In the wintertime, when Elizabeth Jacobus steps out onto her front porch for a smoke break, she can see the hulking warehouse through a barren thicket of trees. At night, the 470,000-square-foot facility gleams under the watch of industrial floodlights. “You should come back when it’s dark,” she told me. “It looks like the sun is rising over there.”
Jacobus wasn’t thrilled when the warehouse was built a few hundred feet away from her home in suburban Roxbury Township, New Jersey. But ever since construction wrapped in 2022, the facility has remained vacant. Investors could have written off the Roxbury project—a product of the early 2020s online shopping boom, which drove a glut of new logistics warehouses across the country—as a casualty of the post-pandemic economy.
But then the Department of Homeland Security came to town.
As DHS expands its footprint, it’s making its cruelty manifest in suburban areas like Roxbury—towns that might have once felt insulated from the brutality and chaos that immigration agents have unleashed in US cities.
In February, DHS purchased the Roxbury warehouse for $129.3 million—more than double its assessed value. As part of President Donald Trump’s effort to deport millions of people, DHS is buying up enormous warehouses across the country to turn them into immigration jails. The “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” as one government memo dubs it, will spend $38.3 billion of taxpayer money—allocated through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—to acquire and retrofit eight “large-scale detention centers” and 16 “processing sites.” If all goes according to federal government plans, the Roxbury site will be up and running with 1,500 beds by November 30.
That’s a big if. Since the warehouse plans were revealed by the Washington Post in late December, they’ve encountered a relentless stream of bipartisan pushback: from Roxbury residents, members of Congress, the all-Republican town council, and Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill. Similar local opposition has already scuttled warehouse sales in roughly a dozen other cities.
The fight in Roxbury highlights one unexpected consequence of Trump’s supercharged immigration machine. As DHS expands its footprint through the warehouse initiative, it’s making its cruelty manifest in suburban areas like Roxbury—towns that might have once felt insulated from the brutality and chaos that immigration agents have unleashed in major US cities. In the process, DHS is running up against the might of a classic suburban rallying cry: Not In My Backyard.
“I think people think that it won’t happen to them because they’re so far separated from it,” said Faith Jacobus, Elizabeth’s 24-year-old daughter. “But it was separated until it wasn’t.”
On Saturday morning, I arrived at Roxbury Town Hall to find the No ICE North Jersey Alliance (Project NINJA) and the Sussex Visibility Brigade setting up for the day’s protest. Safety volunteers in neon vests arranged traffic cones, shoveled snow off sidewalks, and munched on doughnuts from a plastic container. A folding table was set up with a first-aid station and sign-out sheets for a “costume library”—a rack of the inflatable frog and unicorn mascots that have become ubiquitous at No Kings Day protests.
Pretty soon, protesters from across New Jersey were arriving in droves. They lined up along Route 46 and waved signs that read “Warehouses Are Not Human Storage,” “Stop Evil Shit,” and “Gulags Are Bad! Jesus Is Good.” A boombox played tenderhearted classics like the Beatles’ “Let it Be.” The crowd cheered as an endless stream of passing cars honked their horns in support.
“Most of our pickleball group is here,” said Marion Atwater, a 73-year-old in a navy visor and puffer jacket. “We did not bring our paddles, but we are here with our signs.” She added that she and her husband, Donald Smith, 76, were “young whippersnappers” compared to the rest of their group.
“I have bad legs so I can’t stand—that’s why I’m sitting,” Smith said. He held a poster board that read, “No concentration camps in America.” He told me that he identifies as “basically a Republican” but doesn’t support the MAGA movement. As a retired safety, health, and environmental affairs engineer, he was particularly concerned about the consequences of turning an industrial warehouse into a facility for human beings. “One of the main screaming points about this facility is that they don’t have enough water to provide sanitary services for the people they’re going to incarcerate,” Smith said. “[It’s] totally inappropriate.”
Concerns about infrastructure were present before the warehouse was even built, city documents show. “The planning of this project has not been without its challenges. It is a site that is not in a sewer service area,” an attorney for the original developer said during a 2020 planning hearing. Virtually every person I spoke with in Roxbury expressed doubt about whether the already-stressed system could handle an additional 1,500 people.
The warehouse’s purchase by DHS has even fueled some in the community to suspect a broader conspiracy. “It’s almost like this shit was planned,” said Chris Lenox, 50, who lives across the street from the warehouse with his wife and two kids. “Who is going to spend that kind of money to build that facility with no pay day? I mean, it’s remained vacant for two and a half years. It’s very bizarre.”
As ICE director Todd Lyons put it at the 2025 Border Security Expo, the administration wants immigration enforcement to operate “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
But the reality is much more mundane. The warehouse was sold to DHS by an entity tied to a Goldman Sachs asset management fund and the real estate firm Dalfen Industrial. Dalfen specializes in last-mile properties: facilities near urban areas that serve as hubs for the rapid distribution of consumer goods. This is the type of invisible infrastructure that gets your Amazon package delivered overnight. When Dalfen acquired the Roxbury property from a developer in December 2023, it praised its suburban location outside of New York City. Real estate companies, however, have struggled to cash out on warehouse projects in recent years, and industrial vacancies have doubled since 2023.
That untapped warehouse network has become a convenient resource for enacting Trump’s ambitious deportation agenda. As ICE director Todd Lyons put it at the 2025 Border Security Expo, the administration wants immigration enforcement to operate “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
But as it turns out, suburban Americans aren’t exactly thrilled to have massive immigration detention facilities down the street.
