Amid all the crap that we as Americans are having to deal with coming out of the Trump administration, there is good news.
Local communities across the country along with some state and local officials are resisting attempts by President Donald Trump to house thousands of detained immigrants in their areas in converted warehouses, privately run facilities and county jails. These are immigrant prisons.
In red states, red counties and red towns and cities, people are pushing back so hard that ICE officials are having troubles finding locations for their detention centers. In Texas, in Oklahoma, in Utah, in New Mexico, in Virginia, proposed ICE facilities are running into brick walls by grassroots resistance.
Why is this happening? MSNOW reports:
Federal officials have been scouting cities and counties across the U.S. for places to hold immigrants as they roll out a massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by Trump’s recent tax-cutting law.
The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have amplified an already intense spotlight on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing scrutiny of its plans for new detention sites.
For instance, officials in Social Circle, Georgia, El Paso, Texas, and Roxbury Township, New Jersey, all have raised concerns about their locales being used and they all cite a lack of water and sewer capacity to transform warehouses into detention sites.
A proposed ICE facility just north of Richmond, Virginia, drew hundreds of people last week to a tense public hearing of the Hanover County Board of Supervisors. “You want what’s happening in Minnesota to go down in our own backyard? Build that detention center here, and that’s exactly what will happen,” resident Kimberly Matthews told county officials.
As a prospective ICE detention site became public, elected officials in Kansas City, Missouri, scrambled to pass an ordinance aimed at blocking it. And mayors in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City – after raising concerns about building permits – announced last week that property owners won’t be selling or leasing their facilities for immigration detention…. Despite court rulings elsewhere, the City Council in Kansas City voted in January to impose a five-year moratorium on non-city-run detention facilities. The vote came on the same day ICE officials toured a nearly 1-million-square-foot (92,903-square-meter) warehouse as a prospective site. …
Legislatures in several Democratic-led states pressed forward with bills aimed at blocking or discouraging ICE facilities. A New Mexico measure targets local government agreements to detain immigrants for ICE. A novel California proposal seeks to nudge companies running ICE facilities out of the state by imposing a 50% tax on their proceeds.
The Democratic-led New Mexico House on Friday passed legislation banning state and local government contracts for ICE detention facilities, sending it to the Senate.
Similar bills are pending in Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.
The Otero County Processing Center, 25 miles (40 kilometers) from downtown El Paso, Texas, is one of three privately run ICE facilities that could be affected by the New Mexico legislation. The facility includes four immigration courtrooms and space for more than 1,000 detainees. The county financed its construction in 2007 with the intent to use it as a revenue source, and plans to pay off the remaining $16.5 million debt by 2028.
County boards, city councils, regulatory agencies are being inundated by crowds of citizens aiming to stop whatever warehouse locally is being eyed by the Trump administration –and many are voting against the detention schemes.
Since taking office, Trump has doubled the number of ICE detention sites. The US government now is detaining 73,000 people, up from 40,000 a little over a year ago.
In a little over a year, the number of detention facilities used by ICE nearly doubled to 212 sites spread across 47 states and territories. Most of that growth came through existing contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service or deals to use empty beds at county jails.
Trump’s administration now is taking steps to open more large-scale facilities. In January, ICE paid $102 million for a warehouse in Washington County, Maryland, $84 million for one in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and more than $70 million for one in Surprise, Arizona. It also solicited public comment on a proposed warehouse purchase in a flood plain in Chester, New York.
Federal immigration officials have toured large warehouses elsewhere, without releasing many details about the efforts.
“They will be very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” ICE said in a statement, adding: “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.8. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
This on-going process will continue to be played out as more and more citizens of even -yes, red states – discover Trump’s plans and then mobilizing their neighbors to stop the attempt to hold immigrants in warehouses.
But it is good news to know that many of our fellow Americans are not taking this all sitting down. In many parts of the country ICE is more despised than the devil. There is a struggle of resistance that all of us will have to join if we’re going to save the US of A.
Seems odd all of a sudden there’s a need for more detention facilities when people were shipped out previously? There seems to be a change in the process if new deportation sites above previous levels are being resisted. Something doesn’t add up.
They’re gonna come for the homegrowns remember.
It’s really important that we appreciate the good news and efforts by people all over America who are resisting trumpism. And we cannot rely on the mainstream corporate media to provide it to us.
The latest from Hartmann on this subject, and. he is NOT nearly as optimistic as you are Frank.
“By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.”
“By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.”
DJT has out-paced Hitler in his first year…but he’s doing it backwards because he went after the opposition parties and dissenters first long before the Jews. DJT has gone after the latter first (brown people) instead of those actively opposing him.
Over 70,000 People Detained in 225 Concentration Camps, With Plans to Double Them: Why Isn’t This a National Emergency?
ICE’s nationwide detention system continues to expand under plans that would double its size while shielding it from meaningful accountability…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/over-70000-people-detained-in-225-ec0?publication_id=302288
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And, to be blunt, neither am I because I’m trying to integrate the few stories I partially remember that my stepmom’s let out to me as a teen about the US concentration camp her family was kidnapped from their San Francisco home in 1942 and imprisoned in for years with what I read going on right now under Herr Fuhrer Poppy Diapers.
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Concentration Camps for “undesirables” and the MAGA faithful that lived around them knew exactly what was going on. Oh wait, I meant German people not MAGA…slip of the tongue that was I guess.
But look at what the German propaganda called all those undesirables…Same Damn Language being used by the Fascists in our government and the MAGATS that support them. I saw a sign in a photo that said “If You Aren’t Scared, You Aren’t Paying Attention.”
Who do you think this new ‘warehouses’ are really for? Yeah, Nazis murdered xix million Jews and that’s where the conversation somehow stops. a lot of the time. But there were AT LEAST 6 million or more others that were also. Those Undesirables. Political prisoners. dissenters. unionists, teachers, journalists, students, Gypsies, handicapped, on and on the list goes.
And the US is making huge lists already, snapping pictures everywhere, and databases are so much more integrated now with modern infrastructure and computers systems compared to handwritten lists back then and IBM’s primitive computing. We know we have 37 million Fascist-leaning neighbors in this country surrounding us, they aren’t going to argue about any of this. There were 67 million Germans in 1933…
Pretty dismal thoughts after 2am with the Moon trying to break through the inversion layer heavy fog surrounding this house. Yes I do appreciate the efforts of people all over the United States who are resisting FASCISM. The question is…will it be enough?
I read this somewhere (paraphrasing): If Ghandi would have tried his peaceful protest crap in Stalin’s Russia, nobody would have ever known his name because he would have been dead the first day and buried by nightfall in an unmarked grave. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Trump; sure are a lot of similarities aren’t there? Except the last one is at the end of his life in a body and mind that are both rotting. And I don’t think the squabbling, appallingly inept sycophants he has surrounded himself with will be able to hold it together. Cults generally fall apart rather quickly after that happens.
sealintheSelkirks