U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has acquired a massive East Side warehouse the agency wants to turn into a detention facility as part of the Trump White House’s anti-immigrant crackdown, the Express-News reports.
The acquisition comes despite last-minute efforts by San Antonio Democrats to derail the sale, first reported on late last week.
The agency signed a contract to take over Oakmont 410, a 640,000-square-foot industrial property that’s sat vacant for three years, the daily reported, citing a source who asked to remain anonymous. The property, located at 542 S.E. Loop 410, is owned by Oakmont Industrial Group.
ICE plans to transform the warehouse into a 1,500-bed “processing center,” according to an internal agency document reported on by the Dallas Morning News. The feds’ memo outlined plans for four new holding facilities in Texas, including a pair of 8,500-capacity “mega” detention centers in El Paso and Hutchins, along with smaller sites in San Antonio and Los Fresnos.
Chelsie Kramer, Texas organizer for advocacy group the American Immigration Council, told the Morning News the expansion indicates ICE is looking to significantly escalate the pace of its arrests.
“They’re not doing it for no reason,” Kramer added.
East Side politicos including District 2 City Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, Precinct 4 Bexar Commissioner Tommy Calvert and State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins have spoken out against ICE’s plan to warehouse human beings in Oakmont 410.
“This administration is not affirming my, this community and our country’s values for freedom and democracy,” Calvert told the Current last week. “They’re killing people in the street — innocent Americans. So, this is very serious, and we need to not only deny their zoning but we also need to follow who’s making money off this, and we need to boycott them.”
However, it’s unclear what steps, if any, city and county officials can take to stop ICE from moving ahead. Local zoning rules aren’t applicable to federal facilities, according to a statement from the City of San Antonio.
In the meantime, ICE’s militarized crackdowns in Minneapolis and other cities have drawn public protest and further cratered the polling numbers of the already unpopular president.
Although Trump and the architects of his mass-deportation plan initially pledged that it would target the “worst of the worst” criminals, data show 73.6% of those held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction according to data current as of Nov. 30, 2025 compiled by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Many of those convictions were for minor offenses such as traffic violations.
“[T]he conversation about illegal immigration today is no longer about protecting Americans from ‘open borders’ or about migrant gangs wreaking havoc on American citizens,” veteran political watcher Amy Walter wrote last week for the Cook Political Report. “Instead, it’s about the ways in which the deportations themselves — often of migrants who are undocumented but have no other criminal record — are being conducted. And, on that score, Americans strongly disapprove.”
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