Mega MAGA Warehouse Detention Centers

ICE is buying old warehouses to turn into concentration camps

Over the past few weeks, communities around the country have faced the prospect of the Trump administration planning detention centers, or more accurately, concentration camps, in their towns. That’s the description used by author Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a history of concentration camps in One Long Night.

The vast amount of money for these facilities — over $75 billion — came from the GOP’s Big Ugly Bill in 2025, which gave Stephen Miller a blank check for his mass deportation agenda.

In Northeastern Pennsylvania, about an hour away from where I live, there are two of these proposed “Mega Warehouse Detention Centers,” or concentration camps. We found out on Feb. 2 that both were sold to the government in cash and largely without the community’s approval or even knowledge. These multi-million dollar purchases ($87 million and $119 million) went through during the partial government shutdown — a shutdown that happened in the first place because Democrats fought to block additional DHS funding after ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch noted that one of the proposed warehouses, located only 25 miles from Tremont, is slated to hold 1,500 detainees:

Even if you could somehow put the morality of what many see as concentration camps on U.S. soil to the side, the government’s scenario for tiny Tremont — a coal-country hollow of two-story brick homes and faded American flags with just 2,000 residents — boggles the mind.

Bunch also spoke to Pitzer:

“The U.S. is clearly echoing previous history with these warehouse acquisitions,” she said. “Dachau — not a death camp, to be sure, but one of the earliest Nazi concentration camps — took over a converted factory when it began its heinous existence in 1933.”

She noted that the warehouses are a massive expansion of a system that’s already at a record-high 73,000+ detainees and is plagued by squalid conditions, a measles outbreak at the family detention site in Texas, and a death rate as much as 10 times higher than during the Biden administration.

Bloomberg found 23 proposed ICE detention facilities across the country. You can keep track of them with a tool compiled by the volunteer-based Project Salt Box: the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker.

I’ve been reaching out to local leaders who live near these proposed facilities and the response is largely the same: No one wants this. The community doesn’t want this here. No one consulted us and many elected officials are ignoring us.

Many of these communities are rural and don’t have the infrastructure to sustain this. The proposed detention center in Tremont, for example, will be among the largest ICE detention facilities in the country, but residents are already grappling with pollution issues that make it difficult for some to even leave their homes. Not to mention, the facility is also only a few hundred yards away from the local daycare!

That’s not the only facility that would overwhelm a small town’s infrastructure AND sit right next to a school. Residents from Social Circle, Georgia, have spoken out against a proposed facility on those grounds. Not only is their infrastructure insufficient, they say, but warehouse sits less than a mile from the local elementary school. And a third proposed detention center in Oklahoma would sit within two miles of the local elementary and high schools!

Our communities stand to lose everything and gain nothing from these detention centers. In Pennsylvania, local townships and school districts will receive a 1% transfer tax from the sale but they will lose significantly more in revenue from income tax, which the facilities are now exempt from paying. Since federal facilities don’t pay local taxes, most rural communities will just be burdened with the costs these facilities create with no way to offset them.

We’re being told that these facilities will be major job providers in our rural communities, but it’s not true. And the potential handful of jobs they do bring can’t outweigh what they cost us. Studies show that prison construction impedes economic growth in rural counties, and I bet the same is true for these proposed detention centers.

So far, the Congressmen who represent these or surrounding areas in Pennsylvania have yet to comment on the facilities in their backyards. This includes Republicans Dan Meuser, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie, all of whom voted to give billions to Miller on a measure that cleared the House by one vote.

New Hampshire elected officials said they knew nothing of the plans, but documents obtained by the state’s ACLU show state officials have known for weeks that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to turn a Merrimack warehouse into a prison.

These facilities aren’t a done deal across the board, though. In Ashland, Virginia, DHS plans fell through when a Canadian-based company decided not to sell to ICE.

Even conservative communities are successfully pushing back against the detention centers, as TNR’s Greg Sargent noted:

In New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.

And just today, the Mississippi Free Press reported that the proposed ICE detention facility “won’t happen,” said Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker.

While there are ample legal, economic and logistical arguments against allowing these camps, one of the best was from a resident of Sunrise, Arizona, who talked about the Mayor of Ohrdruf where Buchenwald was located. It’s definitely worth a watch.

So, what’s next?

We need to do whatever we can to stop the sales of these proposed detention facilities. Public pressure is a great starting point, as shown in Ashland, Va., Oklahoma City, and more.

Many communities only found out about these sales after the fact, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We need to search for any legal means of delaying construction, renovation, and/or use as fully functioning concentration camps. That could mean environmental flags, issues with local water or sewer infrastructure, local zoning requirements, and more. Be creative!

And don’t forget to put pressure on your state legislators, since eight states have introduced or passed legislation to shut down immigrant detention facilities: California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

You can click here to track the status of the proposed detention center concentration camps.

This is unprecedented, but we aren’t helpless in this. We are actively working to find things that can be done to stop these facilities or slow them down. Please join us for a nationwide call on Wednesday, February 11th at 7pm EST to talk this through with impacted community members who are looking for a way to push back.

Sign up here: Stop ICE Concentration Camps with Rural Organizing