Pro-Trump towns are in revolt over plans to create vast new ICE detention warehouses in their backyards.
The MAGA uproar is the first local test of President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s drive to remake immigration detention by turning cavernous industrial buildings into Amazon-style hubs.
The scheme, detailed in internal ICE documents and public contracting plans and first reported by The Washington Post just before Christmas, envisions seven giant regional complexes, each designed for 5,000 to 10,000 detainees, plus 16 smaller feeder sites of up to 1,500 people, in a pipeline officials have likened to billionaire Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce network, but for humans.
However, that strategy hit the rocks this week, according to a new Post report. Inside a meeting room in Social Circle, Georgia, the newspaper reported that residents learned their town of roughly 5,000 people could be asked to absorb a warehouse that would hold up to 9,000 migrants.
“I’m supportive of the president, but I don’t particularly want this,” Victor Crawley, 57, told the Post, saying locals had only discovered the plan from the newspaper and had heard nothing from federal officials.
People at the meeting questioned why a small city 45 miles east of Atlanta, with just two or three police officers on duty most shifts, should be responsible for a complex almost twice its population. Officials warned that Social Circle’s water and sewer networks are already close to their permitted limits, and residents fretted that the likely warehouse site sits a short walk from the local elementary school.
It was also pointed out that the structure was engineered for freight, not families, and lacks full climate control, has limited fire protection, and is ringed by dozens of loading bays that would be expensive to secure.
The same ICE planning list will affect 22 other communities, many of them solidly Republican, where industrial sites are being scoped for detention centers of various sizes. In Roxbury, New Jersey, which Trump carried in 2024, the Post reported that residents have packed public meetings and rallied at the roadside to force local leaders to resist what they see as heavy-handed federal interference.
In Jefferson, Georgia, the newspaper noted that Mayor Dawn Maddox has already said she will not back a warehouse jail because of “possible safety concerns that could affect our citizens and our school system.”
And in Orange County, New York, county spokeswoman Rebecca Sheehan argued that losing a warehouse to federal ownership would blow a hole in the tax base, saying officials “would prefer something on the tax rolls like a film studio.”
The Department of Homeland Security has billed the warehouse concept as a way to speed deportations by funneling people through fewer, larger hubs rather than bouncing them among more than 200 scattered county jails and private prisons whenever bed space opens up.
A solicitation described a network of new “processing” sites feeding into regional holding centers, while a separate overview projected that the system would eventually be able to detain more than 80,000 migrants at once—on top of the roughly 68,000 already in custody as of early December, nearly half of whom had no criminal record.
Publicly, DHS is saying little. Assistant Homeland Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast, “These are not warehouses--they are detention facilities. Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
She added, “We have no new detention centers to announce at this time.”
Legal experts caution that the local backlash may not be enough. University of North Carolina law professor Rick Su told the Post that federal agencies frequently succeed in brushing aside local zoning when judges agree that municipal rules interfere with national immigration policy.
As the Social Circle meeting broke up, the Post reported that city council member and pastor Nathan Boyd had tried to rally an anxious crowd with a prayer that cast their fight against Washington as a biblical mismatch. “Lord, we need your help to overcome this,” he said. “It feels a little bit like David and Goliath.”
