The GOP’s Detention Center Nightmare: Will NIMBY Hurt Them in the Midterms?

Edwin Lopez-Cornejo called his mother on a Friday to say he felt sick. A day later, the 41-year-old Salvadoran national was dead at a Newark hospital — the second person to die within eight months at Delaney Hall, the privately run New Jersey detention facility operated by the GEO Group; his family said he had not been receiving medication for diabetes, high blood pressure and seizures. The state’s attorney general on Friday opened a civil rights investigation into his August 1 death, which reignited protests outside the 1,000-bed jail and put a name to a number that keeps climbing: at least22 to24 people, depending on the count, have died in ICE custody so far in 2026, a toll advocacy groups say is on pace to break last year’s record.That tally, set in 2025, stood at33 deaths, the highest annual total in more than two decades. A Human Rights Watch analysis of the first 500 days of the second Trump administration found 52 deaths in ICE custody through early June, marking a mortality rate roughly four times higher than under the Biden administration and more than twice the rate during Mr. Trump’s first term.The figures do not include persons who died at the hands of agents themselves rather than in facilities. Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and military veteran, were both fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January. In July, an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 35-year construction worker with no criminal record, died during a Houston traffic stop; a federal source later confirmed he was not even the intended target of the operation. Mexico’s government says14 of its citizens have died in ICE custody since Mr. Trump returned to office, with three more killed during ICE operations.The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed along party lines, allocated $45 billion specifically to expand immigration detention over four years, handing Immigration and Customs Enforcement a mandate and a war chest. ICE acted quickly on the mandate, embarking on a nationwide warehouse-buying spree and converting shuttered industrial buildings into mass detention centers capable of holding up to 10,000 people each.The Department of Homeland Security’s ultimate goal is to provide 100,000 immigrants with bed space. But instead of the triumphant rollout that the Republican leadership had envisioned, the rapid expansion sparked a revolt, and most of it came from their own side.“Most of these same lawmakers voted for the largest detention expansion in history because they understand strong border enforcement is core to America First,” the political strategist and managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, tells The New York Sun. “Now that the facilities are coming to their own backyards, some are showing classic NIMBY instincts, attempting to talk tough in Washington but folding under local pressure.”NIMBY, shorthand for “not in my backyard,” has long described the gap between what politicians want for the country and what they will tolerate in their own districts. Rarely has that gap been so wide, or so public.The question now hanging over every competitive district heading into November is whether Republicans have handed Democrats a weapon they cannot put back in the box, and whether the same base that demanded mass deportation will forgive the party for the machinery it built to carry it out.‘Not in my backyard’From Mississippi to Missouri to New Hampshire, Republican officials who had cheered the immigration crackdown in Washington found themselves scrambling to distance themselves from it at home.In New Hampshire, a community uproar recently forced a halt to a planned ICE detention facility in the town of Merrimack. The state’s Republican governor, Kelly Ayotte, intervened directly with the Trump administration to kill the proposal.In Mississippi, Senator Roger Wicker wrote to the then-Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, to “strongly oppose” plans to convert a warehouse in Byhalia into a detention center. “I am all for immigration enforcement, but this site was meant for economic development and job creation,” he wrote. In Tennessee, Senator Bill Hagerty declared that a facility capable of housing 10,000 to 15,000 migrants was “off the table.”In Virginia, Representative Rob Wittman praised a property owner for refusing to sell to DHS. In Oklahoma City, DHS and ICE also backed away from a proposed detention site following strong local opposition. At the same time, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, David Holt, publicly urged every landowner in the city to follow the lead of property owners who had already turned down federal overtures.Not all Republicans resisted. Representative Mark Alford actively lobbied to bring a detention and processing center to his district in Missouri, and at least one Maryland county passed a resolution expressing full support for ICE’s plans. A consistent complaint across communities has been a lack of transparency, with representatives at all levels of government, from city councils to Congress, saying they have been largely kept in the dark about DHS’s plans. In Social Circle, Georgia, local frustrations rose so high that city leaders barred water use at ICE’s planned facility until the agency provides more clarity on its plans.The pattern is not difficult to read.