Booker, Kim want to bar Big Beautiful Bill funds from being used on ICE warehouse purchases

In the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial purchase of a New Jersey warehouse for use as an immigrant detention facility, the state’s Democratic senators are seeking to prevent money from the agency’s enormous new funding pool from being used on similar purchases in the future.

Last year, congressional Republicans gave ICE tens of billions of dollars in supplemental funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill, which has allowed the agency to remain operational even as the broader Department of Homeland Security is shut down. ICE has since revealed a plan to use much of that money on expanding its network of detention facilities, including one in Morris County’s Roxbury Township, where the agency spent $129 million, per Gothamist, on a warehouse property last week.

Under Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim’s new End Warehouse Detention Act, however, One Big Beautiful Bill funds would be barred from going towards such purchases and from maintaining and staffing existing warehouses-turned-detention facilities.

“Donald Trump is using the money he and congressional Republicans took from working families’ healthcare to fund his cruelty and open detention facilities that our communities have made clear we want no part of,” Kim said in a statement. “These are our tax dollars – not a slush fund for this administration’s lawlessness.”

Although the bill, first reported earlier today by Politico, stands virtually no chance of passing in the Republican-led Congress that gave ICE the huge funding boost in the first place, it’s the latest salvo in an effort by New Jersey Democrats – and some Republicans – to halt ICE’s Roxbury plans.

The new facility, which would be New Jersey’s third federal immigrant detention center, has caused a huge amount of turmoil in Roxbury, with local residents and the town’s all-Republican governing body objecting to the plan in no uncertain terms and even threatening lawsuits to halt it. Booker, Kim, and their Democratic colleagues have led several efforts calling on ICE to back down and abandon its designs on Roxbury.

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), who represents Roxbury in the House, has not joined on those calls, nor has he come out in opposition to the facility itself. He is, however, spearheading a legislative effort to reimburse municipalities like Roxbury for any costs incurred by the construction and maintenance of detention facilities.