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In a change of course, the Trump administration’s plans to detain tens of thousands of immigrants in Amazon-style warehouses have been massively scaled back. As Truthout reported earlier this year, local communities mobilized swiftly to stop these massive detention sites, some capable of holding up to 10,000 people with no infrastructure to manage the waste and water needs.
In January 2026, an internal memo was leaked revealing a list of some two dozen places where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had purchased or was seeking to buy large warehouses to hold immigrant detainees. Now, after spending nearly $1 billion buying up 11 warehouses at a 134 percent markup over assessed value, the Trump administration is ditching the idea.
Truthout talked to activists on the ground in Romulus, Michigan; Roxbury, New Jersey; and Social Circle, Georgia, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) warehouses have been stopped, as well as Surprise, Arizona, where one has been paused pending an environmental analysis.
“This is a great victory for the whole movement and communities who are organizing against the detention expansion here in Georgia,” said Amilcar Valencia, executive director of El Refugio, an organization that assists families with loved ones at the Stewart Detention Center south of Atlanta, where they are based. “Georgia’s Social Circle was one of the largest facilities, able to detain up to 9,000 people, which is incredible to know that human beings would be detained in a facility that is not meant for people, but for packages.”
Detention Watch Network, which coordinated a national campaign against the proposed ICE warehouses, shared a statement with Truthout noting that ICE’s move to offload warehouses “illustrates the growing national consensus that people across the country do not want ICE in their communities. Far and wide, people are against immigrants being locked up in abusive ICE detention centers, and will fight tooth and nail to keep their communities safe.”
Those on the front lines agreed: It was not bipartisanship, lawsuits, or the wisdom of elected officials, but sustained community activism that forced the federal government to abandon the warehouses.
One former Trump official admitted as much. John Fabbricatore, who has been a commentator on Fox News and worked as senior adviser to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, told The New York Times that the warehouses were a quick effort to “scale up” mass deportations, but failed because “the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks.”
A Volatile Situation
The brazenness of the Trump administration’s occupation of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis provoked a popular response. Stopping ICE warehouses became a way for communities to fight back.
Many of these warehouses were built during the COVID-19 pandemic to meet the boom in online shopping but have since sat empty. They are located in many city centers or nearby and became easy targets for activists.
In January 2026, rumors of an ICE warehouse in Romulus, Michigan, about 20 minutes outside of Detroit, started to circulate. The next month, more than 300 students at Romulus High School organized a walk-out to protest ICE. The walk-out was a response to the situation nationally and the rumors in Romulus locally, according to Chris Oliphant, a member of the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, which is a part of the Coalition to Shut the Camps that organized to stop the proposed warehouse in Romulus. “What was going on around the country with ICE raids, particularly in the Twin Cities area, was really having quite a serious effect on people,” he told Truthout. Students were “lighting the way” for what was to follow.
After rumors were confirmed in late February 2026, there was a large demonstration against the proposed warehouse at a meeting of the Romulus City Council. When only 30 to 40 people were admitted into the council chambers, a crowd of hundreds grew outside. “People were very, very angry,” Oliphant recalls, “so anyone that was there knew that this was a pretty volatile situation, politically.” After that night, it was clear that there was “very widespread opposition” to a warehouse in Romulus.
Outside of the warehouse, the coalition held “Solidarity Saturdays” where hundreds of people stood with signs opposing the ICE warehouse. A “pivotal moment,” said Oliphant, was their participation in Detention Watch Network’s National Day of Action on April 25, when they joined 200 other actions across the country against warehouse detention.
In Georgia, immigrant communities from around the state in cities like Athens and Gainesville, as well as Atlanta, got involved in the campaign to stop the large detention center in Social Circle. “That has involved letter-writing, participating in rallies, and talking to members of Congress,” said Valencia.
We’ll Keep Fighting
A warehouse purchased by DHS in Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, has been put on pause pending an environmental analysis. In April, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued DHS and ICE to block the proposed warehouse, which, as the lawsuit states, “lacks the water and wastewater infrastructure needed to safely house that many people.”
Research for the lawsuit was provided by grassroots organizers, says Brent Peak, co-chair of the group Northwest Valley Indivisible. The group had been organizing protests at meetings of the Surprise City Council.
“Aside from the humanitarian reasons to be against ICE detention,” Peak told Truthout, “what is uniquely terrible about this site is that it is right across the street from a massive chemical storage warehouse.”
