The Department of Homeland Security appears to be moving ahead with a new immigrant detention facility to hold as many as 1,500 detainees in Chester, New York — just over an hour from New York City.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s push to ramp up mass arrests and deportations using cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed last year at the president’s behest.
In an online advisory posted on Jan. 8, DHS laid out its proposal “to purchase, occupy and rehabilitate a warehouse property at 29 Elizabeth Drive, Chester, NY in support of ICE operations,” including erecting a small new guard building.
The advisory, which was required because part of the 35.9 acre property sits in a flood plain, does not explicitly reference a jail. But The Washington Post reported last month about DHS’ plans for several new large-scale “processing facilities” for detainees, including one in Chester.
Those new facilities are intended to hold immigrant detainees for a few weeks, according to the Post, before they are sent to large-scale warehouses in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri that will each hold between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
The presumed location of the Chester processing center was first identified by The Monroe Gazette. The property is owned by an LLC linked to former Trump Advisor Carl Ichan, according to the Albany Times-Union.
The likely lock-up has triggered protests and contentious community meetings in Orange County, where Congressmember Paul Ryan (D) is circulating a petition to attempt to block the facility.
Town of Chester Supervisor Brandon Holdridge said he was working with Ryan to “disincentivize this rogue, unlawful, and un-American agency from stepping foot in our town.”
Asked about their plans for the Chester warehouse, a spokesperson for ICE declined to provide specifics.
“Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe,” a statement from an unnamed spokesperson read. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
“These will not be warehouses — they will be very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”
Since Trump took office last year, ICE has opened a new 1,000 person facility in Newark called Delaney Hall, entering into new contracts with several upstate county jails to detain DOZENS more, while sending around 100 detainees at any given time to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
The Chester facility would continue this trend and further enable ICE’s efforts to make more arrests in the New York City area, said Rosa Cohen-Cruz, the director of Immigration Policy at Bronx Defenders.
“Any increase in local bed space for ICE detention enables ICE to be more aggressive in their raids and their enforcement tactics because they have beds to immediately put people,” she said. “So we’re extremely concerned that New York City residents, New York State residents will really be at heightened risk by this increase in capacity.”
