On September 4, masked immigration agents swept through Dover, New Jersey, and cornered a 59-year-old worker against a wall. His daughter recognized him in a video while getting her children ready for school. At 8:25 that morning, he called her sounding disoriented and said he was handcuffed in some kind of jail. She told NPR, which authenticated the raid videos, that she has not spoken with him since.
NPR traced the route that followed. A witness tailed a vehicle carrying detained people up Route 46 and watched it turn onto the road leading to a federal warehouse in Roxbury. A man NPR later located in Honduras said agents had taken him there after the Dover raid. He and about nine other men spent hours handcuffed in the parking lot, he said. Frightened and in shock, he signed deportation papers that he regretted by the next morning.
ICE bought that warehouse to turn it into a detention center. Then a lawsuit led to a court-ordered freeze on the conversion. Now people say ICE used the property for detention anyway.
The court order left ICE a sliver of ambiguity
The legal record is narrower than the phrase “a judge shut it down.” In a May 12 stipulation approved by the federal court, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security agreed not to undertake work toward converting the Roxbury warehouse into a detention center while an environmental assessment was pending. The agreement allowed only listed security and maintenance activity, such as fencing, cameras, lighting, alarm systems, cleaning and basic utility work.
The order did not expressly say that ICE could never bring a detained person onto the property. Harvard law professor Andrew Mergen, a former Justice Department environmental lawyer, told NPR that brief holding may therefore fall outside the conversion ban. He also named the dodge: the Trump administration had “cleverly elided” what the community was trying to prevent.
On September 15, News 12 New Jersey reported that the state attorney general was reviewing allegations about detainees at the warehouse. A civil rights lawyer relayed one man’s account of being held there for an hour or two before transfer. NPR then found another deported man who gave a firsthand account and tied it to video, witness testimony and the 8:25 timeline from the Dover raid.
DHS had a chance to clear this up. It did not answer NPR’s direct question about whether people were held at Roxbury. Instead, the department sent a stock statement saying immigrants “can choose to leave detention by being deported.” That is a grotesque definition of choice for a man who says he signed papers while scared, in shock and handcuffed in a parking lot.
DHS spent a billion dollars on warehouse detention
Roxbury belongs to a larger spree. The Associated Press reported that DHS spent $1.074 billion on 11 warehouses during the final months of Kristi Noem’s tenure, with plans to expand immigration detention on a massive scale. Project SaltBox compared deeds, tax records and commercial sales data and found that DHS paid above the most recent valuation at every site. Tax assessments and market appraisals measure different things. Gaps this large still demand scrutiny.
In Socorro, Texas, DHS paid $123 million for property last valued at about $11 million. In Flowery Branch, Georgia, it paid $68 million for a site assessed at $400,000. The Roxbury warehouse cost $129.3 million, according to AP. New Jersey’s complaint said the building had four toilets for a planned population of 1,500 detainees and called it a logistics center fit for packages, not people.
The DHS inspector general opened an investigation into whether the program was wasteful, according to AP. The May order shows how little planning preceded the spending. The government bought an industrial shell first and agreed to conduct the required environmental review later.
The cruelty allegation fits the facility DHS chose
An anonymous contractor told NPR that his company proposed FEMA-style camps in Texas as a more humane alternative. He said a DHS deputy director rejected the idea and conveyed that White House adviser Stephen Miller did not want comfortable or humane facilities. Miller was not in the meeting, and the contractor had never spoken with him. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called the account false and defamatory hearsay.
NPR also spoke with a former DHS official from Trump’s first term who said higher-ups often wanted harsh detention conditions put on display. That source did not claim to have attended the contractor’s meeting and cannot prove that Miller issued a directive. The second account gives the allegation context without establishing that Miller personally gave the order.
The facility itself shows what DHS was willing to build. The government bought an industrial warehouse with four toilets for a proposed 1,500-person detention center. The contractor said every DHS employee his company spoke with opposed the warehouse plan. Then Secretary Markwayne Mullin celebrated ICE’s 50,925 arrests in August as the agency’s third straight monthly record. When asked whether handcuffed people had been taken to Roxbury, DHS answered with a slogan about choosing deportation.
A loophole cannot make detention disappear
ICE can argue that the court order controls work toward conversion, not every temporary use of federal property. Mergen acknowledged that this reading may survive legal scrutiny. The people held in that parking lot were still detained. The label on the building did not change their confinement.
Using a building the government already owns might sound cheaper than finding another site. The math says otherwise. DHS committed more than $1 billion to warehouses before completing the reviews needed to convert them, and it paid above the latest recorded valuation at every site Project SaltBox examined. Using Roxbury now does not rescue that spending. It turns a badly planned purchase into a place where frightened people can be held beyond public view.
Dover council member Sandra Wittner told NPR that Congress needed to conduct an oversight visit “yesterday.” At an empty diner, an unnamed waitress asked the question DHS refused to answer: “Do you know where they took those men?”
The available evidence points to Roxbury. ICE has had every opportunity to deny it. The court order left a gap between converting the warehouse and using it, and ICE has not explained why detained men were taken there. That ambiguity may matter in court. The men in cuffs experienced detention, whatever category ICE puts on the building.