The Trump administration has moved forward over the past week with converting two warehouses into immigration detention centers, part of a billion-dollar plan announced earlier this year that has drawn widespread protest and lawsuits from state attorneys general.
In Arizona, the government completed the environmental assessment for a warehouse site, clearing a key hurdle for conversion. In Roxbury, New Jersey, a contract to convert the site was awarded despite a court order barring the Department of Homeland Security from doing so, NPR reported.
Homeland Security bought 11 warehouses this year, spending about $1 billion, to turn into ICE detention facilities. Lawsuits from state attorneys general in Maryland, Arizona and New Jersey had halted the conversions pending environmental impact assessments. The warehouse in Roxbury was purchased in February, and a similar warehouse was bought in Hagerstown, Maryland, where residents have also objected. At a city council meeting in Roxbury this week, discussion of the warehouse quickly derailed as residents protested.
The administration has meanwhile abandoned some of the sites. Offers were due on Thursday for two Georgia warehouses ICE bought for planned detention centers, in Oakwood and Social Circle, after the agency dropped its conversion plans. The agency paid more than $128 million for the roughly one-million-square-foot Social Circle site, which was planned to hold up to 10,000 people, and about $68 million for the approximately 600,000-square-foot Oakwood complex, planned for up to 1,600 people. The sales follow a Government Accountability Office finding that immigration officials wasted taxpayer money in efforts to expand detention capacity.
CoreCivic, one of the main detention companies ICE works with, is not involved in the Arizona or New Jersey sites. NPR said it reached out to Homeland Security for comment and received no response.
