New Jersey and Roxbury officials are suing the federal government to stop the Trump administration from converting a massive warehouse in the Morris County town into a large-scale immigration detention center that could open as early as June.
The 67-page complaint filed Friday in federal court accuses the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement of violating four federal laws in their rush to purchase and convert the 470,000 square-foot warehouse off Route 46 into a migrant processing center that could hold as many as 1,500 people at a time.
“This plan won’t make the community or our state safer, and as I’ve said before, we will never just stand by and let this administration violate the rights of New Jerseyans,” Gov. Mikie Sherrill said at a press conference Friday in Newark.
The lawsuit charges that Homeland Security officials bought the Roxbury warehouse and began soliciting construction bids without conducting required environmental reviews or consulting with local officials. The lawsuit notes the building, which is about the size of eight football fields, only has four toilets, one urinal, and five wash basins.
“A logistics center fit for Amazon Prime packages is an unjustifiable location at which to establish a mass immigration detention center covering the 1,000 to 1,500 detainees DHS plans to house in the Roxbury Warehouse,” the lawsuit states.
According to the filing, the federal government plans to execute a contract for its renovation by the end of March, with work to be completed within 90 days. It purchased the warehouse from its prior owners last month.
The lawsuit is just the latest in a flurry of legal and executive actions Sherrill, a Democrat, has taken that targets the Trump administration since she took office on Jan. 20. Sherill has urged residents to document the actions of ICE agents and signed an executive order barring ICE agents from certain state property, a directive that prompted a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The proposed ICE processing center in Roxbury has resulted in bipartisan opposition, with the town’s Republican leaders saying the location is not appropriate for a facility of its size. This week, U.S. Sen Andy Kim (D) told the new acting Homeland Security director that Roxbury does not have the resources to handle the detention center.
In a statement, Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo commended state officials for joining the town in the complaint.
“We remain confident that, through this process, it will be clearly demonstrated that this location is not appropriate for a facility of this nature, given the significant impacts it would have on our residents, local resources, and the surrounding environment,” Potillo said.
State Sen. Anthony Bucco (R-Morris), who serves as the town’s attorney, did not respond to a request for comment. His law firm is representing the city in the matter, though Bucco’s name is not on Friday’s filing.
On Friday in Newark, Sherrill and Attorney General Jen Davenport criticized the proposed facility as a “poorly thought out, chaotic idea.”
“But it doesn’t just violate common sense, it violates federal law, not to mention zoning and building codes that any other property owner would have to abide by,” Sherrill said. “The administration may think it’s above the law, but it will soon find out that that is not the case.”
A request for comment from the Trump administration was not returned.
Davenport laid out some of the major concerns in the lawsuit, including environmental issues. She said the federal government has failed to do the “bare minimum” environmental assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act. She also said that under the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, the federal government must account for local viewpoints, and town officials were not notified of the plan until the warehouse purchase was complete.
Sherrill said the processing center would create waste 15 times the site’s approved wastewater capacity, which she said could create permanent damage and sewage overflow into nearby waterways, including Lake Hopatcong. She also noted that the area is part of the Highlands region, which provides drinking water for 70% of the state’s residents.
The warehouse sits near the intersection of Routes 46 and 80, which has seen multiple fatal crashes over the years. Converting the warehouse into a detention center would add nearly 500 new vehicle trips during the peak morning rush, nearly seven times the volume the site was designed to handle, the complaint states.
The federal government has not offered a plan to expand road capacity for extra ICE activity or the 1,300 staffers who would pass through, Sherrill said. The lawsuit also notes that Roxbury, a town of 23,000 people, relies on volunteer emergency medical services and has only two ambulances.
The Department of Homeland Security had planned to convert a New Hampshire warehouse into an ICE facility but dropped those plans after the state’s Republican governor raised objections, the lawsuit notes.
William Angus is a local activist with the No ICE North Jersey Alliance who has planned protests related to the warehouse sale. Angus said that while the lawsuit is “extremely important, it does not begin to address the larger problem of ICE detention centers overall.”
“Our work continues, advocating not only for compliance with existing statues, but for protecting civil liberties and human rights — which matter in Roxbury just as much as in every other community,” he said in a statement.
The Roxbury center would be the second migrant jail to open in New Jersey during Trump’s second term, and the largest detention center in the state. There are two other detention centers open in the state: Delaney Hall in Newark, which houses over 1,000 detainees, and Elizabeth Detention Center, which has a capacity of about 300 beds.
