SURPRISE, Ariz. — It was around midnight when Cali Overs approached the lectern in city hall in early February. She peered up at the dais in front of her and the mayor, Kevin Sartor, and spoke nervously.
“I am a current student at Dysart High School and the student body vice president,” Overs said. “With a GPA of 4.3, before anyone passes me off as young and dumb.”
Overs had joined the packed city council meeting to voice her concern about the Department of Homeland Security’s recent purchase of a warehouse in her Phoenix suburb, which the government planned to turn into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
The facility sits blocks away from her high school, Overs told her mayor.
She feared that federal agents would target students and families from Dysart, where the student body is 60 percent Hispanic, and that the detention center could bring the chaos and violence that has surrounded other ICE facilities to her school.
“Get this out of our city,” she urged.
In the weeks and months that followed, Sartor said repeatedly that his hands were tied. Overs hasn’t stopped asking.
State and local authorities have grappled with a new facet of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign this year as DHS has purchased warehouses around the country to grow its network of immigrant detention centers. Some communities have scuttled ICE projects in their neighborhoods after pushing back, but the battle in Surprise has dragged on.
Helping sustain it has been Overs, a quiet teenager who said she can’t understand when city officials and politicians drag their feet.
“They’re not doing their jobs,” Overs told The Washington Post in early May on her last week of school.
Overs had envisioned the end of her senior year as a celebration. Instead, she has spent months waging a stubborn campaign against the planned ICE detention center near her school, becoming a fixture at city council meetings, rallying classmates for TV interviews and — as the tension increased — becoming the target of online threats. She is lobbying her representatives in Congress to propose legislation banning ICE facilities near schools nationwide.
It sometimes feels like no one is taking her seriously. But Overs’s message, earnest and carried by the frustration of a 17-year-old coming of age in a political moment full of tension and fear, has resonated with many in her city: Why can’t the adults stop this?
The roughly 400,000-square-foot warehouse near Dysart High School is one of 11 buildings across eight states that DHS purchased this year in a multibillion-dollar project to expand its network of immigrant detention centers. DHS bought it for around $70 million and has said it will hold between 500 and 1,500 detainees, according to Arizona officials.
Cities and towns, even deep-red ones, have bristled at the purchases. In some places, local officials chose to push back. Building owners halted plans to sell warehouses to ICE in Oklahoma City and Ashland, Virginia, after residents and officials protested. The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, introduced a measure to ban nonmunicipal detention facilities for five years after learning of ICE plans to build a detention center in January.
Many in Surprise, a fast-growing, largely Republican suburb, opposed the ICE facility here as well.
But their mayor, Sartor, had a cautious response. He was blindsided, but the city could not regulate the federal government’s purchase or use of the warehouse, he said in the February city council meeting.
Overs felt her high school, located just across the border of Surprise in the neighboring city of El Mirage, was being ignored. Already, the purchase of the warehouse by DHS had prompted some families to keep their children home for fear of increased ICE activity, students said. Elijah Perez Cardona, who just graduated from Dysart, said his parents took away the keys to his truck, afraid that federal agents might stop him on a joyride. Cardona and Dayna Siqueiros, Dysart’s outgoing student body president, organized carpools for classmates after their parents began staying home out of fear of ICE.
“The adults in power should feel responsible,” Overs said at the next city council meeting two weeks later.
Dysart Unified School District declined to comment on the detention center.
Sartor and the Surprise City Council sent a letter asking DHS to share more information about the facility and cooperate with city leadership, but by March, they appeared to acquiesce.
Sartor said in a news conference that Surprise officials met with DHS in Washington and were told the facility would not “trigger local immigration enforcement,” and that ICE agents would not operate in Surprise schools, churches and senior centers. DHS also said it will reimburse the city for lost property tax, according to Sartor.
“While we cannot stop a federal agency from purchasing land, we can work to mitigate their impact to Surprise,” the mayor said.
