Right now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to convert approximately 23 warehouses across the country into massive immigration detention facilities — buildings designed to store products, not house people. If these plans move forward, ICE's detention capacity would balloon to over 92,000 people. This is not a distant threat. At some sites, detentions could begin as soon as this month.

People are already dying in immigration detention. More than 47 people have lost their lives in ICE custody in just the last 15 months. Warehouse facilities — stripped of basic infrastructure, cut off from legal support, and far from families — will only make things worse. Medical neglect, disease outbreaks, and dangerous conditions are already endemic to the existing detention system. Scaling it up inside industrial warehouses guarantees more suffering and more preventable deaths.

Warehouses have no running water systems built for human use, no medical facilities, no space designed for dignity. They are in industrial zones, away from lawyers, loved ones, and community support. Locking people inside them — sometimes indefinitely, without adequate due process — is not immigration enforcement. It is cruelty.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has introduced the Ban Warehouse Detention Act, which would prohibit DHS and ICE from establishing, expanding, or converting any warehouse into a detention facility. It would also block the creation of any new large-scale detention models like this one. Communities from Michigan to Arizona are already organizing, filing lawsuits, and demanding their elected leaders act. Now Congress needs to do the same.

We are calling on members of Congress to co-sponsor and pass the Ban Warehouse Detention Act immediately.