Are ICE warehouses just another Trump grift? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Too Early Spring is the title of a classic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét, but it might also serve as an epitaph for my two favorite sports teams, soccer’s Philadelphia Union and baseball’s Phillies, each saddled with the worst record in their respective leagues, dead in the water with the calendar still reading April. To paraphrase those modern poets, Bananarama, it looks like a cruel, cruel summer.

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January seemed like the cruelest month for opponents of Donald Trump’s inhumane mass-deportation agenda. It wasn’t only that some 2,000 masked marauders from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol were flooding the streets of Minnesota’s Twin Cities and making violent arrests.

It was also because, from frigid New Hampshire to the Arizona desert, top officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were racing in secret to pay top dollar for any giant empty warehouse they could find. Their scheme was to open — and there’s just no other word for it — massive, bleak concentration camps to detain thousands of desperate immigrants arrested in raids like those in greater Minneapolis, and after that in an expanding list of American cities.

Neighbors and local politicians, including a lot of Trump’s fellow Republicans, were shocked by these stealth maneuvers — some because of the cruel inhumanity of, you know, concentration camps, but others had more quotidian concerns, like detentions centers that would use way more water than the town had available.

Still, at a moment when the steel wheels of American dictatorship were rolling fast, the ICE warehouses felt like a fait accompli. DHS officials even insisted the first ones in Georgia and Maryland were aiming to open in April. As in, this month.

But something truly remarkable has happened.

Take a look at Williamsport, Md., a quaint rural community near Hagerstown in the western half of the state where Trump is popular — or was popular, before it came out in January that DHS had purchased an 825,000-square-foot warehouse to detain some 1,500 immigrants there.

The local pushback was immediate, as angry citizens flooded meetings of the county commission that had passed a resolution welcoming ICE. The warehouse neighbors soon found support from politicians like Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who filed suit in an effort to block the detention site from opening.

The fight has reached a crescendo in recent days. Activists placed a giant billboard on a main local highway reading: “ICE Camp is planned 5.6 miles ahead. Not in our community.” Other protesters traveled to Baltimore to rally outside a court hearing where a federal judge has put the project on hold for now, after AG Brown successfully argued that ICE violated federal laws in not studying the impact on endangered species.

During this pitched battle, ICE quietly scaled back the proposal from the original 1,500 beds to only 563. But it’s possible now to wonder if this Maryland detention camp will ever open for business at all. Or, in the wake of dozens of nationwide protests last weekend under the banner “Communities Not Cages,” whether any of them will ever happen.

You may have heard that there’s new management at DHS, where Secretary Markwayne Mullin — the former Oklahoma senator who replaced the besieged Kristi Noem — has now paused the ambitious initial plan to buy 24 sites across the country, even as some of the dozen or so already purchased are either shrunk or face new scrutiny.

The unspoken but best part of this news is that the warehouse scheme hinged on an ever-increasing number of ICE detainees — which reached an all-time high of more than 70,000 during the Minnesota raids, but has been precipitously dropping at a time when the Trump regime had once expected those numbers to skyrocket. The latest ICE headcount in early April was down to just over 60,000. Some of those detainees were released while others have been deported, unfortunately, yet the decline means they aren’t being replaced with new arrests.

Meanwhile, after weeks of reports and rumors that masked ICE goon squads might be headed to new cities after the Minnesota raids were scaled back, the tactics of grabbing landscapers or delivery drivers off the streets instead seem to have died down with the departure of Noem, her too-close-for-comfort sidekick Corey Lewandowski, and their swashbuckling commando Gregory Bovino.

It turns out that Trump and his MAGA minions are not able to defy the laws of political gravity after all. Citizen dissent — from Minnesota to Maryland to dozens of other locales — still matters, even in a fading democracy that is going to hold an election for November, with Trump seemingly too unpopular to suppress all the votes.

It’s a feel-good story...right?

Oh, just one more thing, as TV’s Columbo used to say. DHS spent well over $1 billion to buy those warehouses, with no public debate or approval process. All of them are currently empty, and one hopes — given the squalid and inhumane conditions at ICE’s current detention sites — that they stay that way. But...where’d all that taxpayer money go? Are we ever going to get a single dime of it back?

Evidence is mounting that ICE seriously overpaid for these warehouses. In Salt Lake City, for example, DHS — in one of Noem’s last official acts before her unceremonious departure — paid a whopping $145 million for a warehouse that had been tax-appraised the year before at just $97 million. Something similar happened at that Georgia site, where officials said the $129 million purchase seemed out of whack with the local market, and in Roxbury, N.J., where a warehouse assessed at $62 million was also bought for $129 million.

This follows reports that Noem had implemented an unprecedented policy to require her personal approval on any DHS contract of more than $100,000, and that Lewandowski, her alleged lover, often inserted himself into the process despite lacking any legal authority to do so. Oh, and one more thing...again.

Last month, NBC News dropped a bombshell report that several DHS contractors — including the nation’s best-known private prison company, the Geo Group — complained to the White House that Lewandowski demanded to be paid in return for awarding those contracts from the department. Those rather shocking allegations — which sure sound like straight-up bribery — have not been substantiated, and Lewandowski has branded them “absolutely false.”

But the reports, against a backdrop of known contracting irregularities and apparent overspending by DHS, scream out for an investigation. Like most seeming high crimes and misdemeanors in Trump World, that won’t come from the under-his-thumb Justice Department. But Democrats, who seem poised to retake the House and possibly the Senate in January should promise voters they will haul Lewandowski, Noem, and some contractors before the bright lights of committee hearings.

