Communities around the country are rising up to oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement building new prison facilities in their backyards — and some of the people leading the charge are President Donald Trump's own voters.
According to The New York Times, "Stacy Bradley voted for President Trump because of his border policies, and she likes that he has restored 'law and order.' But she is unsettled by one aspect of his immigration agenda. Last month, the federal government bought a warehouse next to her cheerleading gym in Surprise, Ariz., which the administration plans to convert into a detention center for up to 1,500 immigrants."
She now fears kids as young as 3 who attend her gym, Woodlands Elite Cheer, could encounter an escapee, or even, in the absence of that, would just be traumatized by seeing prisoners being processed in shackles.
“That’s a scary thing for a little kid to process,” she said.
This is part of a pattern, as previous reports have indicated a number of Trump-voting communities around the country are putting up resistance to new immigration detention centers, which were funded to the tune of tens of billions by Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" passed last year.
"The pushback is complicating efforts to expand detention capacity to accommodate the tens of thousands of additional immigrants the administration expects to confine, to deliver on its mass deportation drive," said the report, noting that facilities have either been purchased or proposed in states including Texas, Georgia, Utah, Louisiana, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Tennessee. "Local officials and residents in at least a dozen areas have voiced opposition to the facilities, packing town hall meetings and expressing fears that the protests that recently shook Minneapolis could be unleashed in their backyards."
Blue areas, too, have fought fiercely, and after intense public pressure, a property group in Texas clarified that they will not sell a Dallas-area warehouse to ICE that had been considered for renovation into a prison.