Following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the United States arrested and forcibly relocated 120,000 people of Japanese descent to a series of internment camps, violating their civil and constitutional rights. Motivated by fear, it was an act of lasting national shame.
The federal government is poised to repeat that inhumane cruelty by building a national network of detention centers to house the tens of thousands of people swept up in the Trump administration’s ongoing and increasingly brutal immigration campaign.
That includes in Virginia, where the Department of Homeland Security proposed purchasing a 550,000-square-foot building in Hanover County to use as a processing center for deportations. The owner, a Canadian-based development company, announced Friday it would not proceed with the sale, but the commonwealth must be vigilant should DHS continue its hunt for property here.
Flush with about $190 billion in funding from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act passed by congressional Republicans last summer, DHS is pursuing a radical expansion of immigration arrests, detention and deportation.
The GOP spending bill gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $75 billion in additional money on top of the agency’s annual $10 billion budget, making it by far the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency. It also designated $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities.
According to December reporting in the Washington Post, DHS intends to establish a network of warehouses across the country to hold as many as 80,000 people at a time.
The proposed Hanover County warehouse was positioned to be a key cog in that system. Facilities of its size could house between 5,000 and 10,000 detainees; others are planned for Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. The large processing centers would be fed by 16 smaller ones with a capacity of about 1,500 people each.
If holding people in warehouses for indeterminate periods seems excessively cruel and inhumane, that seems to be the point. The public rejects this in growing numbers and, despite what the president and administration officials insist, that pushback isn’t about immigration enforcement itself.
Former President Barack Obama deported an estimated 3.1 million people during his eight years in office without widespread opposition, and public support for removing foreign criminals — “the worst of the worst,” to use Trump’s phrasing from the campaign trail — was robust enough to return Trump to the White House in 2024.
But what the administration said it would do deviates sharply from what’s played out in places such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. Federal agents have made indiscriminate arrests — including of U.S. citizens and legal, lawful residents — while brutalizing observers and journalists exercising their constitutional rights. People have been held for days or weeks without being charged with crimes and without access to legal representation as the law demands.
Agents have shot at least 13 people since September, including the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and injured untold more. They reject any attempt at legal oversight; a federal judge this week said ICE has violated at least 96 court orders in 74 cases nationwide. And it’s clear that this is all an extension of the president’s campaign promises of retribution, as operations have been focused on states Trump didn’t win and which are led by Democrats.
Despite efforts to prevent reporting about federal detention facilities, The Guardian found this month that at least 32 people detained by ICE died while in custody last year, and at least eight more have died in the new year. The ACLU and other advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, leveling allegations of inhumane treatment and deplorable conditions in those facilities.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. “Like Prime, but with human beings.”
That’s what DHS wants to bring to Virginia with the vast expansion of its detention network. The development company’s Friday announcement appears to offer a reprieve, but the commonwealth must be resolute in opposition should DHS persist or seek alternative sites here.
