The movement in Metro Detroit fighting ICE and Trump’s reactionary agenda has scored an important victory with the news that the agency has given up on its plan to build a new detention center in Romulus. Instead, ICE will be selling the property, one of 11 facilities purchased by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier in the year in an effort to expand deportations. Along with the facility in Romulus, ICE has also decided to “offload” seven other buildings that they plan to sell or give to other federal agencies.
This decision is a major reversal of its proposed plans to build more infrastructure that would allow it to dramatically increase the scope and scale of its deportation efforts. Faced with a growing and popular resistance movement against its inhumane and draconian immigration agenda, ICE and the Trump administration are now in a weakened position.
ICE’s decision to not move forward with these detention centers demonstrates the impact of the class struggle that erupted in Minneapolis which brought about a tactical defeat of Trump’s war on immigrants. While Trump hasn’t abandoned his vicious anti-immigrant agenda — as shown in Republicans’ recent maneuvering to pass $70 billion in funding for DHS — Minneapolis fueled outrage against the Right’s most extreme attacks, bringing broader sectors into the movement for immigrant rights. This has forced DHS to be less public in its attacks on immigrants to avoid another flare-up of resistance and immigrant solidarity.
These events have strengthened the work many communities across the country have been doing to expose their local ICE detention centers. In Michigan, organizers have been holding weekly protests at the proposed detention center in Romulus, which has been part of a broader effort to organize against ICE operations and expansion in the Metro Detroit area. These protests, bolstered by the greater scrutiny on ICE post-Minneapolis, played an important role making DHS decide that ICE detention in Romulus was too risky an operation to maintain.
New Jersey Reignites the Fight Against ICE
The national fight against ICE was also reignited recently in Newark, New Jersey with the mobilizations at Delaney Hall in response to a hunger and labor strike launched by around 300 immigrants imprisoned inside of the detention center. Hundreds gathered outside the facility, standing up against federal agents and the state police who attacked the mobilizations in a failed effort to get the movement to back down. Instead of suppressing the protests, the news garnered national attention, fueling outrage at the state’s Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, for siding with ICE against protesters, and drawing in more support from New York, Pennsylvania, and other states, including Minnesota.
New Jersey was also slated to be the site of a massive warehouse for ICE detention, and the agency had already purchased a warehouse in Roxbury, located in one of the more rural and right-wing parts of the state. However, shortly after news broke of the facility, both liberal and conservative elements in the area forcefully pushed back. A protest organized by the North NJ chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, along with more liberal local organizations, drew hundreds in opposition — a huge show of force in a state where protests even in cities like Newark and Jersey City rarely break 100. The Roxbury warehouse is one of the seven properties ICE is planning to sell.
The fight against ICE detention centers in New Jersey, which has been ongoing for decades, shows the potential the immigrant rights movement has to beat back ICE. This is a state which forced three ICE detention centers to close in 2021. But it is also an example of the setbacks that come when our movement loses sight of its own power and looks to the Democrats and courts to defend our rights. This was shown in 2023 when Biden aligned with a private prison company to reverse a state law against private prisons, paving the way for Delaney Hall to open a year later.
Confronting ICE with Independent Organizing
The attack on immigrant communities is a bipartisan effort that requires politically independent, bottom-up organizing to successfully resist it. The announcement of ICE giving up its efforts to build new detention centers in Romulus, Roxbury, and elsewhere is proof of that. It is also proof that the movement does not have to elect more Democrats in order to secure important wins.
To highlight the continued organizing efforts to confront ICE — which includes mutual aid efforts to help families affected by ICE, campaigns to get people out of detention, solidarity actions with people who are in detention, and exposing ICE activity — a coalition of organizations will be holding a public tribunal to expose the agency’s activity in Metro Detroit.
While the news of ICE’s reversal is an important achievement, the movement needs to continue to grow. Not only do we need to strengthen our fight to abolish ICE and shut down all detention centers, we need to advance a struggle for the full rights of immigrants to be able to live and work without fear and have access to legal, political, and civil rights, including the right to vote. We need to strengthen and expand grassroots organization and assemblies based in our workplaces, schools, and communities to carry our struggle forward. And we need to vigilantly organize against any attempt by the Trump administration to persecute our movement.
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