NIMBY, but for concentration camps
ICE is getting major pushback as it tries to buy massive warehouses for people
Another major front in the resistance has opened up over the last few months as ICE begins buying massive warehouses around the country to use as prison camps — and local residents and leaders push back and in some cases stop them.
Unlike a lot of the burgeoning efforts that I write about here, this one has gotten some excellent national coverage, particularly from Rachel Maddow at MS NOW.
So I strongly encourage you to watch this segment from Maddow’s Jan. 27 show where, among other things, she calls for more national media attention. (It worked!)
“Everywhere the Trump administration tries to put new camps -- new ICE facilities and ICE prison camps, they’re being pushed back,” she said. She then cited examples:
In Durant, Oklahoma, city leaders responded to ICE inquiries by passing an ordinance requiring city approval for any jail or detention center.
In New Jersey, the Morris County township council approved a resolution opposing an ICE detention facility inside a vacant half-million square foot warehouse in Roxbury.
In Hutchins, Texas, the mayor, city council, and county commissioner have all said they won’t allow a facility in their town.
In New York State, officials in Republican-leaning Orange County responded to public outcry by vowing to block a proposed a “processing site” in Chester.
In Kansas City, Missouri, the city council responded to ICE plans there by passing a 5-year ban prohibiting non-municipal detention centers.
Maddow followed up this past Monday with another wonderful segment, which she wrote up here.
She explained that massive public pressure led a company to back off its plans to sell a warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to ICE.
And she quoted from a marvelous opinion column in the Kansas City Star, which urged the company selling a warehouse to ICE to “say, plainly, that you don’t want your legacy tied to masked men hauling people out of their homes and into warehouses on the edge of town.”
To its credit, it was the Washington Post that set public opposition in motion in December when it revealed ICE’s plans to renovate industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time. It listed the 23 sites ICE was pursuing.
The Post followed up last week with a story about the pushback:
In at least 15 communities, residents have staged protests or packed town council meetings, overwhelming local elected officials with questions about the proposed facilities. Locals have shown up at locations identified on the unconfirmed ICE list, which has circulated on social media, with cameras to document tours.
(Here’s a version of that list.)
The Associated Press published a strong, detailed story about the public pushback against ICE plans. Bloomberg reported that several sales are taking place despite public opposition.
Courier reporter Camaron Stevenson lists which facilities have signed leases, have been stalled by community efforts, are opposed by community, and are in the preliminary stages.
Whither the War in Portland?
Here’s a story that isn’t getting nearly enough national attention: Federal agents in Portland were so consistently and brutally attacking peaceful protesters that a judge ordered them to stop on Tuesday.
In a humdinger of a temporary restraining order, federal district judge Michael H. Simon wrote:
In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads. We have been here before and have previously returned to the right path, notwithstanding an occasional detour. In helping our nation find its constitutional compass, an impartial and independent judiciary operating under the rule of law has a responsibility that it may not shirk. For that reason, and as more fully explained below, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order.
The ruling was necessary, he wrote, because federal agents were clearly not going to stop anytime soon otherwise:
The Court finds that the repeated shooting and teargassing of nonviolent protesters at the Portland ICE Building will likely keep recurring against Plaintiffs and the members of the putative class. Defendants’ violence is in no way isolated. Similarly, statements made by DHS officials and senior federal executives show that the culture of the agency and its employees is to celebrate violent responses over fair and diplomatic ones.
As it happens, the ruling came right after a particularly violent weekend. Federal agents responded to a peaceful protest on Saturday as if they were under attack from a hostile army.
“[S]cores of nonviolent protesters were hit with chemical munitions fired by federal officers responding to some demonstrators directly outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. Tear gas drifted into a large crowd of demonstrators “made up of families, including children and elderly people” who were “forced to scatter after they were hit by the thick chemical mist.”
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas wrote movingly about the attack:
In the immediate aftermath, Ty noticed a man squatting next to a bike trying to rinse out his child’s eyes. “The kid’s eyes were red and they were blubbering, not screaming, crying out or talking. The parent was flushing the kid’s eyes out and wiping their face, people were offering them water. Multiple medics were checking in on them.”
He added, “It’s just weird to see a toddler in a pink onesie getting their eyes washed out from tear gas, you know?”
The Associated Press reported:
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said the daytime demonstration was peaceful, “where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger” to federal agents.
“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” Wilson wrote in a statement Saturday night. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis
The federal retreat from Minneapolis is taking place in baby steps.
Trump’s new top man in the Twin Cities, border czar Tom Homan, said today that about a fourth of the federal agents currently occupying the city will be withdrawn immediately – but that 2,000 will remain, pending a “decrease of the violence, the rhetoric and the attacks against ICE and Border Patrol.”