“To have it in our backyard, it’s horrible,” Lenox said. “I was thinking about putting my house up for sale. How am I going to sell my house with this crap in my backyard?”
Lenox leans conservative; his neighbor, Elizabeth Jacobus, is a proud Democrat. Meanwhile, town leadership shares their concerns: On January 13, the all-Republican Roxbury town council unanimously passed a resolution “unequivocally oppos[ing]” DHS’s plans. Meeting minutes show that the mayor and one councilmember expressed their support for ICE’s broader mission but said such an operation made no sense in Roxbury.
“The wording used at town halls has been very, very clearly NIMBY,” said Bonnie Rosenthal, a Project NINJA activist. “If the facility was in a nearby town, I think they would be perfectly fine with that.”
“I don’t want my legacy as a councilwoman to be this jail, this camp. I feel like we’re back in World War II with the internment camps for the Japanese.”
But when I called councilmember Jaki Albrecht, she told me she opposes the facility on moral grounds, too. Albrecht has identified as a Republican her entire life, but she said that, “at this point in time, the ‘R’ next to my name is for Roxbury. Because I am appalled more and more every day by what our president is doing.”
“I don’t want my legacy as a councilwoman to be this jail, this camp,” Albrecht said. “I feel like we’re back in World War II with the internment camps for the Japanese.” Albrecht noted she only learned of the warehouse plans when her son called her about the Washington Post piece.
That lack of transparency from the federal government has riled Albrecht and other local officials. On February 20, the town released a scathing statement slamming DHS for providing “absolutely no feedback” to the community throughout the warehouse sale process. “It is also inconceivable and frankly stunning that all of our communications to DHS on issues related to this selection as a detention center were never answered,” the mayor and council wrote.
Roxbury officials also faulted Dalfen for rejecting their alternative offer of a 10-year tax abatement: “It is extremely disappointing that Dalfen Industrial prioritized profits over community,” they wrote, calling the negotiations “not reflective of a good community partner.”
A Dalfen spokesperson disputed officials’ account, emphasized that Goldman Sachs was the majority partner in the transaction, and said the property was sold in lieu of eminent domain. “The company has no involvement in the future operations of the facility,” the spokesperson wrote.
“This property, which sat vacant for two years, was held in a real estate investment fund that we manage,” wrote a Goldman Sachs spokesperson. “We had a fiduciary obligation to investors in the fund to sell it.”
In response to questions about the Roxbury council’s statement, an ICE spokesperson sent five mugshots of “criminal illegal aliens” allegedly arrested by ICE in New Jersey. The spokesperson added that the facilities “will not be warehouses” but rather “very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards” that “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.” The spokesperson claimed that the Roxbury facility and its construction would bring in an estimated $39.2 million in tax revenue. The town has a different view: According to officials’ estimates, the sale of the facility to DHS will lead to $85 million in lost local tax revenue over the next 30 years.
Project NINJA organizers are willing to accept NIMBY arguments if it means stalling the project long enough that it never becomes a reality—not in Roxbury, not anywhere.
“Anyone with the barest amount of knowledge, it doesn’t matter what their political persuasion is, they understand that it’s a bad deal,” said Project NINJA co-founder William Angus. “It’s not just those ‘liberal protest people.’ It’s all people, from everywhere, who have come together to say this is not appropriate for this town.”
The growing controversy surrounding the DHS warehouse might prove to be political poison for Roxbury’s representative in Congress, Republican Tom Kean Jr.
Angus, a 55-year-old customer service rep with a wiry gray beard, only started protesting after Trump’s second inauguration. Now, he’s become a key organizer behind the Roxbury warehouse resistance. At Saturday’s protest, he wore a black T-shirt printed with the words “empathy,” “inclusion,” and “kindness” in rainbow font. Angus told me he expected to see as many as 1,000 people at the protest, doubling previous turnout. But that afternoon, as he flew his drone camera above Route 46, he looked at the growing crowd in awe.
“Wow, I can’t pan up high enough to take a picture,” Angus said. “I’ve pushed it as far as I can.” Organizers estimate that, all in all, 1,750 people turned out.
The growing controversy surrounding the DHS warehouse might prove to be political poison for Roxbury’s representative in Congress, Republican Tom Kean Jr. His seat is one of the prime targets Democrats hope to flip in the fall. After Roxbury residents—and the town council—rebuked Kean for not doing more to stop the facility, he introduced a bill on February 23 called the “Local Taxpayer Protection Act.” It would allow places like Roxbury to recoup lost property tax revenue in the event a federal immigration facility comes to town.
Angus was unmoved by Kean’s gesture: “We like to call it the ‘We’re Fine With Human Misery As Long As We Don’t Have To Pay For It’ Act,” he said.
Other protesters told me they hoped the immediacy of a massive immigration processing center in the neighborhood would force more conservative Roxbury residents to grapple with the inhumanity of Trump’s agenda.
Sisters Sulma Cabrera, 36, and Cindy Brenes, 41, said they were devastated to see how the deportation machine had wrought terror among their own undocumented family members and friends. Brenes’ sons—aged 10, 13, and 16—told me about how their schoolmates hid in fear last year when they heard ICE agents were in the area.
“I think the reality is settling in on people that are like, ‘We didn’t vote for this,’” Cabrera said. “But they did. And now that it’s happening in such an inhumane way…I think people are changing their minds.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.