One plausible scenario, said Peak, is a “rolling cloud of hydrochloric acid” from an accident. “You will have hundreds of people in a warehouse with an inadequate HVAC system that will suck the cloud in and distribute it throughout the building.”
Members of the local Indivisible group held two meetings with Attorney General Mayes before the lawsuit was filed. “We presented the information,” Peak said. “They sat very straight-faced and kept saying: ‘Thank you for bringing this to our attention.’”
Northwest Valley Indivisible got a tip that there was to be a press conference at the warehouse site announcing the lawsuit, which members attended. Their research was cited on page 23 of the lawsuit. “It was exhilarating when she announced that lawsuit,” Peak remembered fondly.
The federal government has agreed that construction at the Surprise warehouse will not move forward until an environmental impact analysis is done, which is standard for federal construction rules under to the EPA. GardaWorld, a security and surveillance company, has been contracted to do the review. According to research by the Indivisible group, GardaWorld has never before conducted an environmental analysis, but it has performed security work at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.” Every 60 days, the contractor has to provide an update on its progress. For now, the project is on pause.
“We’ll keep fighting it,” Peak said. “We can take a breather right now.”
Victory for Grassroots Groups
Activists mobilized quickly against the ICE warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey. The news broke in December 2025, and as William Angus, who is with No Ice North Jersey Alliance (Project NINJA), relayed to Truthout, “Four days later we were at our town council, and 10 days later we already had protests going. Within six weeks, we had almost 2,000 protesting in front of city hall.”
A lawsuit filed by New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport also benefited from local activists’ input. “We were immediately able to do a lot of legal research,” said Angus. “We gave [the office of the attorney general] a lot of the information that enabled them to file that lawsuit.”
Activists drew attention to the site’s proximity to major waterways. As the lawsuit states, “there is a serious risk of damage to the sewer system and sewage overflows into nearby streets, land, and waterways. These waterways include Lake Musconetcong, which is 1,000 feet away and downhill from the warehouse, and Lake Hopatcong, the largest freshwater lake in New Jersey.”
The government eventually “threw up their hands and said: ‘We surrender,’” Angus said. “So, for me, this is 100 percent a victory for grassroots groups.”
According to investigative reporting outlet Project Salt Box, on July 8, over a week after saying they would sell the Roxbury warehouse, a notice filed in court stated that “upon reconsideration,” the agency was still moving forward with plans for the warehouse.
David Broderick, legal counsel for Project NINJA, said that the government had presented no new facts in the case. “One can’t help but suspect,” said Broderick, “that this is nothing more than a political charade designed to embarrass state and local leaders who declared victory at the time of DOJ’s original filing,” he said.
The comments by former Trump official John Fabbricatore were telling, said Angus. “He didn’t say local officials, he didn’t say Congress. He said ‘the left,’ and that means people like me, the grassroots groups. And I think he is being genuine.”
“We will take the W, but that does not mean that the effort is over,” Angus remarked. “There’s been a lot of ICE kidnappings in North Jersey recently. For us, the fight merely pivots. We are focusing on Delaney Hall and the ICE kidnappings in general.”
The Struggle Continues
Delaney Hall, located in Newark, New Jersey, is the largest immigration jail on the East Coast with a capacity for more than 1,000 people. In June, more than 300 imprisoned people participated in a hunger strike at Delaney protesting inadequate food, medical neglect, and inhumane conditions. They joined others in recent hunger strikes across the country at North Lake, Michigan; Moshannon, Pennsylvania; and Adelanto, California.
If the Trump administration has abandoned the warehouse strategy, it may signal a shift toward the privatization of immigrant detention. North Lake, Moshannon, and Adelanto are all operated by GEO Group, the private prison company. Former GEO Group executive David Venturella is currently the acting director of ICE.
As Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg has reported for The Appeal, at the quarterly earnings call in May 2026, GEO Group CEO George Zoley said the warehouse project had been “paused” and that DHS may be considering shifting to purchasing “turn-key” facilities ready for opening that may be less “politically problematic.”
According to Zoley’s report, GEO Group has six empty facilities with 6,000 beds sitting idle that could be activated in a few months and bring the company $300 million in new revenue.
In California, DHS has purchased two prisons from CoreCivic, the other major private prison company, that will still operate the daily functions of the prisons. The Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County and California City Detention Facility in Kern County were sold by CoreCivic in a deal worth $1.5 billion.
As these moves indicate, ICE continues to pursue the goal of having the ability to detain 100,000 people. Communities that want to stop mass detention will have to keep up the fight.
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