ROMULUS, Mich. — Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on Thursday, June 18 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will abandon its plan to convert the warehouse at 7525 Cogswell Street into an immigration detention center and will instead sell the property. The reversal — coming less than three months after the State of Michigan and the City of Romulus sued, and after months of community organizing led by the Coalition to Shut the Camps (CSC) — is the latest sign that the federal government’s nationwide plan to build a network of mass-detention warehouses is faltering under organized opposition, community by community.
CSC welcomed the announcement as a hopeful and hard-won development while cautioning, firmly, that it is not yet a final outcome. While the news came from the Attorney General’s office, the Coalition said it is still waiting to hear DHS’s own confirmation and to see the specific, binding terms. ICE has not sold the building, no money has changed hands, and the lawsuit will remain active until DHS and ICE sign a written agreement promising never to use the site for detention and to list it for sale — and CSC will be watching that it contains no loophole to relabel the site a “processing center” and reopen the same fight.
We are not declaring final victory [just yet] — we are still waiting to learn the binding terms, and a promise to sell is not a sale. But we already know why the federal government has reached this point. Authoritarian projects run on the appearance of inevitability; they win when people believe resistance is pointless. Romulus is showing the opposite. This project was not stalled by luck or by anyone’s change of heart — it was stalled by a community that applied constant, strategically directed pressure to every weak point it had: legal, political, environmental, and infrastructural. That is the method. And the method is working.
******
In a statement following the reporting by the New York Times, State Senator Darrin Camilleri said “We knew from the start that this ICE facility was unwanted and unwarranted in our community. We organized and coordinated with local and state partners to fight back, and we won. The administration’s heavy-handed tactics were unconstitutional, unpopular, and aimed to bulldoze over local opposition. I am incredibly grateful to the Romulus community, Mayor McCraight, and Attorney General Nessel for standing their ground and fighting for our neighbors.”
This reversal by ICE is due to the hundreds of protestors who voiced their opposition to the plans to warehouse detainees in inhumane conditions in Romulus as well as groups like the Coalition to Shut the Camps, Detroit Committee to Stop ICE and dozens of courageous local and state government representatives who have stood up to resist ICE’s brutal tactics in our community.
