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Across the country, communities are fighting a network of warehouses the Trump administration is buying up to hold immigrants.

Platform Ventures, an investment firm which owns a warehouse in Kansas City, Missouri, said on February 12 that it had pulled out of a deal with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to convert the nearly 1 million-square-foot-sized building into a “mega center” slated to hold 7,500 immigrants.

“[T]he people of Kansas City forced Platform Ventures’ hand,” Ryan Sorrell wrote for the Kansas City Defender, a Black-led abolitionist newspaper started after the George Floyd uprisings.

“This was not a corporate change of heart,” Sorrell continues. “Ultimately, it was a calculated business decision made under extraordinary pressure from a community that refused to be complicit in the machinery of mass incarceration and deportation.”

Kansas City is one of 23 cities where DHS has been quietly purchasing warehouses in remotely located office parks, as a document leaked earlier this year revealed. The Washington Postfirst reported that the Trump administration was planning to imprison 80,000 immigrants in warehouses, in addition to the nearly 70,000 people who are already detained. The warehouses will significantly expand the existing network of more than 230 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities.

A Fight Is Brewing in the Midwest Over Immigrant Mass Detention

ICE acting Director Todd M. Lyons put the administration’s strategy bluntly at a Border Security Expo last year in Phoenix, Arizona: Mass deportations should be treated “like a business … like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

Since ICE agents shot and killed Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as well as Silverio Villegas González in Chicago, people have been focusing their outrage on stopping these warehouses from opening. This is one way people are driving “ICE OUT” of their communities.

People across the political spectrum are realizing these federal detention warehouses will harm their communities. Since federal agencies pay no taxes, local municipalities will lose valuable tax revenue paying for public schools and services. Federal agencies do not have to follow local zoning ordinances, so the warehouses will place a serious strain on the local water and sewer systems.

Putting thousands of people in makeshift facilities not meant for habitation will only worsen human rights abuses by federal immigrant agencies, warned Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network.

“All immigration detention is inherently inhumane and rife with abuse, and yet the warehouse model currently being pursued is particularly horrifying,” said Suh, whose organization is leading efforts nationally to end immigration incarceration.

The warehouse in Kansas City is located between an Amazon building and Walmart distribution center. Several organizations mobilized against the facility, including the Missouri Workers Center, Stand Up KC, Decarcerate KC, and Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation. They paid for billboards denouncing the warehouse, marched on the offices of Platform Ventures, and made hundreds of phone calls to the company’s owners.

When Chair of the Jackson County Legislature Manny Abarca visited the warehouse on January 15 after finding out that federal officials were touring the site, he was confronted by six ICE agents and threatened with arrest. That same........

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