Editor’s note: This article is by Tim Henderson of Stateline. (Stateline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.) We are publishing it to US Border News as part of our commitment to bringing you coverage of important border issues.
Some of the Trump administration’s controversial new warehouse immigration detention centers are getting scaled back and postponed as states and cities fight back, and new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin reviews actions taken by his ousted predecessor, Kristi Noem.
Some states and cities have seen more communication and compromise as Mullin takes over, and the Department of Homeland Security faces a continued funding shutdown that has reached 60 days.
That includes discussions about a proposed Arizona detention center, where DHS agreed to scale back the number of prisoners by two-thirds and pay a city for lost tax revenue, and a proposed center in Maryland with a similar offer from the department. A lawsuit is also holding up work on that detention center. And in Georgia, a small city cut off the water supply to a proposed immigrant holding site.
A plan to house up to 1,500 immigrants in Surprise, Arizona, starting as soon as May, was scaled back to 542 detainees starting in October at the earliest, and DHS agreed to pay the city $300,000 a year for lost property taxes. The department may also offer more to help cover any police costs after negotiations with DHS under Mullin.
“With the new leadership, there’s been a lot of communication,” Surprise Mayor Kevin Sartor told a local radio show April 15, a contrast to the “very frustrating” experience of how the city learned from news reports in January that DHS had purchased a 418,000-square-foot distribution center for $70 million.
“We do have a different leadership style,” Mullin said in a CNBC interview April 16, comparing himself to Noem. “We want to make sure people understand that we’re here working for the people, not against you.”
In Maryland, the new DHS administration has also offered a scale-back from 1,500 detainees to 542, in a Williamsport warehouse bought for $102 million in January. An April 15 court order keeps most work at the center paused as the state continues a lawsuit claiming “impacts on the environmental, economic, and public health and safety interests of the state.”
In Arizona, dozens of Democratic state lawmakers sent a letter in April asking the city of Surprise to “stop the facility from opening at all costs,” but Mayor Sartor has said he doesn’t see a legal basis for a lawsuit. The mayor’s office is nonpartisan, but Republicans predominate among registered voters in the city by almost 2-1 over Democrats.
Communities across the country are facing the results of a massive detention expansion fueled in large part by the record $45 billion approved for increased immigration detention by Congress last summer.
Other state and local action on the plan to repurpose warehouses for detention centers includes a Kansas City, Missouri, ban on nonmunicipal detention facilities passed in January, and developers halted the sale of a south Kansas City warehouse in February.
The owners of an Indiana warehouse sent a letter stating they weren’t in active negotiations for the site, which had been reported as a potential detention center and had drawn local opposition from the town of Merrillville. Democratic lawmakers in Florida opposed plans for a warehouse detention center near Orlando in February, while some Republican lawmakers supported it.
In Georgia, the city of Social Circle cut off water and sewer service for a $128.6 million warehouse proposed to hold 10,000 detainees, saying the town of 5,000 people lacked the capacity to serve it.
“The city’s infrastructure cannot accommodate this level of demand,” according to a February statement from the city, despite a “certainly creative” solution suggested by DHS to fill a water-supply cistern at times of low demand.
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
Do you support the conversion of warehouses into “immigration detention facilities”?
Share your thoughts in the comments to this story!
Abrazos,
Jack Beavers
