State and local officials have found a new way to stop President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation — and so far, it is working.
Elected officials and residents in communities nationwide have been largely successful in recent weeks in sabotaging the Trump administration’s efforts to buy and convert warehouses into detention centers for illegal immigrants in federal custody.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has faced pushback for the past month as it tries to purchase large, empty buildings on the outskirts of a number of major U.S. cities. That has complicated the federal agency’s search for space and created a new way for local communities to hold up Trump’s deportation operation.
A former senior ICE official familiar with the Trump administration’s plans to convert the warehouses into additional detention centers said the pushback is a problem, but does not expect it to ultimately prevent the agency from acquiring 10 warehouses.
“Honestly, the government will just go somewhere else. They’re going to find people that want to sell property,” the official said in a phone call, adding that the government is offering “top dollar” for buildings that are “sitting unused.”
Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, issued a statement last week celebrating how the purchase of a warehouse on the city’s south side had fallen through amid pushback from some residents.
“While Kansas City welcomes any news suggesting the halting of a planned conversion of a warehouse for goods and products into a human encampment, I will continue with our legislative, legal efforts, and community engagement to ensure no warehouse or similar facility in Kansas City or nearby is converted to a mass encampment warehouse of persons that is offensive to the dignity and human rights of those who would be detained within it,” Lucas said.
Around the same time this month, the owner of a warehouse in Dallas suburb Hutchins, Texas, backed out of talks with ICE following pushback.
Texas state Rep. Rafael Anchia applauded Dallas-area residents in a post to X.
“Public engagement works. Property owners have affirmed they will not sell their warehouse for use as an ICE detention center,” Anchia wrote.
Cassandra Garcia Hernandez, a state representative in northern Dallas, called the outcome “proof that when neighbors come together, raise their voices, and work in partnership with local and state leaders, we can protect the character and future of our cities and stand up for what is right.”
A second source, a former senior administration official, maintained that the community blowback is not having a serious impact on deal-making and claimed that public concern is based on false information.
“Business owners want to do business with the government. The issue is at the local level and the misinformation that is fed to the public about the conditions of these facilities of which many are better than regular state and county detention centers and have more oversight,” the second person wrote in a text message.
ICE has faced significant blowback over the past two months, more than at any point in its two decades, and public polling shows that support for the agency’s work has declined over the past year, including among Republican voters following the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens encountered during immigration enforcement in Minneapolis last month.
State and local officials have continued this week to try to block ICE from housing those in detention in their backyard.
In New England, Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) urged her neighbor, Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), to block a potential real estate sale for one such detention center — even though it is not in her state of Massachusetts.
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“We certainly should not be allowing ICE to build new human warehouses when they can’t be trusted to keep people safe and protect due process,” Healey said in a press release.
In Chester, New York, an ICE spokesperson told local media last week that the agency had purchased a former Pep Boys warehouse owned by a former Trump adviser. On Tuesday, it retracted the statement and said it had not purchased the facility amid public protest.
