‘An agency out of control’: Planned ICE detention processing warehouse in Roxbury sparks bipartisan backlash

Immigration activists, local advocates, and elected officials have launched a desperate fight to halt plans for a federal detention center in Morris County that, if completed, could become the largest immigrant camp in the state.

The federal government is considering converting a warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, into a large-scale ICE detention center. The proposed “processing site” off Route 46 would be one of 16 temporary holding facilities across the country. Each site would house 500 to 1,500 detainees.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would keep detainees at these satellite sites until the agency decides to shuttle them to larger warehouse facilities ahead of deportation.

But the plan may not go as smoothly as the feds thought — even in a town that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.

Word that ICE wants to set up shop in Morris County quickly ignited fierce opposition from local and state politicians, who have passed resolutions and sent letters to federal officials demanding the project’s death.

A grassroots protest movement has also shifted into overdrive, with members flooding local council meetings and taking to the streets in a show of rage at the Trump administration’s plot to use the small town of 23,000 as a staging ground for deportations.

“A lot of people were like, ‘Listen, it’s the federal government, there’s nothing you can do,’” William Angus, the founder of the No ICE Northern Jersey Alliance, told The Jersey Vindicator last week. “And I was like, ‘The hell [with that], I don’t accept that answer.’”

“We don’t consider this inevitable, and we don’t consider it our fate that this is going to happen,” Angus continued. “There’s more than one way to approach this, and there’s more than one path to victory. Everybody is coming together because nobody wants this.”

It’s not clear if that boiling anger will sway the federal government, which has widened its sweeping, sometimes violent seizure and deportation efforts despite growing national protests and the deaths of two American citizens during separate raids in Minnesota.

An ICE spokesperson was cagey when The Vindicator asked for specifics about the Roxbury site and whether the agency was aware of locals’ hostility towards the plan.

“We have no new detention centers to announce at this time,” the spokesperson said in an email. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”

Meanwhile, activists have steeled their spines for a lengthy, difficult fight.

“Hopefully, we can add Roxbury to the list of towns they back off from,” Angus said. “But you’ve got to put in the work.”

The town’s Republican mayor, Shawn Potillo, reiterated the council’s dismay at the federal government’s plan in a statement to The Vindicator.

“The council has been clear and consistent in its unequivocal opposition to the proposed facility, and that position has been communicated to all stakeholders,” Potillo wrote in an email to The Vindicator. “The council continues to place the safety of Roxbury’s residents as our top priority.”

The processing site would be ICE’s third New Jersey detention center, joining the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall in Newark and the 300-bed Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in Elizabeth.

An unwelcome proposal

The Roxbury facility would be built inside a yawning 470,000-square-foot warehouse at 1879 Route 46 and would be part of a feeder system intended to let ICE hold more than 80,000 people at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.

The federal government plans to hold newly collared detainees at the satellite complexes for a few weeks, then shuttle them to one of seven massive warehouse camps in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri, according to the report.

The new system will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process and promote the safety, dignity and respect for all in ICE custody,” reads the solicitation.

But it’s got people worried for a variety of reasons, said Tom Kelleher of the Mount Olive/Roxbury Visibility Brigade, which has been involved in several protests near the site.

“The people I talk to are already deeply engaged, so the answers are going to be pretty predictable,” Kelleher said. “People don’t like the idea of torture, or the idea of folks being scooped up off the streets, or the asymmetric brutality of it.”

“That’s a very familiar, left-leaning starting point,” he continued. “But wherever you are on the political spectrum, a prison in your town means your home value goes down. Roxbury becomes ‘the town with the jail.’”

Angus added that there are “lots of bad things that happen when prisons come into town.”

“If somebody dies in a Roxbury ICE detention center, it’s going to be a permanent stain on the town,” he said. “And nobody wants that on either side of the political spectrum.”

That’s not an empty worry; 32 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office in January 2025, according to a report from the Brookings Institution, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC.

That includes one at Delaney Hall: 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, an undocumented Haitian man who died of “suspected natural causes” soon after he arrived at the facility in December.

An ICE spokesperson told The Vindicator last week that the new complexes “will not be warehouses — they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

But that won’t comfort many, given the squalid conditions regularly endured by those held at Delaney Hall. Advocates and politicians regularly pillory the complex for having bad water, worse food, erratic meal times, frigid cells, and dismissive guards, among other complaints.

ICE and GEO Group, the private prison firm running Delaney Hall, have repeatedly denied the allegations.

An agency “out of control”

Last month, the all-Republican Roxbury Township Council passed a resolution declaring that it “unequivocally opposes” ICE’s plan because it would strain local infrastructure, resources, and services such as sewers, water, and police.

“Roxbury is not an appropriate municipality for the placement of a detainee processing facility,” the resolution read.

Council members aren’t the only ones who are upset about the move.

U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim joined eight Democratic members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation in sending a Jan. 13 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying they were “deeply concerned” about the camp.

“The proposal would subject thousands of people, the majority of whom pose no threat to public safety, to confinement under cruel and inhumane conditions,” the letter read. “Warehouses are designed for storage and shipping, not for safely housing people.”

“ICE detention facilities already have a poor track record, including poor ventilation, lack of temperature control, sanitation, and medical care,” the letter continued. “We strongly oppose any effort by DHS and ICE to pursue the use of warehouse facilities for immigration detention and demand that DHS immediately abandon any plans to expand detention capacity in New Jersey.”

Booker also toured the site on Jan. 21 and slammed ICE as an agency that’s “out of control.”

“They’re hurting our local business, they’re undermining our way of life, they’re violating our common sense of decency, and they’re making us less safe,” Booker said that day outside the St. Margaret of Scotland Roman Catholic Church in Morristown.

“Right now, this is an agency out of control, and I’m going to do everything I can to stop the nightmares that are visited upon small towns, big cities, and communities all across our country,” Booker said. “But here in Jersey, we have to do a lot more. We have to stop … any new ICE detention facility built in our state.”

Roxbury officials, including the town’s police chief, reportedly met with ICE representatives several weeks ago while the feds inspected the Route 46 warehouse to make their concerns clear, according to TAPinto.

“We made the ICE contacts aware that we want them to be transparent with information moving forward,” the town representative said in a statement.

Angus, the activist, said he’s grateful for the council’s resistance. But even if ICE pulls out, the war’s not over.

“We’d have a momentary celebration,” he said. “But this is so much bigger than just Roxbury. You have 22 other cities across the country that are in the same position, and if ICE doesn’t go here, they’re going to go somewhere else.”

“So, we’ll have to take the fight to them,” he continued. “The core is going to keep going, because until ICE is completely dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up … the fight’s not over.”