“There are plenty of people who are very law-and-order and supporters of law enforcement who don’t want a jail next to their house,” said Oklahoma City’s Mr. Holt, a former Republican state senator. “NIMBYism is the most powerful force sometimes in American politics, and nobody wants a detention center next to their home, their business, or their school.”The Infrastructure ProblemWhat gave local officials, even sympathetic ones, grounds to push back was not always ideology. Republicans largely framed their concerns in terms of basic logistics: utility hookups, emergency response capacity, potential protests, and tax revenue losses.The Republican mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, Daniel Rickenmann, was direct: “A majority of these locations wouldn’t pass for any other venue, even possibly for a homeless shelter. Are they sanitary? Do they have the beds? Do they have the facilities for restrooms?”The infrastructure strain cuts deep. As one attorney and county official told the Sun: “A post office has the same water consumption and sewage as probably a lot of other uses. If you take a warehouse that was designed for 25,000 widgets and put 15,000 humans in it, you’ve got a very different set of local needs and services that are being used and being taxed and being burdened.”In Roxbury Township, New Jersey — a longtime Republican stronghold — the all-Republican town council voted unanimously to pass a resolution opposing a facility after DHS had paid $129.3 million for a warehouse there, more than double its assessed value.ICE has pushed back on characterizations of the warehouses as inadequate. However, the agency is already struggling at its existing sites. Delaney Hall’s second death in eight months, following Jean Wilson Brutus’s death there last December, is only the latest example. A New Jersey member of Congress, Analilia Mejia, has said she personally witnessed medical neglect on oversight visits to the facility. Still, local GOP leaders voiced support for the president’s mass deportation agenda even as they opposed a facility in their own community. ICE pushed back on characterizations of the warehouse conversions as inadequate, insisting the facilities would meet regular detention standards.Critics are doubtful. A hotline operated by the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants received an average of more than 2,600 calls per month between November 2025 and January 2026 — more than twice as many as a year earlier — with callers reporting unsanitary conditions, inadequate food, and solitary confinement.Meanwhile, private prison companies have been among the biggest winners. During its February quarterly earnings call, CoreCivic reported a more than 100 percent rise in ICE revenue year over year. Nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are currently held in for-profit facilities, and private prison firms were among the most significant financial backers of GOP candidates in the last election cycle.The Quiet Surge Detention levels have been volatile all year. The population hit a record 73,400 persons in mid-January, then fell to roughly 60,000 by spring as arrests of people with no criminal record dropped following the bipartisan backlash over the Minneapolis shootings. ICE has since ramped arrests back up, booking more than 43,000 people in June alone as the administration has turned to lower-visibility tactics — arrests during routine immigration check-ins, traffic stops, and workplace visits — rather than the high-profile raids that defined last year. Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Ms. Noem after her resignation, has described a quieter approach to mass deportation. The shift follows the collapse of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which ended in the reassignments of both “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino and Ms. Noem after Border Patrol and ICE agents shot several people, including two American citizens. Mr. Mullin has pledged to pursue what he has called a quiet way of pursuing mass deportations.The renewed push began days after the Supreme Court, on June 30, rejected the administration’s bid to end birthright citizenship while otherwise expanding executive authority over immigration enforcement — a ruling Mr. Mullin called “dead wrong.”A Midterm Liability in the MakingThe Republican coalition that made the detention center expansion possible now faces the question of whether it can hold together long enough to survive November. It will not be easy.A Quinnipiac poll in January found 57 percent of voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration law, against 40 percent who approve. The Cook Political Report still projects the likeliest outcome as a one-to-three-seat Democratic Senate pickup — short of the four needed for a majority, though the map keeps shifting in both directions. Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio have moved toward Democrats since spring, while Cook shifted Kansas back toward Republicans this week, a reminder that immigration is competing with inflation, health care and other kitchen-table concerns for voters’ attention. An associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, tells the Sun that while detention capacity is pivotal to the Trump administration’s broader deportation goals, the political road ahead is uncertain. “Voters also have many other issues on their minds, so it really depends on what their primary concerns are come November,” she says, highlighting that the administration appears to be recalibrating its messaging following high-profile incidents, including the backlash in Minneapolis.That recalibration is now visible in the arrest data.“It feels like a bit of a reframe,” Ms. Putzel-Kavanaugh continues. “At the same time, there are broader concerns around detention: the creation of facilities, who is being detained, how long they’re being held, and the conditions inside.”Republican incumbents in competitive districts are navigating the same impossible geometry. Having voted for the funding that made these facilities possible, they now need to be seen opposing the facilities themselves.Democrats are debating how aggressively to press the issue, wary that overreach could shift public attention from ICE’s specific conduct back to broader immigration enforcement, an argument the party has historically lost.What is less in doubt is the structural problem Republicans have created for themselves. They wrote the check. They approved the warehouses in principle. And now, community by community, they are discovering that governing is a great deal messier than voting.“The real midterm risk for the GOP would be appearing weak on immigration, not building the facilities voters demanded,” Mr. Thomas said.

The GOP’s Detention Center Nightmare: Will NIMBY Hurt Them in the Midterms?

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