U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is poised to buy a massive East Side warehouse, which it plans to turn into a detention facility, the San Antonio Business Journal Reports.
The agency enforcing President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant crackdown could close a deal as early this week on the vacant 639,595-square-foot structure at 542 SE Loop 410, according to an unnamed source familiar with the transaction.
Neither ICE nor Oakmont Industrial Group, which the owner of the warehouse branded as 410 Oakmont, responded to the Business Journal’s request for comment. The publication’s research of property documents shows it hasn’t yet been placed under contract.
However, news of the pending purchase appears to dovetail with a new Washington Post report that the federal government is moving to snap up real estate in 23 cities to convert into ICE detention centers. Those new lockups together could incarcerate up to 80,000 people.
The Post article lists San Antonio as one of the markets where ICE is pursuing a real estate but offered little further detail about its plans here.
Another real-estate source who requested anonymity told the Business Journal that ICE has circulated its call for a large warehouse space that can be converted into a detention site.
“There is a private contractor that is securing a facility for an ICE detention facility,” the source said.
Oakmont 410 carries an industrial zoning designation from the city that wouldn’t allow human occupancy, according to the Business Journal. That means ICE would likely need to see a special-use permit to use it to detain migrants, one of the paper’s unnamed real estate sources said.
The Current reached out to City of San Antonio officials including Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones for comment on whether the city would allow ICE to seek such an exemption but got no immediate response Friday morning.
However, Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert, whose precinct contains the warehouse, said he’s already taking steps to urge the city to deny a rezoning request. Calvert led successful fights during the first Trump administration to halt federal contractor VisionQuest’s plan to set up a pair of San Antonio facilities to house migrant children.
“This administration is not affirming my, this community and our country’s values for freedom and democracy,” Calvert said. “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.”
Calvert, a Democrat, said the Trump White House is eager to create ICE detention centers nationwide so it can use them to intimidate U.S. residents and weaponize federal immigration agents to target political enemies.
“You can’t tell me that with this 1,402-acre facility that is on the Texas border and all these other centers that are already established that ICE really needs this,” he said. “I think this is portending to dictatorial plans, which can shift to political enemies over time. … I think more Democrats need to be more clear that it’s not just ‘Aw, shucks, another building.'”
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