One frigid January night, a crush of protesters filled a senior center just outside the village of Chester, N.Y.
Some dabbed tears under white fluorescent lights as the sound of chanting wafted from the parking lot, where hundreds more sipped hot chocolate and pressed picket signs against the building’s windows.
They had gathered to oppose a plan by the federal government to bring its deportation muscle to Chester, a hamlet of 4,000 residents in the heart of a Republican stronghold 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. The idea was to retrofit a former Pep Boys distribution center into a detention facility that could confine as many as 1,500 migrants. But in a moment that foreshadowed the nation’s souring view of President Trump’s enforcement tactics, the proposal ignited instant bipartisan dissent.
Republican and Democratic elected officials and residents across the Hudson Valley region lambasted the plan, expressing fears that the immigration operation would overwhelm scarce local resources and unleash a torrent of fraught encounters with federal agents. On social media, there is support for the facility, but it has been muted.
“Everywhere that this has happened has been kind of a real dumpster fire,” said Steven M. Neuhaus, a Republican who is the Orange County executive. “It’s been greeted with controversy, protests, violence, and it’s not something that we want in this sleepy county.”
Chester isn’t alone. A year into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, communities across the United States are opposing plans to convert warehouses into detention centers. The warehouses have become a potent symbol for critics who have painted them as inhumane places with grim accommodations.
The backlash comes at a time of inflamed emotions over the killing of two protesters by federal agents in Minneapolis, which for weeks has been the epicenter of the nation’s rancorous immigration debate.
The future of the project in Chester remains murky: The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has not said whether it is moving forward with its idea. Elsewhere across the United States, similar proposals have been quashed. In Oklahoma City, the Republican mayor, David Holt, commended the owners of a property for pulling out of a deal with ICE.
In a statement, ICE dismissed concerns about the fitness of the buildings and said that they would be well-designed to accommodate migrants.
“Every day, D.H.S. is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe,” the ICE statement said. “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.”
Even as Mr. Trump has received Republican support for his deportation crackdown, the opposition in Chester illustrated the often contradictory politics of the immigration debate. While many voters in the United States support curbing illegal immigration, a majority have also come to disapprove of ICE.
In Chester, several hundred protesters in puffer jackets gathered next to a wooded area in the dark parking lot of the senior center. One man banged on a drum while another shouted into a bullhorn as the group chanted. They placed picket signs on shrubs that faced light car traffic.
Manolin Tirado, 66, lives in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., and showed up hoisting a metal folding chair to sit out for a long night. Mr. Tirado said that he opposed the facility because he did not want Orange County to take on the financial burden of policing demonstrations held by ICE critics. Mr. Tirado said that he was also worried about immigration agents violating people’s civil rights.
“I don’t want to see American citizens jailed or have possible confrontations with law enforcement,” Mr. Tirado said. “What guarantees that they won’t pick up local Chester residents?”
John T. Bell, the Chester village mayor, sent a four-page letter to ICE citing zoning and sewer restrictions that prohibit the agency from putting 1,500 people in the Pep Boys building, which was designed to hold 150. He also criticized ICE for failing to share its plan with local officials before making it public.
“We hope your agency will act with some more professionalism and courtesy to the village in the future when planning such a project,” Mr. Bell wrote.
Attempts to reach owners of the Pep Boys facility as well as brokers for the property were unsuccessful. Public records identify the owner as an affiliate of Icahn Enterprises, a company controlled by Carl Icahn. He is a billionaire who was one of the first corporate raiders, now known as activist investors, who bought stakes in companies and agitated for management to make changes.
Chester Republicans were bothered that ICE operations were disrupting the country’s quality of life, while Democrats expressed moral outrage over arrest strategies and interactions with the public, which they described as oppressive and cruel.
Polls released in recent weeks show that while a vast majority of Republicans support Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement, a small but growing share of them are questioning his enforcement tactics. And many independent voters, who helped Mr. Trump win the 2024 election, agree.
Fifty percent of voters across the United States said that they approved of the Trump administration’s deportations of people living in the country illegally, while 47 percent opposed them, according to a poll conducted in January by The New York Times and Siena University.
A broad majority of voters — 63 percent — disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job after a year in which Mr. Trump deployed thousands of federal officers to cities led by Democrats, creating wide-scale protests and scenes of chaos on the streets. Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had “gone too far,” including nearly one in five Republicans.
Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Chester, created a petition opposing the proposal that amassed more than 20,000 signatures by late January. Mr. Ryan presented an anonymized version of the petition to D.H.S. before its Jan. 16 deadline for public input.
“We’re seeing innocent civilians harassed, detained and even killed,” Mr. Ryan said in a prepared statement.
The congressman said on X that he received a message from ICE declining to share details about its plans to expand operations in Chester, blaming a “heightened threat environment” and “unprecedented opposition being thrown up by the left.”
Isabella Almodovar, 26, lives in the town of Chester and teaches high school students English as a new language. Ms. Almodovar said that she showed up to January’s meeting because she had been disturbed by the treatment of migrants by ICE officers elsewhere across the country, and she did not want the agency to come to Chester.
“The one thing that we need to do is come together and really fight,” Ms. Almodovar said. “That’s the only thing that can help to try and end this.”
Others in Chester are hopeful that ICE will expand operations there.
Seth Cohen, 40, is a construction worker who said that he was frustrated by undocumented workers who took jobs for less money than him. He was grateful that ICE officials were working to reduce illegal immigration, which he said had spiraled out of control under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“I think ICE is a good thing, cleaning up the town, cleaning up the surrounding area,” Mr. Cohen said.
The people at the town meeting said that they were compelled to demonstrate because an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot and killed the protester Renee Good in early January. Ms. Good’s death inspired protests nationwide, prompting the Trump administration to send 1,000 more agents to Minnesota. Since then, federal agents have killed another protester, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record.
Videos of Mr. Pretti’s death contradicted claims by federal officials who defended the agents who killed him, provoking widespread criticism, including from Mr. Trump’s Republican allies. The backlash led to a softening of immigration operations, and this month, the president said that he had ordered 700 agents to leave Minnesota.
Timothy McDonough was one of about 30 speakers during last month’s meeting who urged the Chester village board to oppose the new center. Mr. McDonough, an Air Force and Navy veteran who served in the U.S. military for 22 years, cited concerns about inadequate oversight and access to legal counsel for migrants in detention.
“Please, I’m begging you,” Mr. McDonough said, his voice breaking. “What they’re doing out there is just horrible.”
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.
Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering immigration in New York City.
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