They bought the warehouse in secret because they know what happens when you find out

Thirty-three organizations just put the Trump regime on notice that its plan to secretly turn a warehouse into a concentration camp in Romulus, Michigan, is not going to go according to plan. That’s if they still have a plan, except to hide the mass deportations that had been the singular promise and focus of their first year in power.

Activists gathered near the proposed site Monday afternoon to let both the regime and their neighbors know how thoroughly this potential blight on our great state can and must be resisted. And they’re planning to remain visible at 7525 Cogswell Street every Saturday for the foreseeable future, including on the next ‘No Kings’ Day, March 28.

The message, in my mind, is this: Instead of being inured in quiet submission by a few cosmetic headfakes from the White House, we must stop the opening of the ICE Detention Processing Center in any way we can. NOW.

It’s worth pulling the camera back to address the larger issue of the regime’s immigration detention obsession.

Kristi Noem is out at DHS. Corey Lewandowski — her chief adviser, sidepiece, and the fiend personally overseeing the $38 billion warehouse-to-detention-camp conversion scheme — will leave with her, shocking only her husband. Two senior DHS officials told The Atlantic they now expect a slowdown and that a “pause” wouldn’t be a bad thing.

“They’ve had a ridiculous timeline to rush everything through,” one said. “Now everybody’s kind of going back to the drawing board.”

This is a flinch from a regime whose lust for responding to failure with escalation is now meeting the Escalation trap, at home and abroad. This possible retrenchment happened because people of Minneapolis and elsewhere stood up and said, “We, too, are Spartacus.”

DHS had expected the nation in general and Republican-controlled jurisdictions in particular to welcome the warehouse jails and were genuinely surprised by what officials described as good NIMBYism, the rarest kind of NIMBYism. The Department built a $38 billion program on the assumption that communities would be too slow, too divided, or too intimidated to organize before the concrete was poured. The people, instead, rose up. Deals collapsed in Texas, Missouri, Virginia, Utah, New Hampshire, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Tennessee. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. The regime that won an election on immigration enforcement is losing the country, one warehouse fight at a time.

None of this means Romulus or the people who’d be detained inside this potential human warehouse are safe. The building has been bought. The money must be justified.

ICE’s “Detention Reengineering Initiative” — the government’s name for becoming the Amazon Prime of concentration camp systems — calls for 16 processing centers holding 1,000 to 1,500 people each, and 8 large-scale camps holding 7,000 to 10,000. Romulus is one of the processing centers. ICE told the public the facility would hold 500 people. Their own program documents put processing centers at 1,000 to 1,500. Their own engineering standards for 473,000 square feet suggest actual design capacity exceeding 1,600. The public number was never the real number — and neither was the price. DHS paid $34.67 million for the Romulus building, 144 percent above its assessed value. ICE’s statement claimed the facility would generate more than $33 million in tax revenue. Government-owned buildings are exempt from property taxes. Romulus has no city income tax. They lied and overpaid for something taxpayers don’t want or need. Because that’s what they do.

The regime chose secrecy because that’s also what they do. They also know by now what happens when people find out that the Department of “Homeland Security” wants to build a “detention center.” Because, frankly, by now, we know enough.

State Sen. Darrin Camilleri summed up the regime’s play for secrecy: “We have received zero information from ICE and Homeland Security, so we don’t know anything. They have not issued any plans. They have not talked to the city about what they’re trying to do. We literally are completely kept in the dark.” He also called the proposed facility “an ill-constructed jail that would enable ICE to further terrorize our immigrant communities across Southeast Michigan.” The mayor of Romulus learned his city had been acquired as a federal sorting facility because a Crain’s Detroit reporter drove by and saw a DHS sign on the building. ICE sent Romulus a boilerplate economic impact study. When New Hampshire got its version, the town manager noticed it still said “Oklahoma” three times. The public communications plan, as of this week, is just an unfinished FAQ page, a metaphor of such perfection that will belong in the Museum of Tolerance’s future wing on the Trump regime.

Weeks before DHS purchased the building, a Toyota automotive supplier had been planning to move in. The city’s own Building Department had already issued a renovation permit for that use. ICE outbid a manufacturer — at 144% above assessed value — in a floodplain, next to a protected wetland, within two miles of two public schools, without telling a single person in city government it was coming. Someone appears to have attempted to remove the Romulus Building Department signs warning it is “illegal to occupy this building without benefit of a certificate of occupancy.”

The regime bought a building it can’t legally occupy and tried to remove the sign stating as much. Another metaphor of such perfection that I’m beginning to wonder how big that museum wing will be.

You probably know by now this explosion of detention to record numbers, approaching the scope of Japanese-American internment during WW2, under Trump comes from policy (favoring detention over all other options), combined with malice (escalating the brutality of both the kidnapping and resulting imprisonment).

ACLU senior attorney Miriam Aukerman, arguing before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, explained the extrajudicial aims of these paired evils: “It’s the goal of the administration to make people so desperate because they’re detained that they’re gonna leave their families behind. And just leave the country and leave everything they’ve known. Leave their communities… their kids.”

Michigan already knows what this system produces once it’s running.

The North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin — privately run, rurally isolated, the template the regime prefers — grew to nearly 1,000 people by last fall. Over 800 habeas corpus petitions flooded Michigan’s federal courts. Both Republican and Democratic judges alike have continually ruled against the regime’s mockery of the law.

