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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........

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