As President Donald Trump’s administration plans to move ahead with massive new “prison camps” around the country for Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, led by White House strategist Stephen Miller, they are running into a surprising new source of opposition: MAGA voters who would have the camps in their backyard.
According to Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “We’re now learning that this year, ICE plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.” This would more than double ICE’s current capacity for detention.
But many of these centers would go up in red areas, and those areas themselves are against it.
“In New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons,” said the report. “The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.”
Even more ominously for the Trump administration, Greg Sargent wrote, a new Pew Poll reveals that by a margin of 64 to 35, voters oppose “keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?”
This, he wrote, is “a huge repudiation of MAGA ideology,” because Trump, Miller, and their allies have long attacked the idea of paroling immigrants into the local community while they await a hearing — instead funneling them into a massive lockup system rife with rights abuses.
It’s yet another data point to suggest Trump’s immigration stance, once one of his strongest assets in elections, is now dragging him down.
“At the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering of the country and their effort to choke off all humanitarian pathways for settling here,” concluded Sargent. “Such public sentiments seem very much at odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.”
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