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With great fanfare last summer, House and Senate Republicans approved $45 billion to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention capacity as part of their signature catchall bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This exorbitant amount—one of many line items in the bill’s historic ramp-up of immigration enforcement funding—was considered an easy part of the bill to pass. Republicans didn’t fight over it. Democrats, still angsty after the 2024 election about looking soft on immigration, didn’t call much attention to it.

But now that this network of massive detention centers—large-scale holding centers for people awaiting deportation—is being constructed, the reaction from Republicans is: Not in my backyard.

From Maryland and Virginia to Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Arizona, and everywhere in between, massive warehouses that the Department of Homeland Security is purchasing to convert into detention centers are being met with fierce resistance. It should go without saying that Democratic officials, who’ve recently rediscovered their courage in opposing Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement plans, don’t want 1,500-to-10,000-bed cogs in Trump’s deportation machine within their jurisdictions—or anyone else’s. But it’s the pushback from national Republican electeds, who voted enthusiastically to construct this apparatus just last summer, that’s especially notable. They’re not protesting on behalf of the detainees, or rejecting the administration’s vision. All are quick to point out that they adore the goals of this project. But if you try to place a piece of this infrastructure in their communities, well, someone in the administration is going to get an earful.

The words of Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker rejecting an ICE detention center in his state‍—‍“While I support the enforcement of immigration law, I write to express my opposition to this acquisition and the proposed detention center”—are beginning to read like a form letter.

The administration is doing more than just buying up some vacant space here or there. It’s creating a new model for processing, holding, and deporting people in its custody. In this hub-and-spoke system, “smaller” (still enormous) warehouses would be used as roughly 1,500-bed processing sites that feed into larger, 5,000-to-10,000-bed detention centers, from which deportations would be staged. This would achieve the administration’s goals of deporting immigrants more efficiently and at greater scale. If this sounds like an Amazon distribution system, that’s by design. In the immortal 2025 words of Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, the deportation machine should be like “Prime, but with human beings.”

Ever since proposed locations for these warehouse purchases were published a couple of months ago, and coinciding with the sharp decline in ICE’s public image following a pair of killings in Minnesota, local pushback has been strong. Municipal meetings overflow with complaints, and local officials do what they can to push back. On the same January day ICE was spotted touring a building in Kansas City for a detention center, for example, the city council passed a resolution banning nonmunicipal detention centers for five years, though the fight goes on. A Canadian developer who owned a warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, that DHS was looking to purchase took the property off the market following public outcry. The owners of another warehouse in Oklahoma City, similarly, cut off talks with DHS. The Oklahoma City mayor, in a Facebook post, wrote that “I commend the owners for their decision and thank them on behalf of the people of Oklahoma City.”

That mayor is a Republican. A lot of these local officials at the 23 sites DHS is eyeing are Republicans. Their concerns don’t necessarily touch on the humanity of what ICE is doing, or present a conscientious case against the erection of a mass prison network. Instead, the arguments are more about disruptions to communities that aren’t situated to handle this—and weren’t given opportunities to explain this before DHS proceeded. And those complaints from local Republicans have fed up to their Republican national officials.

In his Feb. 4 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Wicker laid out his case against a proposed ICE detention center in Byhalia, Mississippi. It covers most of the points that other Republicans, in similar situations, have been making.

Wicker argued that the location was “positioned for economic development purposes” and that “converting this industrial asset into an ICE detention center forecloses economic growth opportunities and replaces them with a use that does not generate comparable economic returns or community benefits.” Further, mass detention facilities put strains on local resources (“transportation access, water, sewer and energy costs, staffing, medical care, and emergency services”), as human beings have needs that Amazon Prime packages do not. Last, Wicker pointed to “public safety” concerns from the community. Understandably so, given that the Trump administration has sold its enforcement regime as necessary because undocumented immigrants are hardened killers from mental institutions.

“I look forward to your prompt response,” Wicker concluded, and then pointedly reminded her to “keep me informed of this acquisition and any future ICE contracting proposals affecting the state of Mississippi.” Wicker noted shortly thereafter that Noem told him she would search for a new location.

Not everyone has been so lucky. DHS has made successful acquisitions despite similar concerns elsewhere. DHS closed on a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, late last month, paying $70 million in cash, much to the, well, surprise of the local government. This earned a rebuke not just from Democratic senators or state leaders, but from Rep. Paul Gosar, a far-right member of Congress who was vehemently anti-immigration before it was cool. In a Feb. 4 letter to Noem, Gosar—after a few paragraphs of throat-clearing about his strong support for ICE—asked 15 questions about how the hell Surprise, Arizona, is expected to absorb this, and why the city wasn’t consulted about it at all.

The small town of Social Circle, Georgia, with a population of about 5,000 people, also recently learned that it, against its wishes, would be getting an ICE detention facility that could double or triple its population in a matter of months. (It’s not hard to find the specific warehouses. Do a map search of the town name, and it’s usually the biggest rectangular structure.) The retrofitted warehouse could begin receiving detainees by April. This prompted Social Circle’s congressman, Mike Collins, a MAGA social media gadfly who’s now running for Senate, to pipe up.

“Although I am aligned with the mission of ICE to detain and deport the criminal illegal aliens who have flooded across our border due to Joe Biden’s reckless policies,” Collins wrote on Facebook earlier this month, “I agree with the community that Social Circle does not have the sufficient resources that this facility would require.”

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These are just a few examples. There’s bipartisan opposition to a proposed processing facility in Chester, New York. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who didn’t vote for the OBBBA but is certainly Democrats’ most pro-immigration-enforcement senator, wrote his own letter of complaint to Noem about two facilities reportedly under consideration for Pennsylvania. The offices of Texas’ two Republican senators didn’t respond with their positions regarding three facilities reportedly eyed for their state—though Sen. John Cornyn’s office passed along floor remarks noting his support for funding DHS and ICE—and neither did the offices of Missouri’s two Republican senators regarding the proposed Kansas City megawarehouse.

DHS, too, did not respond for comment about the pushback, and whether it had adequately discussed its purchase plans with stakeholders.

The lack of consultation across the map, though, doesn’t look like an oversight. This is how White House policy chief Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, runs his government: Act fast because time is ticking, and deal with—or steamroll past—individual complaints after the fact. It does not take a genius to understand that members or senators might vote for one thing and then complain when it threatens to overwhelm their local sewer systems, or places detention camps within a mile of elementary schools. “Mass deportation” as a slogan to rev up the base was one thing; in practice, every step of the process‍—‍from the mass deployments of agents to the construction of detention—burns enthusiasm for the project. The administration is doing what it can, as quickly as it can, before the luster is gone altogether.

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