Threat of an ICE Detention Center

How the Threat of an ICE Detention Center Galvanized a Trump-Country Coal Town

“We do deserve better than a plethora of data centers, detention centers, warehouses, biosolids processing plants, massive landfills.”

Madison Pauly

When Joe Wiscount was a teenager in Tremont, Pennsylvania, a tiny town in a region once ruled by coal barons, he worked a summer job stretching tarps over a pit in the countryside, preparing it to be filled with garbage. When he moved back to his hometown with his wife, Lara, over 30 years later, they found that waste had taken over. To the west and south, biosolids companies trucked in sewage from places like New York City and piled it in the open air, wafting clouds of morning stench toward Main Street. A landfill in the scar of an old strip mine bloated toward a village to the east. To the north, a plant processed chicken manure into fertilizer pellets.

The Wiscounts, retired teachers who often finish each other’s sentences, started calling the state environmental department and speaking out at local meetings, urging officials to stand up to companies. “Other states that have more money and resources, whatever they want to get rid of, whether it’s human crap or garbage, this is where it gets dumped,” Joe says. “People come in from outside the county with big money and just roll in and roll over everybody.” Then in January, the Wiscounts heard a rumor about a new enterprise coming to Tremont: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was planning to open a massive immigrant detention center in an empty 1.3 million-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of town.

At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said the administration wanted to make deportations run like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” Within months, Trump stripped legal status from 1.6 million immigrants, hired thousands of new ICE agents, and launched mass arrests, mostly of people with no criminal convictions. To hold them, the agency embarked on a $38.3 billion project to streamline and expand its system of lockups. Known as the Detention Reengineering Initiative, it sought to convert warehouses across the country into short-term processing centers and “megacenters” where people would wait for deportation.

“Whatever they want to get rid of, whether it’s human crap or garbage, this is where it gets dumped.”

The $119 million deed for the Tremont megacenter came through February 2. At a public meeting two days later, Schuylkill County Commissioner Larry Padora reported that he’d learned the federal government intended for the warehouse to hold 7,500 detainees, plus up to 2,500 staff members. “They’re going to try to employ them locally,” Padora added.

“What we’ve heard is jobs, jobs, jobs,” Joe Wiscount recounted on a recent afternoon in the couple’s living room, surrounded by family photos and Phillies and Eagles sports memorabilia. But no one seemed able to explain how the town—not much more than a Family Dollar, a pizzeria, and a few blocks of twin houses—could support an immigrant jail with five times its population. Nor could anyone answer why the federal government had chosen this town, of all places—though Lara guessed it had something to do with the deep-red, rural politics of the area. Like most locations ICE selected for warehouse detention centers, Schuylkill County is heavily Republican, going 70 percent for Trump in the last election cycle. “I don’t think they thought they’d get pushback,” she speculated.

The Wiscounts, both Democrats, had been horrified by the ICE shootings in Minneapolis a few weeks earlier and were aghast that the agency planned to use their town’s empty distribution center to ship and store detainees. “Just try to envision what 10,000 people jammed in there would look or feel like,” Joe said. “It would be incredibly inhumane.”

Their reaction also had something to do with family pride. The Wiscount name is synonymous with Tremont: Joe’s mom taught third grade here for 37 years; a veterans memorial park on Main Street bears a carving of his late father. On a recent night at the local gun club, 20 out of 23 people at the bar were Wiscounts, Lara recalled. “We were very upset and concerned about the town’s name being attached to it,” Joe said. Besides, Lara added, “you have to do the right thing. I was in education for 30 years because I care about kids, I care about people.” So they decided to begin organizing their neighbors.

A mile down a country road off Interstate 81, past an Amazon warehouse, is the only stoplight in Tremont township. There, directly behind the daycare, sits the vast, mostly windowless distribution center once owned by discount retailer Big Lots. The building opened in 2001, during a warehouse construction spree when the state began offering 10-year tax breaks to businesses willing to relocate into economically depressed regions. Big Lots built its distribution center on a property pockmarked with the remnants of early 1900s coal mines. Then, two years ago, the company went bankrupt, and 505 local jobs vanished.

It was just the latest blow in a long history of hardship in the area, local activist Brianna DelValle explained as she drove me around the forested roads near the warehouse in early June. The granddaughter of a miner, she pointed out signs of the past: piles of waste coal along roadways, streams that run orange and acidic with mine drainage. The Schuylkill County population, mostly working class and white, has been falling since 1930. Tiny local governments are desperate for revenue, making them vulnerable to corporate exploitation, DelValle argues. Normally, “there’s not a lot of political will to push back on things,” she said. “People are tired and busy and just don’t have the wherewithal.”