Chris Judd, a Surprise city council member, told The Post he also feared reprisal from state legislators, who have filed complaints against an Arizona city and county for opposing ICE.
Sartor did not comment on Overs’s criticisms. He said in a statement that he is continuing discussions with DHS and is “committed to protecting the safety and best interests of our community.”
Overs also went bigger. She reached out to Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R) and Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego with a bold demand: propose legislation banning any ICE facilities within a three-mile radius of a K-12 school.
“Student security is a bipartisan, nonpolitical issue,” Overs wrote in a Change.org petition.
None of the congressmen met with Overs, she said, but staff members from their offices spoke with her. Gosar’s staff did not commit to supporting her petition, while Kelly and Gallego’s offices told Overs the bill was unlikely to pass in Congress, she said.
Spokespeople for Kelly and Gallego, who have opposed the Surprise facility, praised Overs for her efforts but did not comment on her proposal. In March, the senators backed a bill that would bar DHS from constructing detention centers without approval from local officials. Gosar did not respond to a request for comment.
DHS declined to comment on concerns about the Surprise facility. In a letter to Gosar, shared by the congressman, the department said “ICE strives to maintain a cooperative partnership with local communities.”
Campaigning against the ICE facility consumed the rest of Overs’s school year. After class, she waded through crowds of protesters outside city hall to pass out pamphlets for her petition. She covered her school Chromebook with sticky-note reminders of calls to schedule and emails to send. The meetings left her little time to see her friends, except when she encouraged them to join her for interviews.
It wasn’t the senior year Overs had envisioned. She started the year by picking a silly kid’s backpack, a Dysart senior tradition. Overs chose a red one themed after the Pixar movie “Cars” with an image of Lightning McQueen.
In the spring, she placed a sticker above the cartoon character that read “No ICE prison in Surprise.”
Any normalcy left in Overs’s senior spring shattered when insults and death threats against her began to appear online. Rachel Owens, Overs’s mother, said she contacted Surprise police after someone on a neighborhood Facebook group wrote “hopefully she gets [shot] by an alien,” using a gun emoji.
Owens, 47, said it felt surreal to see Cali on TV and terrifying to read the anger aimed at her.
“She’s putting herself out there and these elected officials. … I feel like they could be doing more,” Owens said.
But she added that she was proud of Overs and her work.
“I don’t want her to give up,” she said.
The breakthrough for Overs and others protesting the detention center came in late April, when Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued DHS, alleging it violated federal immigration and environmental laws by moving to develop the detention center without conducting an environmental assessment. (DHS declined to comment on the lawsuit.)
A court date has not been set for the state’s lawsuit, and the status of the ICE facility is uncertain. Days before the state sued DHS, the department issued a stop-work order to the security contractor tasked with developing the detention center, according to federal contract records reviewed by the news site Project Salt Box. The stop-work order was rescinded in early May, according to federal records.
Asked about the pause in construction, a DHS spokesperson said the department was “reviewing agency policies and proposals” after the appointment of new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in March.
DHS is moving forward with plans to convert warehouses it purchased in other cities, The Post reported last week.
Overs, who graduated Wednesday, said she is still concerned for her friends who remain at Dysart. She has not given up on her petition for a national ban on ICE facilities near schools.
“I’ve learned that for things to be worth it in the end, you kind of have to struggle,” Overs said.
In late April, she stood before another lectern on a dirt patch outside the warehouse. Mayes had invited her to speak at a news conference announcing the state’s lawsuit, where she faced her biggest crowd of cameras and reporters.
Overs spoke more confidently this time.
“This is not a political issue,” she said. “This is not a Democrat or Republican thing. It is the right thing.”
It was the day before Overs’s senior prom. She stayed for hours after the news conference to give several additional interviews and woke up the next morning exhausted and sunburned.
That night, she decided to stay home.
Douglas MacMillan contributed to this report.
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