Republican lawmakers are dealing with tensions between local elected officials and the Trump administration over moves to transform warehouses in their districts into immigrant detention centers.
Reps. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania and Paul Gosar of Arizona said they will spend their recess week meeting with leaders in their districts taken aback by the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of three warehouses in the two states totaling $277 million. Republican lawmakers in Georgia and Mississippi, too, have been lobbying the administration to change its plans.
Meuser, who served as the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania co-chair, told NOTUS he’s been speaking with DHS officials every day about local concerns that the two facilities the agency purchased in Berks County and Schuylkill County could put a strain on public infrastructure, security and jobs.
“We’re going to work it out to make it as nonnegative of an impact and, hopefully, a very positive impact on my district,” he said.
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DHS’s push to expand its detention footprint through warehouses, with plans to hold between 1,500 and 8,500 people in the GOP districts, has been met with local opposition.
During county commission meetings, officials of the Schuylkill County township, where DHS has purchased a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse, said the sewer system can’t handle an influx of thousands of people. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania wrote that his constituents are also concerned about the economic impact; the federal government’s purchase of the two warehouses translated to a combined loss of $1.6 million in tax revenue per year for the counties, Fetterman said.
“I don’t know if it’s the right location or if there’s a better location, they did all the analysis there,” Meuser said. He said he planned to visit the sites next week.
The situation has put Republican lawmakers in a tenuous yet somewhat familiar position, as they attempt to seek information and changes from the Trump administration while maintaining public support for the president’s agenda. Republican lawmakers found themselves doing the same thing when the administration’s cuts to federal funding and the federal workforce hit home. This time, however, their concerns are regarding the administration’s biggest priority: deportations.
Trying to get answers from the agency hasn’t been straightforward for all lawmakers. Gosar told NOTUS that he had given DHS officials six days as of last Tuesday to respond to his questions about the scope of the 1,500-bed processing center in Surprise, Arizona.
“I’ll climb the ladder, even talking to the president about it,” Gosar said of his next steps if DHS doesn’t respond to his list of questions about the potential strain on local infrastructure.
The Surprise city government released a statement on Jan. 30 that said its officials hadn’t been notified about the $70 million purchase of a 418,000-square-foot property.
“My thing is: ask for permission, don’t ask for forgiveness,” Gosar said.
Ultimately, Gosar said he didn’t know if he supported the warehouse in his district.
“I don’t know that. I want to see the process,” he said.
One Republican has already gotten federal officials to reverse course. In Mississippi, Sen. Roger Wicker’s opposition to a proposed 8,500-bed detention center in Byhalia led to the homeland security secretary “agreeing to look elsewhere,” the senator said in a statement on X last week, following a letter from Wicker and subsequent phone call.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency had no detention centers to announce in Mississippi.
“I relayed to her the opposition of local elected and zoning officials as well as economic development concerns,” Wicker wrote.
Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia, who is running for Senate, is in a similar situation. DHS purchased a warehouse in his district in the city of Social Circle that would house double the city’s population.
Collins, an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, “shares the same concerns as the residents and leaders of Social Circle that the city may not have the facilities or infrastructure this development would require,” his spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.
“He has brokered communication between ICE and city officials so these concerns can be addressed,” the statement continued.
In a Facebook post on Feb. 4, Collins wrote that following a briefing from ICE on the proposed facility, although he was “aligned with the mission of ICE,” he had “asked DHS to continue evaluating the impacts that the facility would have on Social Circle and to ensure we can accomplish the mission without negatively impacting the community.”
A DHS spokesperson said the Social Circle detention center would bring 9,800 jobs to the area.
Democrats with proposed warehouses in their districts have been rallying against them for months, with multiple lawmakers telling NOTUS that it’s been almost impossible to get information from DHS, even after repeated requests.
At the end of January, Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona told NOTUS that in response to a letter asking about rumors of a proposed new detention center in her district, DHS told her office that “they would not be sharing any plans whatsoever about what they have in the works or anywhere else in the country,” even if the plans involved her distinct.
“To what we know, there’s nothing right now, but again, we don’t really know,” Ansari said.
When asked about the concerns from GOP officials, the DHS spokesperson said in a statement: “Secretary Noem has stated that she is willing to work with officials on both sides of the aisle to expand detention space to help ICE law enforcement carry out the largest deportation effort in American history.”
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