Despite local loyalty to Trump, his administration’s acquisition of the former Big Lots dealt an immediate blow to the local economy: The school district, county, and township lost nearly $1 million in annual property taxes. Adding insult to injury, multiple local Republican officials say they received zero communication from the federal government either before the sale or afterward. “We didn’t get one letter from them,” said Larry Bender, a 79-year-old former miner who’s been a township supervisor for four decades.

Nor did anyone from ICE talk to Justin Moeller, the young mayor of Tremont borough. If Moeller had been contacted before the sale, he could have explained that their little town simply didn’t have enough water for a detention megacenter. In 2024, the mayor—who also serves as assistant fire chief—helped fight a pair of blazes that destroyed two houses and half a block of Main Street. Since then, the municipal authority has been hauling in water just to maintain safe levels for residents. According to estimates from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, ICE would need 900,000 gallons every day to provide adequate water for drinking, bathing, and flushing for 7,500 detainees, not including staff—more than double the capacity of the entire town’s water system. On top of that, the detention center could produce up to 1 million gallons of sewage daily. That’s triple the permitted capacity of the local sewage treatment plant—meaning yet more human waste would have to be shipped through Tremont or else overflow into local waterways.

ICE would need 900,000 gallons every day—more than double the capacity of the entire town’s water system—to provide adequate water for drinking, bathing, and flushing.

The Wiscounts seized on the infrastructure problems as they began to organize in February. They circulated a petition opposing the detention center that cited the potential strain on water, sewage, and taxes, as well as ambulances, hospitals, and roads—ultimately collecting hundreds of signatures. With help from Joe’s mom, Brenda, they gathered written records of Tremont residents’ objections. Many were worried about the warehouse’s water and sewage issues, as well as the town’s lack of a local police force to respond to potential anti-ICE protests like the ones that erupted in the spring outside Delaney Hall, a detention center in New Jersey, over allegations of medical neglect and inadequate food.

Of course, some locals did support the detention center. When I visited the town in June, I met Kathleen Smith, a Trump voter wearing a God Bless America T-shirt, as she packed groceries into her car at the Family Dollar. “At least if they break out, there’s a lot of stripping holes,” she told me, referring to remnants of mines in the mountains around the warehouse. Unprompted, she added that she moved to the Tremont area because Puerto Ricans had moved into her old city.

“We got mixed races in town. They could get picked up for no reason. Including me.”

“This is a racial town,” explained Darrin Wansley, a military veteran sitting on his front porch a few blocks away from a house flying a Confederate flag. Although he was born in Philadelphia, Wansley doesn’t want ICE around; he’s been hearing news stories about agents mistakenly arresting and deporting US citizens. For 24 years, he told me, he was the only Black person in Tremont. These days, he said, “we got mixed races in town. They could get picked up for no reason. Including me.”

But despite the local strain of racism, the Wiscounts were heartened to find plenty of neighbors who were worried about living conditions for detainees inside the former Big Lots. “I worked at the warehouse for 15 years,” one wrote on a testimonial form. It’s “not suitable for thousands of people.” With DelValle, who in February started a website called No Skook Detention, the couple organized a town hall. Lara remembers a sense of elation after nearly 100 people showed up, including the county commissioners. “We can do something,” she recalled thinking. “We can make people listen.”

A week later, Joe’s cousin Jennifer Devine spearheaded a protest along Main Street. Dozens of people chanted “ICE out” on the sidewalk, despite a downpour. “I’m willing to fight,” swore Devine, who lives down the road from the Wiscounts and works the night shift at the Amazon distribution center. “If that place is functional, I told my husband, I’ll be up there every day protesting.”

DelValle noted that county officials responded seriously to the water and sewer concerns. “That is a massive issue that needs to be addressed before anything goes on there,” Padora declared at an early county commissioners meeting. Then powerful state leaders followed suit: In late February, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, vowed to do “everything in my legal power and my regulatory power” to stop ICE from moving into the warehouse. The following month, the state Department of Environmental Protection ordered ICE to submit written plans for its water and sewage and acquire permits before flushing or turning on a faucet. ICE appealed to the state’s Environmental Hearing Board, seeking an order that would allow it to occupy the building before it addressed the infrastructure issues. But the appeal would take months, delaying the project’s potential start date.

Elsewhere in the country, ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative was running into similar stumbling blocks. Republican elected officials were pushing back on federal plans, and some state and town governments filed environmental lawsuits. Amid rumors that ICE was considering buying a second former Big Lots distribution center in Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation swooped in and purchased the property “to continue driving economic prosperity for our tribal members and the surrounding community,” Chief Gary Batton said in a statement.

Then on June 18, the New York Times reported that ICE had decided to offload seven of 11 warehouses it had purchased by reselling or transferring them to other federal agencies. Tremont was on the list. So was another smaller warehouse that ICE had bought next door in Berks County. Republican Rep. Dan Meuser, whose district includes both locations, confirmed several days later that ICE no longer planned to turn either site into a detention facility. In a statement about the rationale, Meuser flicked at the effect of the local uproar: “The Administration’s plans evolved based on operational needs and, in large part, the extensive due diligence conducted by county and local officials.”

