ICE Nears $1B In Warehouse Purchases As Cities Test Legal Options

As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accelerates a $38.3B plan to build out a 92,600-bed detention network, the agency is rapidly acquiring and converting industrial properties across the country — leaving local officials scrambling to understand how the projects will take shape and whether they have any power to slow them.

The federal government has already spent nearly $900M acquiring 10 warehouse sites as it expands detention capacity nationwide. In the case of a recent purchase in New Jersey, a seller implied the government threatened to use eminent domain to secure the property.

Community pressure on politicians and property owners has led to the scuttling of deals in many cases, including in Mississippi, Utah, Tennessee and New Hampshire.

But where warehouse sales to ICE have closed, local officials and attorneys are testing other ways to push back. Cities and towns have passed moratoriums, amended zoning codes and raised infrastructure capacity concerns tied to large-scale industrial conversions.

At the federal level, lawmakers have introduced bills aimed at restricting ICE’s property acquisitions, and one state has already sued the administration, alleging violations of environmental and procurement law.

“We are fundamentally opposed,” Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Quinton Lucas told CNN in late January in response to a failed attempt to build a detention center in his city. ​​“We passed zoning changes in the last two weeks. You are seeing every American city fight back in any way that it can.”

City leaders across the nation are sharing strategies and advice about potential challenges, including through groups like Local Progress, which are creating and distributing a toolkit to help localities slow down or halt detention centers. 

“I think what we're actually seeing is that there's just a lot of discontent in our communities,” said LiJia Gong, managing director of legal and policy at Local Progress, a coalition of municipal officials advancing a racial and economic justice agenda. “The way in which DHS is approaching these communities, there's no transparency.”

Legal scholars say city and local governments have a very difficult — but not necessarily insurmountable — challenge in pushing a legal claim to stop or pause the conversion of e-commerce sites into detention centers. 

“We all have a clear, unified position that really crosses party lines, and then we also have a clear understanding of how limited our options are,” David Holt, Oklahoma City mayor and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, told Stateline about the strength of the pushback and the uphill battle localities face.

When asked about the zoning and infrastructure issues local politicians have raised, an ICE spokesperson said “sanctuary politicians” were trying to stop the agency from deporting criminals.

“The biggest losers are the people these politicians were elected to serve,” the spokesperson said. “[Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem aims to work with officials on both sides of the aisle to expand detention space to help ICE law enforcement carry out the largest deportation effort in American history.”

The federal government has historically taken a more measured approach to detention facilities, planning ahead of time and building from the ground up, University of North Carolina law professor Rick Su said. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has a nonbinding “good neighbor policy” of trying, when possible, to follow local codes. 

But ICE has already taken the title to 10 warehouses without providing detailed information to local governments about how they will be impacted. The prices of nine of those purchases have been made public, adding up to $893.8M.

“It just shows you why these battles haven't popped up as much in the past, because of norms and expectations and just essentially people working together,” said Su, who focuses on immigration, local government and land use. “The erosion of the norms means that there's not actually a lot of legal requirements to work together. That's what we're seeing.” 

Supremacy vs. Federalism

Nicole Wilson, a member of the Orange County, Florida, Board of Commissioners, is helping draft a moratorium on detention centers. ICE has reportedly been scouting warehouses in the area, but no deal has been confirmed. 

She is following the lead of Kansas City, which passed an ordinance establishing a moratorium on approving permits for nonmunicipal detention centers and successfully pushed back on a rumored warehouse purchase. 

But this approach runs into a few issues. 

First and foremost, the legal system holds the general presumption that when the federal government is carrying out a core federal function — in this case, immigration enforcement — it isn’t subject to state or local regulations. 

A 2021 New Jersey law seeking to ban private prison operations in the state was recently struck down by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that states can’t shape or constrain federal immigration enforcement. The supremacy clause from Article 6 of the Constitution is understood to overrule local building and zoning codes, an argument bolstered in a 1995 Supreme Court case that found building codes in Greenwich, Connecticut, didn’t apply to a post office facility. 

The use of eminent domain in these cases is also possible, though Su and Gong said it would likely be too drawn out to be a tool for ICE's expansion push, which it plans to have fully operational in nine months.

Su said cities' best argument is likely that they don’t have the services, especially water and sewage, to support a large-scale facility. 

