Rural America has long been where the rest of the country sends what it doesn’t want nearby: prisons, power plants, landfills. These days, two more intrusions have been added to the list: immigrant detention centers and data centers.
In December, Larry Bender, the supervisor of Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, Pa., learned to his great surprise that the federal government had purchased the largest commercial property in the township: a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse that had been a Big Lots distribution center. It would now be used for immigrant detention.
Tremont is home to about 300 people. The facility was designated for up to 7,500 detainees. Given the social, economic and environmental impact, you might think the government would have provided residents and public officials with advance notice. But the deed was recorded before Mr. Bender said he even knew a sale was in the works.
Something similar occurred last year when Delsia Bare, whose family owns farmland in Mason County, Ky., learned that an unnamed technology company had filed an application to rezone 2,000 acres surrounding the family land for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company had approached her family to sell some of its land, but the family ultimately declined to do so. Ms. Bare found out about the full scope of the plan when the company’s zoning application appeared in public records. The company had kept things under wraps by having landowners as well as town officials sign nondisclosure agreements.
In both cases, the transaction was intended to be finished long before the people who would have to live with the consequences could ask questions about what was being planned.
Congress should address this problem. Specifically, it should require companies planning large-scale facilities to publicly disclose who they are and what they intend to build before they seek to change how the land is used, and to notify local governments before acquiring property in their communities. Rural communities wouldn’t necessarily get to veto a project, but they deserve to know and understand what is coming before it arrives.
The same principle applies to federal agencies. Before acquiring property in a community, they should be required to notify local governments that a purchase is coming and identify what the property will be used for. Those requirements wouldn’t stop a data center or a detention center from being built. But they would stop it from being built in secret.
Mr. Bender, a Trump supporter, told me that he believes detention centers must go somewhere, and he stressed that he isn’t sure he opposes the facility in Tremont. But there are important issues that should be debated earlier in the process. Tax revenue, for example: When the government purchased the warehouse from Big Lots, which was the only significant commercial taxpayer in Tremont, the township stood to lose about $200,000 a year in revenue and the local Pine Grove Area School District stood to lose more than $500,000.
There are also environmental considerations. Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, though a supporter of President Trump’s federal immigration enforcement, has opposed the Tremont facility on infrastructure and local impact grounds. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who also opposes the facility, warned that it could quickly deplete the water reservoir serving the surrounding area.
Though the federal government now says it plans to try to address those concerns, they could and should have been raised and debated before it acquired the property.
In Mason County, Ms. Bare said that the unnamed A.I. company offered her family $26 million for roughly 550 acres of her family’s farmland — an astonishing figure that was 10 times the market-rate price. She initially accepted the offer, she said, having been led to believe by local officials that the power of eminent domain gave her little choice. But she later ended up backing out of the deal. “Some things do not have a price,” she told me, “and the land that we’re using to eat off of as a nation and as a planet, there’s just no way that you could replace this soil.”
By the time Ms. Bare backed out, the company had moved on to her neighbors, using nondisclosure agreements to keep everyone else in the dark — including about its identity.
Rural America is going to be forced to accommodate more of these facilities, and the scale of what is underway makes transparency requirements even more urgent. Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $45 billion for detention expansion last year, and by January the detained population had risen roughly 80 percent, from fewer than 40,000 people last year to about 72,000. As for data center land transactions, they are averaging 224 acres per year, up 144 percent since 2022.
Local resistance to large development is sometimes dismissed as NIMBYism, and much of that criticism is fair. When communities use dated zoning laws to block affordable housing or renewable energy projects that are badly needed, the label fits. But NIMBYism requires knowing something is coming and choosing to fight it. A farmer who walks away from a $26 million offer is not blocking affordable housing. A township supervisor who learns only after the deed was recorded that his community’s commercial tax base has been sold to the federal government never had the chance.
Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, has researched how data centers and large federal facilities arrive in rural communities. Both, she said, come backed by enormous funding and a regulatory environment that tends to clear local participation out of the way. “There really isn’t a substantial notice period to do the type of environmental and economic analysis to determine if a data center is actually right for your community,” she said.
The same is true of federal facility acquisitions. “The political pressure that this administration has placed on companies to build either data centers or detention centers is so real that communities have been reduced to collateral damage,” she said.
Rural communities are often fighting both kinds of facilities simultaneously, often without knowing who they are fighting or why, because neither the federal government nor private developers are currently required to tell them anything before the decisions are made. Requiring disclosure and giving communities time to respond would give the people who have to live with those decisions a seat at the table before a deed is signed.
Rotimi Adeoye is a contributing Opinion writer, a former congressional speechwriter and the author of American Pursuit, a newsletter on politics and policy.
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