The day the Times story broke, I spoke by phone with Joe and Lara Wiscount. “We are beyond elated,” Joe said. “Thrilled, excited beyond belief.”

“There’s another voice in my head that has concerns, doesn’t believe anything that these people say,” Lara chimed in. But she was letting herself feel some relief. They planned to toast the news at the gun club that evening.

Now, the warehouse outside town sits empty, its future use unknown. But something else has shifted in Tremont. After the fight about the detention center, “it doesn’t matter if they’re Democrat, Republican, the town has come together,” Lara told me in early June. “And there are other issues that we need to look at.”

Top of mind are the biosolids plants that residents have been raising concerns about for years. Late last year, in response to the volume of odor complaints in the Tremont area, the state Department of Environmental Protection stationed a new inspector in Schuylkill County and issued a notice of violation to one company, Natural Soil Products, for piling up too much unscreened waste. In April, the department delayed a permit modification for the plant until it clarified how it would control foul smells.

Elsewhere in the county, residents are up in arms about data centers, demanding officials adopt regulations to limit or block their development. And in the borough of St. Clair, they’ve turned their attention to a landfill, with retired Magisterial Judge Dave Plachko rallying locals to stop a construction-waste dump from expanding toward the borough. The landfill, which opened in 2019 and is owned by the behemoth Waste Connections Inc., is notorious for releasing hydrogen sulfide that makes residents’ eyes and throats burn. So when it sought to buy 177 acres of former coal land even closer to town this past spring, Plachko rallied neighbors on social media and started speaking out at county meetings. In July, a judge delayed the sale after Plachko recruited allies to help fight back in court.

The public response has been “at times overwhelming,” Plachko said. “People are uniting against these huge, unaccountable, exploitative corporations that are coming to Schuylkill County threatening our water, threatening our air.”

“We are at a tipping point in Schuylkill County,” one Republican voter testified at a recent county commissioners meeting. “We do deserve better than a plethora of data centers, detention centers, warehouses, biosolids processing plants, massive landfills.”

Some voters have begun to equate the big corporations that cause environmental hazards and raise the cost of living with the Trump administration. Brandon Albert, a 33-year-old mechanic who rents an apartment in Tremont, sees the ICE warehouse plan as part of the same overarching trend of exploitation—“corporate America capitalizing on small town USA.” Albert voted for Trump in 2024, but “I do regret it,” he said. To him, Trump’s chosen sides, and he’s with the corporations. “He’s becoming really anti–ordinary people and more big business.”

The ICE warehouse has provided “an opening in areas where doors are not usually open to Democrats.”

Could the political winds really be shifting in this deep-red county? The ICE warehouse has provided “an opening in areas where doors are not usually open to Democrats,” said Penn State Berks political science professor Randall Newnham. Democratic voter registration in Schuylkill County grew while Republicans fell—albeit by just a few voters—for the first time in seven years in April, according to Todd Zimmerman, chair of the county Democrats.

One test will be this year’s midterm contest for Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, the only district in the country where ICE bought two warehouses. Incumbent Meuser—the top-spending House member at Mar-a-Lago as of last summer—has drawn ire from constituents for rarely holding in-person town halls to discuss issues in his district, including the ICE detention centers. In early June, local Democrats and independents lined a hot sidewalk outside his Schuylkill County office, protesting what they said was Meuser’s absence and inaccessibility. (Meuser did not respond to a request for comment.) A volunteer handed out pins linking together various local issues: “No ICE Detention Center, No landfill expansion, No data centers, No [Natural Soil Products].” The Wiscounts both gave speeches, Joe balancing the mic as Lara helped him flip pages on his clipboard.

Challenging Meuser is Democrat Rachel Wallace, who grew up in Schuylkill County and went on to work in the Senate, State Department, and White House Office of Management and Budget before moving back to care for her ailing mother last year. Her bid is a long shot in a district still rated solidly Republican by national political forecasters. But her campaign recently released a survey of likely voters indicating that support for Trump and Meuser in the district had dropped by 11 and 17 points, respectively, since the 2024 election. In January, as residents were protesting Meuser’s inaccessibility, she held her own town hall to hear concerns about the still-rumored detention center.

Since then, Wallace has focused much of her messaging on residents’ deep-seated sense of political neglect and day-to-day economic struggle. “We know what it’s like to have extractive industry come in and leave us all holding the bag,” she told me. “There’s this sense in this part of the state where we’ve just been sitting on our hands for so long—and encouraged to sit on our hands for so long—and now it’s starting to boil.”