of under 1,500.
“Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population,” Wicker said. “Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”
Blackburn also worked with DHS to end plans to build a mega-detention center to hold up to 16,000 immigrants. She told her residents that the planned facilities for detention in Lebanon “will not move forward.”
Additionally, Young said “there is some sort of early version of” the federal government trying to retrofit warehouses to detain immigrants.
“If you go back to the origins of immigrant detention, late 19th century, under Chinese exclusion, there was absolutely no infrastructure for detaining immigrants,” Young said. “And so the first immigrant, Chinese immigrants, were detained and jailed in dock warehouses in San Francisco.”
The most recent example of the federal government turning to quickly constructed detention facilities to detain thousands of immigrants is the mass deportation campaign of 1954.
Most recently was the 1980s, when Mariel Cubans were held on military bases. One of the bases in Arkansas held up to 20,000 Cubans, and a riot erupted. It was a disaster that nearly ended then Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinon’s political career, and the blunder continued to follow him to the White House.
Detention centers and communities
Deirdre Conlon, an associate professor of geography at the University of Leeds, and Nancy Hiemstra co-wrote a book about the web of financial relationships that detention centers have with local communities and private corporations.
“The people who are detained become commodities out of which revenue is generated, that not only the private provider makes money off, but then the county government becomes dependent on,” Conlon said.
When the federal government disinvests in some communities, filling in budget gaps tends to come from detention centers owned and operated by private companies, Hiemstra added.
“But the warehouse model just axes that relationship,” she said.
Hiemstra, an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, points out that even though DHS is trying to pitch to these communities that the operation of a warehouse will create jobs, those skills needed to run a facility are unlikely to come from the local community. A majority of the daily operations of the facility comes from the migrants detained, who typically earn up to $1 a day in cleaning and cooking.
“For the size of some of these facilities and the skills that are required … they will have to pull people from the outside (of the community) in,” she said. “That is not going to benefit the existing community at all.”
Hiemstra said it’s no surprise that DHS is facing opposition to operate large-scale detention facilities in communities.
“It removes the economic benefit to local communities that is present with the existing model,” she said. “Not that we want that to continue, but this will just pull it out of local communities even more and make it a total corporate money grab.”
But the main concern, she added, is using a warehouse to detain thousands of people.
“If these come to pass and it seems normal to throw humans in warehouses that will further normalize the deaths that are occurring and this dehumanization of people,” Hiemstra said.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.