Geoff Bennett:
For months now, ICE has been quietly buying industrial warehouses around the country, reportedly with plans to turn them into a network of immigration detention and processing centers to hold tens of thousands of detainees.
Our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, begins our coverage with a look into how the national and at times local controversy is playing out in one small Maryland community.
Liz Landers:
A national controversy lands on the agenda of a small Maryland city during an otherwise mundane weekly meeting.
The Hagerstown City Council and mayor represent about 45,000 residents, but the broader community is bracing for the arrival of as many as 1,500 mostly undocumented migrants.
This huge warehouse right here was recently purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a detention facility. This is more than 800,000 square feet, and, if it opens, it could be one of the largest detention facilities of its kind in the country.
During a couple of visits over a week, we saw anti-ICE vandalism, but no visible signs of ICE itself. We ran into Doris Keil-Shamieh and her husband, Greg, as we left the site.
Doris Keil-Shamieh, Maryland Resident:
The administration is ruining this country, and it’s tearing apart communities, tearing apart communities that we need. And they’re good people. This has got to stop.
Liz Landers:
Locally, the facility will be primarily regulated by the Washington County Board of Commissioners.
Man:
All in favor by saying aye.
Man:
Aye.
(Booing)
Liz Landers:
Protesters interrupted their meeting earlier this month shortly after the board unanimously agreed to a resolution welcoming ICE.
Man:
Nobody ever expected it to become a place of residence.
Liz Landers:
We listened last week as the city’s utility director briefed the council on its limited, but critical role governing the facility.
Woman:
Our authority starts and stops with the water.
Liz Landers:
In the audience, community members on both sides of the national and now local debate.
Arthur Larue, Hagerstown, Maryland, Resident:
I don’t think it’s a good thing for Hagerstown if we get that.
Jane Page Thompson, Hagerstown, Maryland, Resident:
I think it’s a great thing. Hagerstown needs as much help as it can get in increasing the income per person. Having this facility will do that with jobs.
Liz Landers:
If there are people that are being held in this facility who haven’t broken the law other than being in this country illegally, are you OK with that happening?
Jane Page Thompson:
I am engaged to a man who was a political refugee from Bolivia who was naturalized as an American citizen. So, for me, it’s really personal that people come to this country legally.
Arthur Larue:
With the things I have heard that are going on in some of the other ICE facilities, I definitely don’t want that in my community. I’d love to see the city do everything they can to fight this. Given our council and our mayor, I’m not sure that they will.
Liz Landers:
ICE already spent $102 million purchasing the warehouse. The Department of Homeland Security responded to our questions with a statement touting its economic benefits and reading in part — quote — “These will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards. Sites will undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure.”
Bill McIntire, Mayor of Hagerstown, Maryland: We know who bought it, but we don’t know what is actually going to happen there.
Liz Landers:
Bill McIntire, Hagerstown’s nonpartisan mayor, notes that, while the city does have limited authority over water and the new facility will almost certainly need to secure a greater allowance, he’s not eager to pick a fight between his small town and a giant federal agency.
Bill McIntire:
We have never denied water to anyone, so if you do deny this, does the federal government look at this as a political move and are we opening ourselves up to litigation?
Liz Landers:
Earlier this week, Maryland’s attorney general sued the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, saying that the administration failed to conduct an environmental review or seek public input or provide explanation for the purchase, which is required by law.
Joining us now is Douglas MacMillan, a reporter for The Washington Post who’s done extensive reporting about these ICE facilities.
Thank you for joining us.
Douglas MacMillan, The Washington Post:
Thanks for having me.
Liz Landers:
Let’s start with the size and scope of this.
Can you give us an idea of ICE’s efforts to create this system of detention centers throughout the country?
Douglas MacMillan:
Yes, so they’re going all around the country.
We’re seeing this happen all the way from all the way up in New Jersey, New Hampshire, all the way down to Orlando and Florida, all the way out West. They’re trying to build places in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is all over the country. They’re focusing on warehouses they can find a little bit outside of large towns.
