Kim and Booker push bill to stop DHS from turning warehouses into immigrant detention camps
Measure would bar DHS from running warehouse detention sites with Trump-era Big Beautiful Bill funds
New Jersey’s two Democratic senators want to bar the Department of Homeland Security from using billions in extra federal cash to buy, rent, or run warehouses that would house immigrant detainees.
Dubbed the “End Warehouse Detention Act,” the bill would make it illegal for the federal agency to use taxpayer dollars secured through Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to fund the controversial deals, according to a statement from Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim.
The proposal hits close to home in New Jersey, where the feds just paid nearly $130 million for a mammoth warehouse in Roxbury that officials want to convert into a detention camp for as many as 1,500 people.
“Donald Trump is using the money he and Congressional Republicans took from working families’ healthcare to fund his cruelty and open detention facilities that our communities have made clear we want no part of,” Kim said in the statement.
“Like in Roxbury, people across the country are standing up against this inhumanity, and Congress needs to stand with them,” he continued. “These are our tax dollars — not a slush fund for this administration’s lawlessness.”
The bill would not only prohibit the department from buying or renting new warehouses; it would also stop the feds from operating, repurposing, staffing or maintaining warehouses to which it already holds the deed.
Booker said this would make sure that “not one more taxpayer dollar is used to buy, contract, or convert warehouses into harmful, inhumane detention centers.”
“New Jerseyans have made it clear: we will not allow detention centers to turn our communities into places of fear,” Booker said. “I have walked through one of these warehouses and seen firsthand how these facilities are no place for human beings.”
The measure is unlikely to pass, considering the GOP’s narrow margin in the House and slightly wider hold on the Senate. And even if it did clear both chambers, Trump would almost certainly veto it.
But it does offer another front in the Democrats’ fight against the president’s hard-line immigration policies, which have resulted in sweeping, sometimes violent raids that have ensnared tens of thousands of undocumented people and led to the deaths of at least two American citizens.
Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda is being led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has put thousands of agents into the streets throughout the nation in search of those who entered or stayed in the United States illegally.
But those agents need somewhere to put the people they seize, leading the federal government to try to drastically expand its footprint in small towns like Roxbury — despite vicious local opposition.
The proposed “processing site” off Route 46 would be one of 16 temporary holding facilities across the country, each of which could hold between 500 and 1,500 detainees.
ICE plans to keep the detainees at these smaller satellite sites until the agency eventually shuttles them to larger mega-camps ahead of deportation.
The agency has said the warehouses will meet its “regular detention standards.”
But the move quickly ignited fierce opposition from local and state politicians, as well as a grassroots protest movement that’s flooded local council meetings and held a smattering of protests.
Kim, a first-term Democrat, also proposed two other anti-ICE bills on Thursday: The ICE Funding Accountability Act would stop DHS from using Big Beautiful Bill money to hire more ICE and Customs officers, and the Private Detention Accountability Act would require ICE’s oversight office to conduct audits of the detention facilities and report its findings to Congress.
“Americans are sick of this administration’s cruelty and lawlessness, and don’t want another dime of their hard-earned money funding it,” the senator said. “Congress needs to step up, assert its authority, and use these bills to rein in this out-of-control administration.”
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Steve Janoski is a multi-award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Bergen Record and the Asbury Park Press. His reporting has exposed corruption, government malfeasance and police misconduct