New Jersey, Town of Roxbury Press Harder on ICE Detention Fight as DHS Timeline Shifts Again
The state asks a judge to depose DHS officials after the agency's account of its renovation plans changed — again — in new court filings.
New Jersey and the Township of Roxbury filed a volley of legal papers Tuesday night pressing a federal judge to halt the conversion of a Morris County warehouse into an immigration detention facility, arguing the Department of Homeland Security broke federal environmental law before spending $129 million to acquire the property.
The filings — a reply brief, an attorney declaration, and a request for emergency depositions — landed just before 10 p.m. ET, one week before a scheduled May 12 hearing before U.S. District Judge Jamel K. Semper in Newark.
The case is one of four in which state attorneys general have challenged a federal program to expand immigration detention capacity by purchasing existing industrial buildings. A judge in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction last month in nearly identical litigation. Similar challenges are pending in Michigan and Arizona.
DHS has argued that retrofitting an existing building does not require the same environmental scrutiny as new construction. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, agencies can bypass fuller review by invoking categorical exclusions — shortcut determinations that a project is unlikely to cause significant harm. For the Roxbury facility, an environmental consulting firm called Solv LLC conducted that analysis under a roughly $1.7 million contract with ICE’s facilities management office, concluding the project qualified for multiple exclusions. The firm’s review was signed Feb. 6 and approved Feb. 24 — one day after the property closed.
New Jersey and Roxbury counter that the law requires agencies to consider the full consequences of what they are doing before they do it — not piece by piece, after the fact. Because the warehouse was purchased solely to establish a detention facility, they argue, the acquisition and the planned operations are one project, and DHS broke the law when it bought the property without first asking what that project would mean for the surrounding community. The environmental review DHS promised for the first time in its opposition brief does not fix that, plaintiffs argue: by the agency's own description, the review will evaluate how to run the facility, not whether to put one in Roxbury at all.
Township engineers submitted unrebutted declarations that the local water system would be overwhelmed “even if the facility had no staff and only 323 detainees” — well below DHS’s planned capacity of 542 — and that downstream sewer pipes could not accommodate any additional flow under state environmental standards regardless of on-site improvements.
Much of Tuesday’s briefing focused on what plaintiffs called a pattern of contradictory representations by the agency. At a March 10 meeting with Roxbury officials, DHS said it would award a construction contract by the end of that month and be fully operational within 90 days. After plaintiffs threatened emergency court action, DHS counsel wrote on March 30 — in an email now filed as an exhibit — that no construction would begin before May 28 at the earliest and that site activity would be limited to basic maintenance and security.
DHS’s opposition brief said otherwise. Agency declarations described plans to proceed before any construction contract is signed with “demolishing drywall and adding communications wiring and workstations” to make the warehouse “useful for ICE purposes” — one declaration qualifying the work as “mainly drywall demolition,” language plaintiffs argue signals undisclosed additional activity.
“Given these inconsistencies,” plaintiffs wrote, “this Court should not deny Plaintiffs’ motion based on DHS’s representations unless and until Plaintiffs have an opportunity to take testimony from DHS witnesses.”
That is the basis for the deposition request. In a letter to the court, Solicitor General Shankar Duraiswamy asked Judge Semper to compel two-hour depositions of DeGregorio and Byers before the May 12 hearing, saying DHS’s account had “zig-zagged over the past two months” and that the agency had not responded to “multiple inquiries” seeking clarity. “Only a compelled deposition,” he wrote, “will enable Plaintiffs and the Court to assess the factual basis for DHS’s argument.” DHS has indicated it opposes the request.
Plaintiffs said they would drop the injunction motion entirely if DHS committed in writing to deferring all construction, including interior demolition, until the environmental review is complete.
Judge Semper has not ruled on either request.
Keep track of the latest developments in the warehouse lawsuits in one convenient place at our Warehouse Litigation Tracker.
The case is State of New Jersey et al. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al., Civil Action No. 26-02884.
F’k them SOB’s!
NO ICE CONCENTRATION CAMPS Here or anywhere!
With the amount of warehouses and their proposed capacity…
Do you really think they’re just for immigrants?!
When it comes to tRUMP’s RETRIBUTION TOUR…
You’ve not even seen the tip of the iceberg.
FIGHT, JERSEY FIGHT!
STOP this fascist dictatorship and his minions in the WH!!
Save our democracy!
🇺🇸🇺🇦🇨🇦