Republican lawmakers support mass deportations but don't want ICE facilities in their districts

The Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of a more than 400,000-square-foot warehouse in Surprise has led to protests in the West Valley city. The agency says it plans to turn it into an immigrant detention center.

Among those expressing concern last month was Republican Congressman Paul Gosar. He wrote a letter to then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, saying that while he supports the administration’s immigration policies, he had questions about the facility in his district. He later thanked Noem for her response.

But Gosar is not the only GOP politician who supports the president’s promise of mass deportations only to criticize the feds for planning to put immigration detention facilities in their communities. Similar situations have played out in places like New Hampshire, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, among others.

Ryan Gillespie has been following this. He’s a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel newspaper and spoke with The Show more about it.

He started with whether it’s fair to say that some of these facilities are drawing criticism from politicians who are supportive of the policy — just not in their communities.

Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel

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Full conversation

RYAN GILLESPIE: Yeah, it's, it's an interesting development we've seen around the country. And to be clear, I don't necessarily know if that's true here in Orlando, partially because we are a blue city here in Orlando in the middle of a red state. So our local politicians are by and large all Democrats, our local Congress representatives Democrats, things of that nature.

But obviously we have Republican governor, Republican senators, and I have not been able to get any of them to actually talk about this topic despite my efforts. But yeah, we've seen that around the country is a lot of these, ICE is going around the country looking for these warehouses where they can convert them into detention centers, and they're really all over the place.

But we've seen a congressman from Mississippi have some success in getting ICE to look elsewhere. A Republican mayor in Oklahoma City lobbied against this and was able to get ICE to move along to other places. And a Republican governor in New Hampshire also got involved in convincing ICE that New Hampshire wasn't the best place for one of these.

MARK BRODIE: Is it too simplistic to call this NIMBYism?

GILLESPIE: I don't really know what else to call it, right? Like we see this here, and I'm sure it's not unique to Orlando by any means. But I think by and large, for example, I think most people would say we should support the homeless, we should do more to help the homeless. Until you try to build a homeless shelter near their house, and then there's a problem.

Or I think a lot of people would agree, regardless of your politics, that we should have housing that is affordable. And then if there's an affordable housing development proposed near a neighborhood or something like that, then you get that pushback from people who by and large support that as a policy, just not near them.

So I do think there's some of that, but I think there's also these warehouses are kind of logistical nightmares in a lot of cases. I mean, there are instances where these warehouses could detain more people than the town they're in has residents. And so that creates all sorts of infrastructure concerns. You don't build a warehouse to have 1,500 or more residents, essentially.

There's wastewater concerns, there's water concerns, there's electricity concerns. So it really runs the gamut.

BRODIE: Yeah, it's interesting, some of the concerns that some of these politicians have had. You mentioned logistical concerns, traffic concerns, energy concerns, water concerns. You also sort of have the public safety issue that some folks have brought up. I think some have brought up maybe potential impact on property values, things like that.

I'm curious what you make, and what some of the folks with whom you've spoken about this make of the fact that it's not just one concern, that there are a number of different areas where some of these politicians are saying, "I'm not so sure this is such a great location for this."

GILLESPIE: Yeah, well, if you just think by and large what a warehouse is supposed to be, when you're a local city or county and you approve zoning or you approve a development of a warehouse, what you think you are getting is economic development. You're getting an Amazon or a company like that coming in to occupy 300-and-something thousand square feet. They're going to be moving goods through, through your city. They're going to be employing gobs of people. And generally warehouse jobs are not, you know, they're not bad jobs. They're generally pretty decent paying.

So when you're taking a warehouse off the market essentially to convert it to a detention center, you're losing the tax base that comes with that because federal government wouldn't be paying local taxes on that necessarily.

But you're also, you know, taking potential economic development in a lot of these towns, Orlando being the outlier. We are a major U.S. city. But a lot of these towns that you see this being built in — like Merrimack, New Hampshire, for example —they're not that.

BRODIE: Is it in any way surprising to see the amount of opposition specifically from Republican politicians to some of these facilities, given that in many cases they support the policy, they just don't want it in their district or their town?

GILLESPIE: It was surprising to me. That's, that's why I wrote it. It's hard to get information really about this at all. It's remarkably difficult. ICE is not a federal agency that does a lot of talking to the media, or at least certainly not the local media. As an Orlando-based reporter, I'm not going to be able to get a lot of information out of ICE.

So you defer to federal sources, congressional offices and whatnot. And we're not getting a lot of information here. So some of the documents that we were able to get to do, some of the reporting that I've been able to do on this story story has been from Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte's office in New Hampshire as she was fighting against it.

And I talked to the town manager there in Merrimack, and he was saying that the most important thing they did to defeat the effort was to immediately involve every elected official they could find. And that was a lot of Republicans and Democrats. And in their case, Gov. Ayotte actually met with Kristi Noem when she was still a Homeland Security secretary personally in D.C. and was able to talk her out of this.

So it's pretty interesting and it's why I was really curious here in Florida what the opinion would be of somebody like Sens. Rick Scott or Ashley Moody, who are both Republicans, Trump-aligned, [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis-aligned in Moody's case, that you would venture a guess of maybe what their opinion would be.

But seeing what we've seen around the country, I don't know, I couldn't even begin to tell you what I think their opinion is because I just don't know.

BRODIE: When politicians talk about not wanting these facilities in their towns or in their districts or in their communities, is there a consensus on what type of place is maybe better suited for them? Or is it more of, "I don't care where it goes as long as it's not right here"?

GILLESPIE: Well, it depends who you talk to. If you talk to Democrats, they will just tell you there's no adequate place for this. That this is just not the way that we should go about doing this as a country.

But if you talk to some of the Republicans, even the ones who have opposed this, if you read their letters that they've written or some of their public comments, a lot of their concerns are kind of some of the things I mentioned before, where it's like, "Hey, you're aiming to put this detention facility in a small town with like 3,000 residents, that you're going to use more wastewater at this one address than the rest of the town uses in a day, period."

They don't have the facilities, the infrastructure, the treatment plants and things like that to handle this kind of volume. And in some cases, building a warehouse in a small town is a major economic development opportunity and a major job center in a place that maybe doesn't have a lot of that.

And so then the concern is if you're taking one of those off the market to house ICE detainees, you're taking jobs away from somewhere that they worked so hard to get them there. So that's a lot of the disagreement that we've seen among Republicans. It's not like we're seeing a revolt against the policy so much as maybe about how this specific instance is affecting a specific city or town or congressional district.