An eight-month effort to stop the Trump administration’s plan to turn industrial warehouses into mass detention camps has proven massively successful, with all but one of the 23 selected locations abandoned or paused indefinitely.
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) announced the most recent closure on August 11: a planned detention center just outside Socorro, Texas, that would have been the largest in the country. The 1 million-square-foot industrial park, made up of three warehouses, was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security for $123 million in February. The plan sounded straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel: remodel the buildings into an Amazon-style distribution center — “Prime, but with human beings,” according to former ICE Director Todd Lyons.
“I am really proud of the way the community came together. Early on, the city of Socorro voted to create a moratorium on this and other projects,” said Escobar. “This was a priority for me and my team. We did a lot of work, elevating the voices of the community, ensuring that the decision makers at the highest levels of the federal government understood the significant challenges that having a detention facility at Socorro would create, and we spent a lot of time working various processes to get to this end result.”
The Socorro complex was one of 11 warehouse sites the Trump administration purchased for a combined $1 billion, with the express purpose of holding people detained by ICE indefinitely. Eleven other locations were in the early stages of development, but swift, visceral opposition from local residents killed those projects before sites could be purchased. Only one facility is still in the works: a 64,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, that officials expect to open in Spring 2027. Two other purchased sites, one in Arizona and another in Maryland, are paused indefinitely due to lawsuits brought by the states’ attorneys general.
A searchable map of all 23 locations, including their current status, can be found here.
The fire sale of seven warehouses, along with the uncertain future of the few sites still in DHS’ possession, marks the end of an era of aggressively rapid anti-immigration expansion spearheaded by Trump advisor Stephen Miller. In Trump’s first year back in office, Miller sought to deport one million people, strip citizenship from millions more, and develop a national mass incarceration network to hold whoever stood in his way. Public opinion on the administration’s handling of immigration quickly soured as Miller’s efforts resulted in the illegal detention and deportation of citizens and noncitizens alike, inhumane conditions at detention centers, and warzone-style military operations in US cities politically opposed to the president.
The breaking point came in January 2026, when ICE agents participating in Operation Metro Surge killed two US citizens, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Protests erupted nationwide, fueled further by news that the Trump administration planned to accelerate its efforts with its warehouse detention plans. Once the locations of the warehouses became public, they became rallying points for activists, who effectively pressured local leaders and warehouse owners to block DHS from turning the sites into detention camps.
Within a month, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired, and her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, announced that the warehouse plan was on hold. The project has since been slowly dismantled, and activists are now working to ensure the remaining DHS-owned sites in Arizona, Maryland, and Texas meet the same fate as the complex in Socorro.
“DHS didn’t do this because they wanted to,” said Brent Peak, Co-Chair of Arizona’s Northwest Valley Indivisible. “This is a real win. It is not the end of the fight though, and we’re not walking away until this prison camp is shut down for good.”
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