He said many cities have experience arguing these points in opposition to data center development, and the issues with water infrastructure play into an important reciprocal aspect of federalism: While local governments can’t force the federal government to do anything, the federal government also can’t force local governments to do anything — the so-called anti-commandeering doctrine of the 10th Amendment.

“All sites undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process prior to purchase to ensure there is no detrimental impacts on local utilities or infrastructure,” ICE's spokesperson said.

Gong said the core issues of this argument will need to be litigated. 

“There's really powerful arguments to be made about, can local water resources be commandeered for the purposes of advancing this federal immigration policy?” she said. “I think the truth is that those things have not yet been decided.”

Unknown Impacts 

Local governments have raised questions about how rigorous ICE's due diligence has been to this point. 

The Department of Homeland Security on Feb. 3 paid PNK Group nearly $129M for an industrial complex in Social Circle, Georgia, where it is planning a “mega-center” detention facility that would hold up to 10,000 detainees and employ more than 2,000 staff. City officials have repeatedly questioned DHS about the water infrastructure plans for the facility. 

While the municipality can process 660,000 gallons of wastewater a day, the ICE facility would need more than 1 million gallons of capacity per day, the city said in a Feb. 18 public statement. In documents shared by the city, DHS said the project, which it seeks to build out in 75 days or less and start operating by May, will have “no adverse effect on the community and surrounding properties.”

But ICE’s wastewater analysis included the use of capacity at the A. Scott Emmons Treatment Facility, which isn’t owned or controlled by Social Circle, as well as capacity from a plant the city has yet to build. 

Additional plans for on-site discharge raise uncomfortable questions about where the sewage would go and the potential impact on local wetlands. 

Social Circle officials didn’t respond to questions about whether they plan to lodge a more formal legal challenge to the project. The city's statement suggests the officials have been in dialogue about the issue with DHS. 

When reached via email, City Manager Eric Taylor said, “We are exploring all options.” He declined to comment further.

In Socorro, Texas, where ICE paid $123M for a warehouse it plans to turn into an 8,500-bed megacenter, no federal officials contacted local government, much less shared their plans, as of Feb. 26, according to Victor Reta, Socorro’s director of public relations. 

Mayor Rudy Cruz Jr. has ordered city officials to research and draft a potential ordinance in opposition to the redevelopment. The motion to investigate strategies to stop the construction of the facility — focused on water, sewer and power capacity that the mayor said was already in short supply — passed during a special Feb. 11 city council meeting. Reta confirmed last week that the research was ongoing.

But many local ordinances trying to ban detention centers tend to be prejudicial — by saying the federal government can’t build a certain type of building, the local law would be, in effect, singling it out, Su said.

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Commissioner George Dunlap, first vice president of the National Association of Counties, said he worries that an argument about water capacity may backfire.

“What makes this difficult is you’re singling out one group and saying, ‘We’ll provide water and sewer for this piece of property and not this property,’” he said. “I don’t know if that would hold up in the court of law.”

The first attempt to use the courts to fight the detention center plan was filed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who sued DHS on Feb. 23. Brown argued the Trump administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by “providing no explanation for their decision, failing to consider reasonable alternatives, and abandoning their own past practice of conducting environmental reviews for similar detention facility projects — all without any reasoned justification.”

ICE purchased a warehouse outside of Williamsport, Maryland, on Jan. 16 for $102.4M and plans to convert it into a 1,500-person detention facility. Brown’s office declined to answer questions about the choice of legal strategy, citing the ongoing lawsuit. 

The suit says the facility would overwhelm local infrastructure and endanger protected wetlands and wildlife. 

“This isn’t about the environment,” a DHS spokesperson told Bisnow in response to the Maryland suit. “It’s about trying to stop President Trump from making America safe again.”

Su said he believes using federal law to challenge federal action, while still a path with potential loopholes, has a much better chance of success. 

“Of course, I'm not sure how likely they might win on this. NEPA has all sorts of exceptions for national security and the like, and this is an administration that is quick to declare everything an emergency,” Su said. “But it would force the federal government to take a position and invoke, well, something, which they have surprisingly been reluctant to do here.”

Ciara Long and Chloe Gallivan contributed to this story.