General Discussion

On Jan. 21, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to officials in Hanover County, Virginia, informing them that the government would be building an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the town of Ashland.

For context, Hanover is a reliably red county just outside Richmond. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 26 points there in 2024.

Specifically, the government told the Hanover officials that it wanted to build out the facility on a former cattle farm, where there is now a 500,000-square-foot warehouse constructed by a company owned by Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison.....

Then, less than 48 hours later, Pattison’s company put out a one-line statement: “The transaction to sell our industrial building in Ashland, Virginia will not be proceeding.”.....

If they build them, they will fill them up.

If history tells us anything, it’s that once facilities like this are built in these kinds of numbers, while they may start as immigration detention centers, they are available to the government to use indefinitely for whatever it wants to do.

But everywhere they are trying to build these things, including in some of the country’s reddest states, people are pulling out all the stops to prevent them from being built. And if the country stops the government from building them, it will never again have this kind of momentum to try to construct a constellation of prison camps outside the reach of the law.