Surprise residents who were angry about the federal government turning a local warehouse into an immigration detention center can take a sigh of relief this week. That’s because federal authorities have agreed to hold off on their conversion of the warehouse until it completes an environmental review.
The agreement comes months after Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued the government over the proposed warehouse — and it’s just the latest news in the ongoing debate over the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to convert massive warehouses like this into ICE detention centers.
Michael Wriston broke the story for Project Salt Box.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Michael.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Hey, good morning. Happy to be here.
LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So, this is kind of the latest move in this ongoing court battle between the Arizona AG and DHS over this Surprise warehouse, which sparked so much outrage when people found out what was supposed to happen there. Now, they’ve asked the judge to pause the case?
MICHAEL WRISTON: They have, yes.
LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about about what they’re asking there, where where the case stands now.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Yeah, so recently, within the last couple of weeks, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that they are planning to actually offload a number of these warehouses — seven of them.
Unfortunately, Surprise is not one of the ones that they’re looking to offload. But, with that renewed attention to the warehouse initiative and and sort of the step back on DHS’s part, in Surprise, the Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security have reached an agreement that they would essentially pause the case, and that the, you know, ICE and their inspectors would have to go through and do a a rigorous National Environmental Policy Act review, and and generate what is called a Record of Environmental Consideration, that goes above and beyond what they did a couple of months ago. And the idea there is they need to they need to do a better job determining if there are any environmental impacts, not just to the people that live in Surprise, but to any potential people that would be housed inside that warehouse.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. So, back up a minute and remind us what the Attorney General of Arizona argued when she sued DHS over this in April. Her argument, a lot of it had to do with this lack of an environmental review, right?
MICHAEL WRISTON: Right, yeah. So, the concern that came out of the the initial filing that that she filed months ago was that when ICE bought the warehouse, they did not do a thorough enough job investigating the environmental impacts, the policies and procedures that the federal government passed as law, that dictate how they would purchase the property and then use the property down the line.
In the filings that DHS subsequently submitted, the documents that they released, it shows that, you know, they really, you know, I hesitate to use the word pencil-whipped, but they did rush through a lot of the environmental considerations. Some of them were completed in as little as, you know, a couple of hours on the day that the property was bought, or within close proximity to the the filing of the lawsuit.
So, it looks like that process was rushed and, in some cases, skipped. One of the glaring omissions was the warehouse sits across the street from a chemical storage site, and none of that shows up in the in the Record of Environmental Consideration that ICE initially did.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, so talk a little bit more for us, Michael, about what this kind of environmental review might entail. Like, you’re getting at it’s more than, you know, pollution and water concerns.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Right. So, the environmental consideration would take into effect, or take into consideration, any impact to human habitations stemming from a change in use. So, right now, the warehouse is an industrial shell. It’s plumbed and outfitted to basically service freight, storage. It has just a few a few toilets, not a lot of sinks. So, obviously, there’s the water consideration. What would it take to convert this warehouse into something that could with that could hold 1,500 or more human beings? So, obviously, there’s water, that’s a concern there.
But then they would also have to look at, you know, air conditioning, what would the impact be if they had to better ventilate this, are there ground chemicals, are there, you know, impacts on native species, impacts on waterways and tributaries to other water sources, proximity to chemicals or or things that could infiltrate the soil, the water, the food supplies, etc.?
So, it it is a wide-ranging, very broad scope survey of all things environmental, and that’s just part of it. The other part, of course, is the procedural act — how did ICE go about purchasing it, and are they following federal guidelines for doing this conversion, or are they sidestepping them?
LAUREN GILGER: Right. Let me let me back up for a moment to, Michael, and just talk a little bit about what kind of reaction this got from many, many residents in Surprise when folks found out the plans for this giant warehouse, that it was planned to hold many, many migrants at some point.
What did folks have to say? And, and this was not rare, we should say. This happened in many places around the country where where ICE purchased these warehouses.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Right, I would I would classify it in Surprise and in other places as full-throated, bipartisan outrage. I mean, you know, on on the left side of the political spectrum, you had people that are very clearly and evidently upset about the human rights implications of housing human beings in a warehouse, or in a facility that wasn’t built to purpose for detention.
And then on the right, you had people that were very upset about the financial implications, mispenditure of, you know, government funding that inevitably ended up being useless or or not necessarily seen through to its purpose. So, bipartisan outrage. You’ve seen deep coalitions of people across the both aisles showing up to fight this. And, yeah, Surprise was a great example because you had you had high schoolers, you know, you had people that were very early, you know, very early in their lives coming forward and dedicating themselves to the cause of opposition. And that has continued on.
I mean, even now, as they’re taking a step back, it hasn’t diminished that that spirit of oversight that we’ve seen in folks that are in that community. They are keeping their eye open that that this environmental review is done adequately, that no corners are cut, and I don’t see the pressure being let off. I think that that folks on the ground are going to see it all the way through to the end.
LAUREN GILGER: Last minute here for you, Michael. Project Salt Box has been tracking 11 of warehouses like this around the country that DHS bought up, planned to make into immigration detention facilities. As you mentioned, some of those are not going to go forward at this point. It sounds like many have been delayed or abandoned.
Can you kind of summarize the overall picture right now in terms of DHS’s plans to to turn these warehouses into immigration holding or detention detention facilities?
MICHAEL WRISTON: So, of the 11 that they bought for $1.07 billion, seven are are targeted for offload. They’re going to sell those or transition those to other federal departments for use.
Of the remaining four, which are Surprise, Arizona; Williamsport, Maryland; and two in Texas, in El Paso and San Antonio; one of those, El Paso, is going to be converted into ICE office and training space. It will not be used for migrant detention or large-scale detention. There are no announced plans for San Antonio at this time. Williamsport is under a preliminary injunction facing a very similar NEPA requirement as Surprise. And Surprise, obviously, is now settled with the AG that they are going to do that same NEPA review. So, despite owning 11 properties outright, they’ve only really got plans for one.
LAUREN GILGER: Okay. All right. Michael Wriston with Project Salt Box, joining us to talk about the latest on this Surprise warehouse. Michael, thank you very much for coming back on The Show. I appreciate it.
MICHAEL WRISTON: Thank you.
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