What Gov. Kelly Ayotte knew and when she knew it about ICE’s plans to locate an immigrant detention center in Merrimack, N.H., is an important question, but less urgent than what she proposes to do about it.
Ayotte maintained for weeks that, despite a Washington Post report in December, her inquiries to the White House about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans for Merrimack had gone unanswered. In fact, she asserted that the first she knew about it was on Feb. 3, when the ACLU-NH made public records it had obtained through a right-to-know request that showed ICE had contacted the state’s Department of Cultural and Natural Resources in January seeking information about the Merrimack site.
The commissioner of that department, Sarah Stewart, duly fell on her sword and resigned, purportedly because her department had failed to inform the governor of this inquiry. It’s hard to imagine any bureaucratic silo so well constructed as to sequester that kind of bombshell news from the governor’s office, but we suppose that stranger things have happened.
And in fact, they did. On Feb. 12, Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security that the agency had spoken with Ayotte “in the past weeks” about the economic impact of the project, testimony which the governor promptly denied. Later the same day she said that she had now received documents from the Department of Homeland Security detailing its plans, which she posted to her website and forwarded to town officials.
What these showed was that ICE plans to spend $158 million this year to convert an empty 324,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Merrimack into a 400-to-600 bed processing facility, where detainees would spend three to seven days before being transferred for deportation to much larger facilities being constructed as part of a $38 billion nationwide initiative. The Merrimack facility would cost $146 million to operate for its first three years, with 162 employees.
The department’s economic analysis of benefits was mystifying in itself, with references to the “ripple effects to the Oklahoma economy” and that annual local operations would result in $10.7 million in tax revenue, including sales and income tax — of which New Hampshire has neither. This kind of cut-and-paste sloppiness is enough to cast the whole project in doubt on that basis alone.
As might be expected when the words “warehouse,” “detainees” and “processing” appear in the same description, the plans have been met with revulsion by many residents of Merrimack. After all, who wants their hometown to be synonymous with a concentration camp, which in essence this would be? Based on the agency’s “surge” in Minneapolis, who is to say that the detainees will not eventually include American citizens critical of the Trump administration, or journalists doing their jobs? And what happens to the building when the nation’s immigration fever breaks and the government shuts down this network of persecution?
So far, Ayotte has confined her criticisms to the “troubling pattern of issues with this process.” But what of the substantive rather than procedural issues? The governor entered office last year cheerleading for increased immigration enforcement. She signed legislation banning “sanctuary city” policies, and encouraged New Hampshire law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements with ICE to enforce immigration laws.
By extension, one might suppose that she would welcome the ICE detention facility in her state with open arms, despite local opposition. But Ayotte shares with her predecessor, Chris Sununu, a decided preference to have it both ways when it comes to certain controversies, especially ones that involve conflict with MAGA priorities. She also may sense that the ground is shifting in what the American public, including her constituents, will tolerate from ICE. So opponents of the facility should keep the pressure on to have her intervene to kill the project.
Local officials and residents have rallied in opposition in a dozen locations across the country targeted by ICE, including some that voted for President Trump. The Boston Globe has reported that owners of warehouses in Missouri and Virginia have refused to sell their properties. In Kansas City, according to the Washington Post, the owner of the building was approached by a third-party intermediary and backed out once it learned that ICE was the buyer, and the city council passed a five-year moratorium on new non-municipal detention facilities.
Notably, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi has said that ICE agreed to look elsewhere when he objected to the agency’s plan for a warehouse in his state.
If not welcome in Mississippi, where? In New Hampshire? We don’t think so.