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........

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