So we’re finding these about 45 minutes to an hour outside of large city centers. And they’re trying to fix these near logistics hubs, where it’s easy to move people in and out of the city. So we think that they want to — they have — ICE officials have stated that their objective is to make the system of detention and deportation more efficient.
And the current acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, has actually compared his aspiration to Amazon’s system of moving packages. He said, we want to be able to move humans around the country as efficiently as Amazon ships packages.
Liz Landers:
What’s the overall cost of this? How much is the Department of Homeland Security and ICE spending on this?
Douglas MacMillan:
So they’re projecting to spend $38 billion.
That involves buying the warehouses. Many of them cost around $100 million. That involves significant upgrades in retrofitting these warehouses to basically turn what are empty, vacant shells of buildings into a kind of functioning detention center with housing units, recreation areas, kitchens, outside basketball courts.
They want to kind of, like, build these out and spending a lot up to $150 million for a single facility in some cases.
Liz Landers:
Many of these warehouses are currently just massive empty buildings. We saw this one in Hagerstown. And, apparently, there are four toilets in this huge 800,000-square-foot-plus facility. What is the process going to look like for making these habitable for people?
Douglas MacMillan:
Yes, I mean, these places were built to hold goods and ship goods. They were not meant to hold human beings. So there’s a pretty significant renovation process that has to go under way. And ICE wants it done really rapidly.
So it’s going to be a challenge. For one example, a lot of these are distribution centers built for a company like Amazon where a lot of trucks would have been pulling up to these large bay doors. And so many of these facilities have dozens of bay doors around the perimeter of the building. That’s not a very secure feature if you want a detention center to hold people who are not going to be able to escape.
So one of the first things they might have to do is brick up all those bay doors. Another thing that a lot of these facilities have that is going to be a challenge is that they are built on a thick concrete slab, which is going to make it extra hard to install plumbing and to install wiring and to install kind of the workings of a building that you’re going to need when you’re talking about holding thousands of people.
So it’s going to be a pretty complex job.
Liz Landers:
What’s your reporting on the timeline that ICE has for this? How long is it going to take them to be able to convert these warehouses?
Douglas MacMillan:
So it’s really rapid. They want this whole system of up to 24 facilities to be up and running by the end of the year essentially.
And we have heard internally there’s been a lot of debate over that time frame and that even some companies that they have worked with for many years like GEO Group and CoreCivic, who are the two largest detention contractors in the country, that they have been pushing back and saying that this timeline is too aggressive.
Liz Landers:
The administration has found some of these warehouses that they have purchased in areas that are Republican communities. What has been the reaction in those places?
Douglas MacMillan:
Yes, so I spent time in one of these facilities down in Social Circle, Georgia. It’s a small town 45 minutes east of Atlanta.
It’s projected to be one of the first mega-detention centers. Like, they’re going to turn one of these warehouses and turn it into a detention center holding up to 8,500 people. The people there were really worried and scared and nervous about what this means for their town.
A lot of them say that they support the president and they voted for the president, and they generally agree with his immigration agenda and they agree that illegal immigrants should be locked up and deported from the country, but that they don’t think that this makes sense for them.
Liz Landers:
And, just quickly, how has the administration handled some of the pushback in some of these places?
Douglas MacMillan:
So, very different. In some places, they have just been completely quiet and they have gone about their business just simply buying the facilities and moving forward with their plans to put these up, not really kind of being any mind, giving any mind to the protests and the pushback.
In other places, it sounds — it seems like they have acquiesced and they have actually come to the table. We have seen a few examples now. Just this week, Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee announced that ICE was canceling its plans to host a detention center in her state in Tennessee. We have seen similar announcements from state leaders in New Hampshire and Mississippi.
So it looks like that some Republican leaders who have juice with DHS are striking deals to get these facilities not in their areas. But in other places, including many Democrat-led areas, there isn’t kind of that ability and that the DHS has not really come to the table and meaningfully engaged with the local community.
Liz Landers:
Doug MacMillan, thank you so much for sharing your reporting.
Douglas MacMillan:
Thanks for having me.