An Eastern District judge wrote that the mandatory detention policy was not only wrong but “fundamentally unfair,” and courts across the state kept citing her.

The administration called those judges “rogue.” DHS’s own statement confirmed, apparently without noticing the confession embedded within it, that “any delays in getting new ICE detention facilities up and running have come from activist judges with bogus environmental rulings or pushback from communities.”

They are telling the people — in a press release — that our strategy works.

Fernando Ramirez Adame had a valid work permit through 2028 when ICE picked him up at an Indiana weigh station. His family had a plan for exactly this moment: voluntary deportation. Don’t fight, don’t spend time inside, just sign the paper and go home to Mexico. At North Lake, Adame asked for the voluntary deportation form. Three months passed. It never came. A Republican-appointed judge finally sent him home — to Fremont, Michigan, less than an hour from the facility that held him.

That is the absurd machinery that grinds up human will that the good people of Romulus are being asked to welcome. And the Coalition to Shut the Camps is speaking for the community’s best intentions by saying: Hell no.

The coalition sent formal intervention letters last week to the five public agencies and regulated utilities with actual authority over whether 7525 Cogswell Street ever opens: the Great Lakes Water Authority, Wayne County, the City of Romulus, DTE Energy, and Michigan EGLE. Every one of those agencies has to say yes before the water runs, the lights come on, and the drains work.

The coalition’s letters to five agencies are the same pressure on the same hinges — and we know it can work because across the country, you can hear the song of hinges breaking under the pressure of the people and their reps. Pennsylvania’s governor wrote to Noem that proposed facilities there would violate legal requirements for public drinking water, sewage, and water pollution, and that state authorities would not issue the required permits. In Social Circle, Georgia, city officials didn’t write a letter. They put a lock on the water meter. The city’s permit allows 1 million gallons a day; the sewer plant processes 660,000 gallons and is already at capacity. DHS’s own infrastructure analysis confirmed the detention center’s daily needs for up to 10,000 “detainees” would exceed both figures. ICE’s response was to assert its design would not affect existing infrastructure “adversely in any way.” The lock is still on the meter.

“ICE does not merely have a compliance problem,” said Alaink Kemple of the Mass Blackout Coalition. “It has a documented record of killing people in custody, sexually abusing children, detaining and deporting American citizens, and defying federal courts. We will not stand in silence as this government builds new, illegal concentration camps to continue what its own judiciary has repeatedly ruled unlawful.”

“We will not allow Donald Trump to build this concentration camp in our backyard and use his secret police to terrorize our community,” said Heather Miller, chair of the Coalition to Shut the Camps. “We will continue to build mass demonstrations and mobilize all across the city of Romulus and the state of Michigan to drive ICE out of our communities for good.”

The Romulus City Council voted unanimously against the facility. The mayor said he will not issue a certificate of occupancy while he holds the office. The Michigan Attorney General told ICE to halt. Thirty-three organizations moved in the same week so that no single agency could act in isolation and claim it didn’t know. Not one of those agencies was consulted when the building was bought. Now they are demanding their founding right to redress their grievances.

The regime is wobbly. But the building is still there, a vacuum of depravity representing, as Andrea Pitzer calls it, a past that has never really gone away. The likely new DHS secretary will likely be the goof with a mullet of a first name, Markwayne Mullin. We know he was only picked for his loyalty to Trump, a vice that becomes more vile with each breath. We know he was picked because the only person Trump could get confirmed at this point would probably have to be a Senator. And any Senator who’d take that job would be by definition the dopiest United States Senator.

And we know the regime wants to at least pretend to be doing something different when it comes to deportations. But we also know that Trump’s obsessions, especially when they’ve mated with Stephen Miller’s obsessions, rarely evaporate. And the biggest fear we all have is that Markwayne is just better at running a concentration camp system under the radar, abjuring all the trollish pomp of Noem, Lewandowski, and Greg Bovino — all flashy, fashy, corrupt scapegoats sent to the Farm-a-Lago in order to create a smokescreen to preserve Stephen Miller and his control of DHS. This is why it has only become more urgent to get Miller out of our government and our lives.

As Markwayne inherits a DHS under scrutiny, a leadership humiliation, and a billion dollars in warehouses that now require permits from agencies formally on the record against these camps, this is the moment when America’s soul will be judged. In the next few months, America will decide if we will step back from this regime’s fully funded intention to put millions of people into camps.

And they may not be wobbly for long, or the wobbliness will soon overcome all of us. The flames of Trump’s narcissistic need to escalate will only be increasingly fed by the failures of his Iran misadventure. That war is a deadly unmooring of civilization that has not benefited anyone not named Netanyahu, Putin, or MBS, while depriving Trump of his favorite two numbers to brag about: the Dow and gas prices.

If any of the purchased warehouses can’t be converted into detention sites, DHS has suggested repurposing them as office space or training facilities. But as long as the system is growing, the concentration camp process continues. Society’s morals and inhibitions, withered by propaganda, can flail into a full collapse, inviting horrors we once thought were confined to history books, Stephen Miller’s vision board, and Oscar winners.

We are in a moment when history, already in decline, can easily nosedive — or pull out of the plunge. We don’t get to decide most of this. But we can put all our weight against the hinges of the growing concentration camp machine until one snaps, and then the next.