ICE back off plans for New Jersey detention facility

The department had purchased the property for nearly $130 million in February as part of a nationwide effort to rapidly expand detention capacity for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Attorney General Jennifer Davenport issued a joint statement claiming the Homeland Security is "backing down" from its plans to build the facility and called the development a "major victory" for the state and local government. 

"This has never been a partisan case, because the plan to establish a detention center at the Roxbury warehouse was always unlawful," they said. "Converting a warehouse for packages into a detention center for thousands of people would not only be inhumane but also have devastating local and environmental impacts — and it would not make New Jersey any safer." 

"That’s why we took the Department to court and forced the Trump administration to abandon its plans," they said. 

In February, DHS confirmed that it was planning on purchasing warehouses around the country, including one in Roxbury, to be converted into ICE detention facilities as part of the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts.

"These will not be warehouses – they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards," an ICE spokesperson said in a statement at the time "Sites will undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase."

But the proposal drew bipartisan pushback from state and local officials, many of whom said they were not briefed on ICE's plans and only learned about the proposed facility through news stories. . Roxbury's all-Republican town council unanimously rejected the proposal. They sued to block the project, which they said would mean an influx of 1,500 detainees to the community of 23,000 that "would strain beyond capacity the local water and sewage systems, threatening water availability and risking sewage overflows into land and water."

New Jersey already has two ICE facilities where immigrants facing deportation are held by federal authorities: Delaney Hall in Newark, holds more than 1,000 detainees, while a smaller facility in Elizabethtown has capacity for hundreds, according to Homeland Security. For weeks, Delaney Hall has been rocked by violent protests that prompted Sherrill to deploy the state police. 

Democrats, who have called on ICE to close the Delaney Hall facility, are moving ahead with a controversial proposal that would authorize the state to set new taxes on privately run ICE facilities, claiming the move is aimed at replacing lost state tax revenue from federal contracts with a private company that operates the detention center.