NPR: ICE Quietly Used New Jersey Warehouse as Detention Site Despite a Court Order, Neighbors Say
After a Sept. 4 raid in Dover, a deportee told NPR he was held with nine other men in the Roxbury warehouse's parking lot. DHS would not say whether it uses the site.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly been using a warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, to hold detainees all summer, according to an NPR investigation, even though a court order bars the government from converting the building into a detention facility. The state attorney general's office says it is looking into similar reports. The Department of Homeland Security did not answer NPR's question about whether it is holding people there.
The warehouse was one of 11 that DHS bought in early 2026, at a cost of about a billion dollars, to turn into detention centers as part of the Trump administration's mass deportation effort. The plan drew fierce protests in both conservative and liberal towns. Attorneys general in Maryland, Arizona and New Jersey sued, and DHS has either agreed or been ordered by a judge to halt conversion at those sites pending environmental assessments. The plan was largely abandoned, but DHS is holding on to the buildings.
An official at a government contractor that was approached to convert several of the warehouses told NPR that DHS staff pushed back hard on the idea. He said his company proposed more humane FEMA-style camps in Texas and was told that was not what White House adviser Stephen Miller wanted. "Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel," he said. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called the claims "false hearsay allegation(s)" and said Miller "has never made any remarks to anyone about wanting illegal aliens to have worse detention facility conditions." She called the account defamatory.
The rumors in Roxbury's neighbor towns grew over a summer in which ICE made about 100,000 arrests in July and August. On the morning of Sept. 4, masked agents raided Dover, about 15 minutes away. A woman who followed the car carrying detainees filmed it turning onto the wooded road to the warehouse. She said two unmarked vehicles then circled and filmed her. Dover Council Member Sandra Wittner said the raid took place between 7 and 8 a.m. and the last vehicle entered the warehouse road at 8:25 a.m.
NPR verified videos of the raid. One shows two masked agents cornering a worker against a wall. His daughter said he called her at 8:25 a.m., disoriented, and said he was handcuffed in some kind of jail. NPR located a friend of his in Honduras, where he was deported. He said agents took him to Roxbury, where he and nine other handcuffed men were held in the parking lot for hours. "I signed my deportation papers. The next morning I regretted it," he said. He was later moved to "a real facility."
Harvard professor Andrew Mergen, a former Justice Department environmental lawyer, said ICE may not technically be violating the order, which bars converting the site pending environmental review. He said the administration seems to have "cleverly elided" the intent by using the space in furtherance of detention. Activists with the group Project NINJA say detention is not among the actions the order allows. Wittner called for congressional oversight: "We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday, quite honestly." In Dover, the streets where the raid happened remain deserted.
