There are various ways that the people of Texas are using to fight back against ICE agents. In addition to staging various protests, many communities in Texas are pressuring warehouse owners not to collaborate with or assist DHS and ICE agents. If you don’t know, recently DHS has been eyeing a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Hutchins, which they hoped to use as a detention center. As if that wasn’t outrageous enough, this conversion would use taxpayers’ money.
The building itself was expected to house nine thousand detainees, which was one thousand people over the number of townspeople who live in the area. Critics argued that having a detention center in this small Texas town didn’t make sense. For one, this warehouse should only be used for storage, and some Texas citizens even said during a public hearing how ridiculous it was for Hutchins to have a detention center before even having a grocery store.
Some people even pointed out how troubling the situation was, with the acting ICE director saying that they wanted to run ICE more like Amazon and treat detainees less like humans and more like packages. Though the people of Hutchins managed to fight back against having a detention center built in their small town, in another region in Texas some warehouse owners have already folded to DHS and ICE agents.
It wasn’t just Texas, either, as many other states also have new ICE detention centers being built, which ICE hopes will be able to host 80,000 detainees. The fight is still far from over, but many people felt that this was still a victory worth celebrating.“Good for them! Patriots.” one user said.
Others remarked that stopping ICE from obtaining more warehouses to convert into detention centers was one of the best methods to fight back. “Refusing to sell warehouses to ICE might actually be a better way to put a wrench in whatever their plan is than burning the warehouses. It’s obvious that ICE is using those warehouses for human trafficking purposes.” one Redditor wrote.
Some users, however, said that this would be an uphill fight, as DHS and ICE were given a lot of funding thanks to Trump’s The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. What happened in this small town in Texas could be a small stumbling block for ICE. One user wrote:
“The issue is that there’s a bunch of corporate warehouses like this one up for sale and many have been up for sale not being used for years, causing a serious financial incentive to sell to DHS or a shell company. There needs to be some sort of alternative option whether it’s rebuilding the structure into something other than a warehouse, the local or state governments offering tax-exempt status on the unused buildings, etc., because it is admittedly pretty expensive for these companies to be owning massive empty warehouses and paying maintenance and taxes without any income generated.”
