On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post broke the news that the Trump administration plans to convert seven large warehouses across the country into holding pens to collectively hold 80,000 humans. One of the selected sites is Hutchins, Texas, 30 miles south of where I live in Plano, Texas.
This news helped me and other Dallas-area clergy make sense of what we have been seeing at the ICE Field Office in Dallas over the last several weeks.
We hold constant vigil at the site, and for weeks now we have seen huge quantities of office furniture being delivered and assembled at the field office. We’ve also seen and spoken with new recruits for ICE coming in for training.
A well-placed anonymous source within the building confirmed to us the current field office will be used for Department of Homeland Security executives while a warehouse facility in Hutchins will be converted to warehouse 9,500 humans.
These warehouses across the country will fulfill the vision of ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons, who said in April the administration’s goal was to move immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”
Moving and warehousing human beings as packages or cargo. Let that sink in.
The conversion of warehouses into holding pens isn’t new. During the first Trump term, the administration famously converted a Walmart store in Brownsville, Texas, into a detention facility for minors called Casa Padre. At its height, the 250,000-square-foot facility housed 1,500 boys between the ages of 10 and 17.
A 2019 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General raised the alarm of overcrowding at five facilities in the Rio Grande Valley. The report and its accompanying photos tell a stunning story of massive overcrowding and inhumane conditions that make the spread of communicable diseases all but inevitable.
I bring these stories and images up because the administration’s past efforts at warehousing humans has been deemed inhumane, and these were much smaller endeavors with fewer people.
Never has this administration attempted to warehouse nearly 10,000 immigrants in any one location. Until now.
To understand just how massive and grossly inhumane this will be, consider this: The sites like the one coming to Hutchins will hold more people than the largest single-site jail in America, Cook County Jail in Illinois.
Because these warehouse facilities were built to hold cargo and not humans, the water, plumbing and sanitation infrastructure is incapable of supporting this number of humans. And, in a town like Hutchins — a poor, rural exurb of Dallas with a population of less than 6,000 — warehousing an additional 150% of the town’s population will inevitably strain already limited water and sanitation capabilities.
Todd Lyons
The human warehousing network Lyons and this administration envision depends on small, poor communities like Hutchins.
Hutchins sits on a low-lying floodplain near the Trinity River in Southeast Dallas County. At just over 9 square miles, the town has drawn industry since its beginning due to its proximity to the river and later Union Pacific Railroad. In 2005, Union Pacific opened the 360-acre intermodal terminal to process more than 365,000 cargo containers annually. The terminal straddles the towns of Hutchins and Wilmer.
The remoteness of Hutchins makes the administration’s decision to open a human cargo warehouse here — away from prying eyes — even more haunting.
Since the Washington Post’s breaking story, our clergy group has confirmed with our anonymous, well-placed source that ICE is currently scouting facilities in Hutchins. As the Post pointed out, the whole point of this warehouse network is to make deportations happen more quickly. Which raises the question, what happens to the administration’s human cargo after being warehoused in a facility in which communicable diseases are certain to spread?
The nearest airport to the town of Hutchins is a small regional airport in neighboring Lancaster. The largest commercial airport is DFW, more than 30 miles away.
While the railyard currently only moves shipping containers and does not have passenger rail cars, given the depravity of the very notion of warehousing humans, it cannot be ruled out that this administration will begin using boxcars to move their human cargo.
The Nazis also found that the most expedient way to move their human cargo.
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.