“ICE Bought a Warehouse in a Conservative New Jersey Town. Locals Are Now Fighting Back.”
This is a fascinating story from Roxbury, up in Morris County near, like, Lake Hopatcong. (Take 80 west toward Parsippany, then just keep going.)
The township’s all-Republican council recently “passed a resolution affirming that it ‘unequivocally opposes’ modifying town warehouses for ICE use.” That resolution doesn’t matter much since the town is outgunned by the massive, overfunded federal bureaucracy of ICE, which already bought a large warehouse in town, intending to turn it into a detention camp for undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, citizens with accents, and all the other sorts of non-white folks they’ve been rounding up and shipping off to such places for the last year and a half.
ICE paid $129 million for the warehouse “double its assessed value,” because — thanks to the “Big Beautiful Bill” — the agency has tens of billions of unspecified taxpayer dollars to spend however it wants. That sale meant a big payday for the Texas-based real estate speculators who purchased the vacant property a few years back, but it’s going to cost Roxbury Township about $85 million in tax revenue over the next 30 years.
Lauren Gill’s article for Bolts gets into all of the valid, serious concerns that local residents have for “unequivocally opposing” the plan to turn this warehouse into an ICE facility. A lot of this is a form of NIMBYism — “Not in My Back Yard.” NIMBYism is always suspect, since it tends to put the emphasis on the “M,” with the only concern being that this is happening in MY neighborhood. That can be frustrating to deal with when the proposed development is something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere, in anyone’s back yard. And there seems to be a lot of that me-first, me-only focus to Roxbury’s opposition to this proposed ICE facility. Locals don’t want to see their town turn into, say, Rahway.
So there’s a lot of NIMBYism driving this local opposition — “… concerns about what it will mean for the environment, traffic, and property values. One resident who spoke at the January meeting said she was worried the facility would affect her ability to sell her home.”
But, again, those concerns are also not wrong. This facility will make traffic worse and it will have a detrimental effect on property values — especially when all that lost local tax revenue starts hurting the local school system.
And the environmental concerns are large and not exclusively local. I mentioned that Roxbury is near Hopatcong not just because it’s the closest I’ve ever been to Roxbury or because it’s fun to say, but because this is the part of Jersey that most of the state’s water comes from:
The warehouse is located in New Jersey’s Highlands region, a bucolic 1,300-square-mile stretch in the northern part of the state that spans from the Delaware River in the west, all the way to the New York border. The area is protected under 2004 legislation that created rules for water and wastewater usage in the area and limited development. Despite this, DHS in a January letter to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), described extensive plans to transform the warehouse, including upgrading existing water and sewage systems or installing new ones.
The region is overseen by the New Jersey Highlands Water Protection and Planning Council, a body in charge of reviewing development applications for compliance with the legislation. Ben Spinelli, executive director of the council, told Bolts that the warehouse should have never been built in the first place because of its proximity to vernal pools and forest that are key to maintaining the quality and quantity of water that feeds into the state’s drinking water supply.
… The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility.
So local residents will likely end up paying higher water bills and also worrying about what they’re swimming in the next time they go to Lake Hopatcong.
You’ll notice, of course, that we have not yet mentioned the biggest, most important reason that anyone, anywhere, and everyone, everywhere, ought to be opposed to ICE detention centers like the one proposed for this former warehouse in Roxbury. None of this local opposition has mentioned that this is a crime against humanity, a lawless violation of human rights, and a monstrous cruelty driven by a racist ideology of ethnic exclusivity and ethnic supremacy.
This is the part of Gill’s piece I find most interesting:
The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. …
“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts.
On Feb. 28, members of Project NINJA organized a public protest against the Roxbury ICE facility in coordination with 22 other cities around the country where similar facilities are being proposed. Still, Angus said, the group’s concerns don’t resonate with everyone in town.
“I can very vigorously argue about the humanitarian side of why this is wrong … but with some people, that argument has no sway,” said Angus. “So we have to focus on the issues that will speak to those people, because at the end of the day, there are many good reasons—from the environmental to the water and the sewer—that make this a bad fit for the town, regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum.”
This recalls that wave of conversations a few years back captured in that viral tweet about “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” Angus recognizes that his humanitarian argument ought to “hold sway.” But he also understands that, for many of his neighbors, it doesn’t. Rather than getting stuck in the bewildering frustration of that, banging his head against that brick wall, he instead seeks to find “issues that will speak to those people.” Saving the souls of the seven MAGA members of the town council might be a nice added bonus, but it’s not the main goal here, which is to stop this warehouse from turning into a concentration camp.
Maybe some day Jesus will appear to those Republican council members in a blinding light, knocking them off their feet and bellowing “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” and they’ll have a change of heart. But that’s between them and Jesus. It’s not William Angus’s job or my job or yours. Our job, until then, is to find whatever argument we can that will speak to them, even if that means bracketing the paramount issue of basic justice to focus on things like how living in the shadow of a concentration camp is like to affect the resale value of your home.
I also think that persuading local residents who do not support or even understand the moral argument against this ICE facility to oppose it for other reasons may make them more receptive to those moral arguments later, down the line. This is partly because it builds connections between them and their neighbors who support groups like NINJA — making it harder for them to dismiss such people and their views. But mainly it reduces their investment in and lockstep identification with the MAGA agenda of ethnic cleansing.
We humans may be totally depraved sinners incapable of redeeming ourselves until grace makes us receptive to the recognition of our own utter unworthiness, but because of all of that most of us also resist the kind of dramatic Damascus Road or 12 Steps conversion that forces us to confront and fully own up to our own wickedness. We may like to sing “Amazing Grace,” because it’s pretty and it’s uplifting, but none of us really ever wants to think of ourselves as “blind” or “lost” or “wretched.” Unless a seed dies and is planted, etc., but as much as we humans may be utterly dependent on saving grace, we also seem to require some measure of saving face. The ability to tell yourself that — whatever else you misunderstood or voted for or identified with or otherwise got terribly, horribly wrong — you at least were “unequivocally opposed” to this facility, for whatever reason, is the kind of face-saving knowledge that sometimes makes redemption seem more like a possibility that you might survive and, thus, more like a possibility that you might consider choosing.
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