“NIMBY” once conjured images of affluent homeowners blocking housing or shelters. Today, a different version is spreading across suburbs and small towns: residents organizing to keep ICE detention and processing centers out of their communities. This “new NIMBY” isn’t about granite countertops or property values; it’s about public safety, strained municipal budgets, and basic human dignity, and it’s forging unlikely coalitions that cut across ideology.
Consider Roxbury, New Jersey, one of sixteen towns reportedly shortlisted for a “small” ICE processing hub, up to 1,500 people, designed to shuttle detainees from local sites to larger regional centers and ultimately to mega-facilities in the Gulf South. Residents learned conversions could happen within sixty days, often by retrofitting existing warehouses. Local organizers were blunt: warehouses are built for packages, not people, and rapid conversions almost guarantee substandard ventilation, sanitation, and emergency egress, allproblems that don’t stop at the facility’s door.
New Jersey advocates have mapped the response. Faith-led volunteers with Eyes on ICE stand vigil outside Newark’s Delaney Hall during every visitation window on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends from dawn to dusk. They meet with the families and document the conditions inside. “The conditions are absolutely horrific,” says Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi NJ. “People weren’t fed…for 20 hours…two slices of bread,” with reports of “moldy…spoiled…and frozen food,” medications withheld “for a week or more,” extreme heat and cold, foul water, and coerced cleaning “without proper…supplies.” When unrest erupted, visitors outside “heard three loud pops and then everyone coughed at the same time,” O’Leary recalls—evidence of chemical agents deployed in a warehouse-turned-jail abutting an industrial “chemical corridor.”
This is the heart of the new NIMBY: an insistence that detention infrastructure, especially lightning-fast warehouse conversions, imposes unacceptable risks and costs on neighboring blocks. It isn’t abstract. Families “torn away…are our neighbors,” O’Leary notes; within weeks, loved ones are “trying to figure out how to feed their kids…and how not to be evicted,” creating “huge ripple effects” across schools, clinics, churches, and small businesses.
Civilians are pushing back on two fronts. First, law and policy: residents are urging councils to make private prisons and ICE detention an unpermitted use, a preventive brake on conversions before they start. Second, public visibility: a fast-growing “visibility brigade” uses rush-hour overpasses to reach people who won’t see a press release. “We do it on bridges…because we have a captive audience,” explains activist William Angus. The model began in Paramus with two-foot-tall letters and now counts “350 chapters across all 50 states.” It works, he says, because commuters realize “you’re not the only one” and many “literally have no idea” this is happening.
Crucially, the movement’s moral through-line is not in anyone’s backyard. With “limited due process, limited checks and balances,” O’Leary warns, wrongful detention persists while social costs land on the very towns asked to host industrial jails. At its best, the new NIMBY is democratic muscle: neighbors learning how detention actually operates, naming the harms, and using civic levers to keep warehouses from becoming jails. As Angus urged before a Roxbury council session: “If you’re a local, show up, please.”
