06/22/2026
In Merrimack, New Hampshire, more than a thousand people lined the streets in the freezing cold. In Social Circle, Georgia, the town manager turned off the water. In Pennsylvania, the governor refused to grant a single permit. In town after town across the country, ordinary people packed county commission meetings, organized their neighbors, and filed wave after wave of lawsuits -- refusing to accept what the federal government was trying to do in their communities. And they won.
The Trump administration is now abandoning its plan to convert massive industrial warehouses into immigrant concentration camps at most of the sites it had targeted across the country. After a year of grassroots resistance and bipartisan outcry, the federal government will sell or transfer at least seven of the 11 warehouses it had purchased -- properties on which it spent over a billion dollars of taxpayer money in pursuit of a signature initiative spearheaded by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
That number does not include at least a dozen additional warehouse purchases that were blocked outright by organized community opposition and litigation before the deals could be completed. The administration is still trying to move forward with four other warehouse detention sites, though several of those, too, face ongoing protests, lawsuits, and a federal court order blocking construction.
The warehouse program was central to Trump's mass deportation campaign. After Congress allocated $45 billion to expand ICE detention capacity, the administration set out to build a new model of immigration detention -- massive industrial facilities, some designed to hold up to 10,000 people, owned outright by the federal government and rolled out across the country with almost no consultation with the towns chosen to host them.
As former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons put it, the goal was a detention system that would run "like Amazon Prime, but with human beings."
Beyond the deep concerns raised by ICE's already extensively documented system of abuse, neglect, and record deaths in detention, residents feared what these new facilities would mean for their hometowns. They would be vast new sites for the kind of abusive treatment the country has already seen at places like Dilley, the concentration camp for immigrant children and families in Texas -- and would put enormous strain on local water, sewer, roads, and emergency services in places that had been given no say.
The story of Social Circle, Georgia tells the larger one. It is a small town of roughly 5,000 people in a county where 73% voted for Trump. In February, DHS quietly purchased a warehouse there for $128 million -- nearly five times its $29.4 million assessed value -- with plans to convert it into a detention facility holding up to 10,000 people. That would have tripled the town's population overnight.
The community said no. Town Manager Eric Taylor cut off the federal government's access to water at the warehouse. Residents organized, packed meetings, and flooded their elected officials' offices -- Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and Republican Rep. Mike Collins all got involved. Indivisible Boldly Blue and Indivisible GA 10 led the local fight on the ground. In May, Social Circle became the first small town in the country to sue the federal government over its warehouse detention plans, employing a novel legal strategy.
When the cancellation was announced this week, Taylor told Fox 5 Atlanta: "It's ten-thousand people too many to be housed in a warehouse that's not meant for human habitation. That is a tripling of our city in population literally overnight."
Social Circle is one of seven communities that won. DHS is also walking away from warehouses it had purchased in Romulus, Michigan; Flowery Branch, Georgia; Hamburg and Tremont, Pennsylvania; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Roxbury, New Jersey. The prices the administration paid were staggering -- $129 million in Roxbury for a warehouse assessed at $62 million, $87 million in Hamburg for a building that had sold for $57.5 million in 2024, $145 million in Salt Lake City at a per-square-foot price one local real estate broker called "unheard of" for the market. Many of the sellers were financial institutions and developers with deep ties to the Trump administration.
At a March 3 Senate hearing, Sen. Cory Booker accused DHS of supporting an "incredible empire of for-profit companies that are profiting at rates we've never seen." Now, having spent more than a billion dollars in total, the government will unload these properties -- almost certainly at a substantial loss to the same American taxpayers who paid for them.
The reversal was the product of community uprising on every front -- on a scale far larger than this week's seven cancellations suggest. Before any purchase was even completed, communities had already blocked at least a dozen other proposed warehouse deals, in places from Kansas City, Missouri, to Chester, New York, to Merrimack, New Hampshire. People held protests in freezing cold and brutal summer heat, packed town halls and county commission meetings, and flooded their elected officials with calls. Advocacy organizations and local governments filed wave after wave of lawsuits, many of them challenging the administration's failure to conduct the environmental reviews required by federal law. State governments stepped up too.
In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro fought the Tremont and Hamburg facilities at the state level -- using administrative orders on water, sewage, and fire and life safety codes to demand the plans ICE wouldn't share, and refusing to provide the permits the agency needed. Both Pennsylvania facilities are now on the list of those being abandoned.
In San Antonio and Socorro, Texas; in Surprise, Arizona; in Hagerstown, Maryland, four warehouse projects are still planned -- and four communities are still in the fight. The wins this week show them what is possible.
But the broader battle is far larger than any warehouse. On June 9, Congress passed another $70 billion in immigration enforcement funding through 2029 -- fresh fuel for an expansion the administration is far from abandoning. New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is pivoting to a different model -- expanding contracts with the for-profit prison companies that already run roughly 90 percent of ICE detention. CoreCivic and GEO Group each gave half a million dollars to Trump's inaugural committee. GEO Group's stock has more than doubled since the 2024 election.
The men, women, and children inside that system -- and the millions more it is being built to hold -- are paying the price. The same organizing, lawsuits, and refusals that brought these warehouses down will be needed to bring down what comes after.
As Kim Herdman Shapiro of No ICE NH put it earlier this year, after her own community blocked an ICE warehouse: "This is a victory for us and all of New England, but it is not the end of this fight. Now we take this energy and stand with every other community targeted. We say no to human warehouses."
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To support the communities still fighting these warehouse plans -- and to stand up for the rights of immigrants -- here's how to help:
--> To support the local fights still underway against the four remaining warehouse projects, connect with the grassroots groups leading them -- including Northwest Valley Indivisible in Surprise, Arizona -- https://northwestvalleyindivisible.org -- and the Hagerstown Rapid Response Network in Maryland -- https://www.hagerstownrapidresponse.com -- along with local opposition organizing in San Antonio and Socorro, Texas. To find your local Indivisible chapter or local immigrant rights coalition, visit https://indivisible.org/groups
--> To defend the rights of immigrants in your community, look for an immigrant rights group in your area, or find your local Indivisible chapter at https://indivisible.org/groups
--> To support the ACLU, which has filed lawsuits that helped block several of these warehouse facilities and continues to fight detention conditions and policies nationwide, visit https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights
--> To support the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provides direct legal representation to detained immigrants and conducts oversight of ICE facilities, visit https://immigrantjustice.org/
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For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
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To read more about the defeat of DHS' warehousing initiative in many communities, visit https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/politics/ice-warehouses-immigration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rlA.B5Pa.bOFZ2bawWviw&smid=url-share
To read about the successful revolt against an ICE warehouse in a small town in Georgia, visit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/19/georgia-federal-immigration-detention-center