Over Trump’s 10 years in politics, his regime has increasingly blurred the line between crimes against humanity and more basic offenses against the U.S. Criminal Code. Just look at Trump’s illegal war in Iran, which has resulted in roughly 5,000 deaths, while his chief negotiators are tied to investment and crypto deals across the Middle East and his sons are selling systems to protect Persian Gulf states from the drone attacks caused by their dad’s war-of-choice.

Why would the president’s xenophobic mass-deportation drive — ripping families apart, seizing essential workers with no U.S. criminal record, killing immigrants in wretched detention camps as well as protesting citizens out in the streets — be any different? Were the Trump regime’s human rights crimes around immigration an excuse for a massive grift?

Question: Did you ever attend nerd prom (note: this would be the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, interrupted this Saturday by a gunman) and if so, how was the experience?

Answer: The short answer is “no” — this solid B-lister who’s never covered politics from inside Washington, or wanted to, has never been invited, and if I miraculously was invited now I would decline, maybe even politely. But there’s also an asterisk. When I worked multiple stints for Newsday covering state legislature sessions in Albany at the end of the 1980s, there was a statehouse correspondents’ dinner attended by the governor (the late Mario Cuomo) at which the reporters (get ready to groan) actually did comedy skits! It was a different time. Groups that blended Democrats, Republicans, journalists, and lobbyists went out drinking every night. The partisan divide was a mountain creek, not the mighty Hudson River. Was all this too chummy, and ethically wrong? Maybe, but this was also before large swaths of one political party went fascist, so...

Pretty much everyone who responded to last week’s question about their attitude on soccer’s World Cup, which hits U.S. shores in about six weeks, shares my dismay and inner conflict over the corruption of the planet’s greatest sporting event. Janette McClelland says she’ll be watching baseball or the WNBA instead. “Trump is involved,” she wrote. “Fox will ruin the coverage by going rah-rah over a mediocre US [men’s national team]. And mention Trump as much as possible.” Anne Marie Pendergast is also aghast at the corruption and run-amok capitalism, but adds that “[a]s lifelong soccer fans we will watch every minute, but from afar and with the hope that the players and fans enjoy the beautiful game we love in spite of all that.” (Same here.)

📮 This week’s question: Three days later, the media still can’t stop talking about that shooting as the president attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. They plan to stage this bizarre elite so-called “nerd prom” all over again in less than a month. Really? Should they? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Press dinner again?” in the subject line.

If Philadelphia’s iconic founding father of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, could be brought back to life and introduced to the current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, he’d have a lot of questions. Like, what is that bizarre glowing object in your pocket that beeps occasionally? Also, what are you trying to do, get Donald Trump killed?

OK, whoa, whoa...that second one seems out of left field, so let me explain. The story starts in 1787, when delegates arrived in Franklin’s hometown to debate a new constitution for the fledgling United States of America, and tinker with bold democratic ideas that were still being honed in a world largely ruled by kings. Franklin and other delegates argued that one thing that would set the American Experiment apart would be a way to remove a corrupt leader from office — an impeachment process modeled after Rome’s attempts at a republic centuries earlier.

Franklin argued at the constitutional convention that impeachment is needed to deal with a president who had, in his immortal words, “rendered himself obnoxious.” Without a constitutional process to remove such a tainted president, he argued, history had shown that citizens would find the only alternative for removal would be to take matters into their own hands: assassination. Franklin wrote that killing government officials charged with misconduct meant the accused would “not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.” That proved sage advice, since all three presidents who’ve been impeached so far have been acquitted in their Senate trials.

But flash forward 239 years, and America has exactly what Franklin feared: a president, in Donald Trump, who has rendered himself obnoxious. The president’s many high crimes and misdemeanors are rehashed in this space on a weekly basis, and summarized in this recent piece. Given the partisan divide in U.S. politics that Franklin and other founders sought to avoid, Trump’s impeachment by the House’s current slim GOP majority is all but impossible. But now Jeffries has shocked some political observers by declaring that Trump’s impeachment is not a priority even if, as expected, his Democratic Party reclaims the lower chamber.

“Of course not,” Jeffries said dismissively when asked this weekend about whether impeachment is on the Democratic agenda — appropriately during an interview on the conservative Fox News Channel. “I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living.” This despite the fact that polls show a roughly 55% majority of those cash-strapped voters support Trump’s impeachment, when some 8 million people crowd the streets in a protest movement that — in the spirit of 1787 — is called “No Kings.”

Franklin’s 18th-century comments resurfaced this weekend because a 31-year-old California man, who seemed to accuse Trump in a manifesto of essentially being an obnoxious sexual predator and a corrupt president, decided to take matters into his own hands — exactly as the ancient Philadelphian once predicted. The violence sought by Cole Allen — accused with attempting to assassinate the president after racing toward Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner with a long gun — was wrong and morally repugnant, and yet it’s right to fear that political violence will only become more commonplace when elected leaders refuse to do their constitutional duties. Franklin, famed for his wisdom, saw all of this coming. If Jeffries is serious about becoming House Speaker, he needs to start reading his history.

Just two years ago, I felt like I was howling into the wind when I urged readers to look more closely at the violent police response to the then-widespread campus protests over Israel’s increasingly deadly military campaign in Gaza. Beyond people’s emotional and often deep-seated feelings about Israel or Palestine, I argued that the willingness of college administrators and many governors — including some Democrats — to suppress campus speech could lead to disaster if Donald Trump won that year’s presidential election. I wrote: “By the time a returned-to-the-White-House Trump makes good on his vow to send out troops and tanks to put down any Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration protesters, America might be numb to such images." Ponder how this all turned out when you read: “Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them ‘safe’ should scare America about what’s next.”

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