By his definition, that may never happen.
He also said federal agents would focus more on “targeted operations,” rather than the large sweeps of people based on their location or race, as championed by Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol leader in Minneapolis.
We shall see.
It’s not like they’ve changed their stripes. Early on Tuesday, immigration officers with their guns drawn arrested at least one observer who had been tailing them in an SUV. And children still live in fear.
The resistance, however, continues to be amazing, despite the dangers.
The Washington Post reported that “More than 34,000 Minnesotans have signed up to be trained as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement observers with various activist groups in recent weeks, many of them since Jan. 7, when a federal agent shot and killed Renée Good, a poet and mother of three, after an encounter with an ICE convoy in South Minneapolis.”
And The 19th News has brought us one of the most emotionally infuriating and inspiring stories of the occupation. This is how it starts:
A newborn in Minneapolis hadn’t eaten for a day and a half.
Her mother had risked going into work to get just enough money for more diapers when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stopped her car and took her away. At home waiting for her were her 16-year-old daughter and the baby — just barely 3 months old.
With their mother gone, the teenager tried to feed the baby, who was exclusively breastfed, formula to no avail. So they called Bri.
There’s also some inspiration from elsewhere in Minnesota:
The police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened last week to prevent federal immigration agents from arresting a local resident.
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) reports: “As immigration crackdown spreads beyond Minneapolis, the small town of Northfield resists.”
And also from MPR: “Pursued by federal agents, suburban ICE observers remain resolved.”
Protests Around the Nation
Friday was another big day for anti-ICE protests, as the Washington Post reported.
Here are scenes from Chicago, Portland, Maine, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
Thousands of nurses and their supporters turned out for a series of vigils for Alex Pretti outside VA hospitals around the country last week. Here’s the vigil in New York City.
Also, as the Star Tribune reports, “More than 100 bike rides honoring Alex Pretti have been organized nationally and internationally since a local bike shop’s call to action following the killing of the 37-year-old Minneapolis resident.”
In the Courthouses
It’s been quite a week for powerful, outrage-filled statements from district court judges. And that’s in addition to the Oregon ruling mentioned above.
I am so relieved for the 350,000 legal Haitian immigrants who were facing mass deportation this week because Kristi Noem decided to end their Temporary Protected Status.
In an absolutely extraordinary ruling, Washington, D.C., Judge Ana Reyes, stayed Noem’s decision, which she wrote was “motivated, at least in part, by racial animus.”
She concluded her ruling thusly:
There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).
Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.
Minnesota federal Judge Patrick Schiltz excoriated ICE for defying almost 100 court orders in the last month. He wrote:
Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
Another federal judge in Minnesota ordered federal agents to stop arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota who were lawfully admitted to the United States. Judge John R. Tunheim wrote:
It is also essential to emphasize that the refugees impacted by this Order are carefully and thoroughly vetted individuals who have been invited into the United States because of persecution in the countries from which they have come. They are not committing crimes on our streets, nor did they illegally cross the border. Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully—and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested and detained without warrants or cause in their homes or on their way to religious services or to buy groceries. At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty. We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.
And Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a permanent injunction blocking part of Trump’s executive order attempting to make over the election process. She wrote:
The Framers of our Constitution recognized that power over election rules could be abused, either to destroy the national government or to disempower the people from acting as a check on their elected representatives…. Accordingly, they entrusted this power to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress…. They assigned no role at all to the President. Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.
Resistance in Non-Political Spaces
I loved this essay by Melissa Ryan, in her Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. She put out a call for stories about non-political spaces becoming hubs for organizing, and here are some of the examples people shared:
A group chat of strangers formed to support a mutual friend after surgery evolving into a mutual aid hub to support vulnerable neighbors and share information.
Book clubs and knitting groups meeting to make ICE whistle kits for mass distribution.
PTAs and parent groups working to identify vulnerable families and help with school transportation, grocery runs, and other forms of support.
A local gaming group of men changing its long-held no-politics stance to encourage conversations about organizing, sending support to Minneapolis, and acts of resistance from the gaming community as a whole.
Hosting a weekly gathering where anyone can drop by for soup, ICE whistles, and call scripts.
So Much More to Read
From the New York Times: “Northern Command Tells N.C., Alaska Troops to Stand Down on Possible Minnesota Deployment.”
From the Baltimore Beat: “How Baltimore organizers are preparing to fight back against ICE.”
From the American Prospect: “‘No Sleep for ICE’ Campaigns Expand.”
From NPR: “A red hat, inspired by a symbol of resistance to Nazi occupation, gains traction in Minnesota.”
From Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mona Charen: “Trump backs down when there’s resistance. So keep fighting.”