When government needs a veil of secrecy to conduct public policy is a strong indicator of creeping authoritarianism.
ROXBURY, N.J. — On a warm morning on Sept. 4, masked immigration agents rolled into Dover, N.J.
Footage of the raids rippled across social media, sent people into hiding and reignited rumors that had been circulating for months: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were taking people to a nearby warehouse.
D.E., who requested NPR use his initials only, stands near the location two blocks from his home, in which he was violently arrested by ICE officials without a warrant, in Long Branch, NJ. D.E., 44, who has had a brain tumor growing in his head for years, was denied medication by ICE officers, and as a result, suffered from several seizures.
The warehouse in Roxbury was one piece of a billion-dollar plan by the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants as part of President Trump's mass deportation efforts.
That plan to convert warehouses into detention centers faced fierce backlash and legal challenges from residents and immigrant advocates. It was largely abandoned, and in several sites, including Roxbury, the government is legally forbidden by a court order from converting them to a detention facility, pending environmental assessments.
But an NPR investigation has found signs that the New Jersey facility is being used. And the state's Office of the Attorney General says it is looking into similar reports.
Contractor says he was told Stephen Miller wanted facilities to be "cruel"
In early 2026, Homeland Security bought 11 warehouses to turn into ICE detention facilities. They spent about a billion dollars on these.
NPR spoke to an official at a government contractor whose company was approached to convert several of the warehouses into ICE facilities. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the government.
"No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people," he says.
At a meeting with a deputy director at DHS, he says, his company proposed an alternative: FEMA-style camps in Texas that would be more humane.
He says that idea was swiftly shot down. While White House adviser Stephen Miller was not at the meeting, they were told that this was not what Miller wanted.
The contractor says his understanding from that meeting was that "Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted."
"Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I've never been in that position before."
In a statement to NPR, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the contractor's comments were "false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller." Bis also said that Miller "has never made any remarks to anyone about wanting illegal aliens to have worse detention facility conditions. It simply isn't true and this is defamatory."
The White House did not respond to repeated requests to speak to Miller directly.
DHS is holding on to the strategically positioned warehouses
Early on, the warehouse plan was met with protests in both conservative and liberal towns. Several state attorneys general filed lawsuits to halt construction, based on environmental concerns.
"It very quickly became an absolute boondoggle," says Michael Wriston, a former military intelligence analyst who co-founded Project SaltBox, a watchdog group that tracks ICE's expansion. "It was really about the optics of people being kept in these cages and these large warehouses. They wanted a lot of what they called B-roll to play on social media, but they didn't do any due diligence of making sure that they conformed with environmental policy or that the construction wouldn't disturb local water tables."
A DHS official who served during Trump's first term, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retaliation, says that while they were not in the meeting the contractor described to NPR, they had often heard higher-ups in the administration wanting to make a point of showcasing difficult conditions immigrants were being held in.
Then, with the departure of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March, there was a shift: Her replacement, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, sought to do less showy immigration crackdowns. Today, Homeland Security is selling several of the warehouses.
But they're still holding on to a few, including in Hagerstown, Md., Surprise, Ariz., and Roxbury, N.J. "These locations are very critical to ICE's deportation agenda," says Wriston, "because they fill in the gap in places where ICE does not have a robust detention network. They don't have a lot of jails there." They are also located in areas where there are no partnerships with the police who can house detainees in local jails.
In Maryland, Arizona and New Jersey, following lawsuits from each of the state attorneys general, DHS has either agreed or been ordered by a judge to halt the conversion of the warehouses into detention centers, pending environmental impact assessments. But throughout the summer, in the towns surrounding the Roxbury warehouse, rumors started to bubble.
A summer of arrests and rumors
Over the summer, there was a historic surge in ICE arrests: around 100,000 people in July and August.
In New Jersey, the rumor mill started churning. The Roxbury warehouse is located in a wooded area, on a road right off Route 46. Project NINJA (No ICE in North Jersey Alliance), a coalition that opposes ICE detention expansion, says several neighbors reported vehicles, often in a caravan, speeding up the road.
"They're holding people in that warehouse," one woman says in a WhatsApp group in the town of Dover, which is about 15 minutes from Roxbury. "I have a co-worker who was taken there. They hold them there and at night they take them somewhere else." The message was forwarded to NPR by Dover Council Member Sandra Wittner.
"But, you know, it's like third- and fourth-hand accounts," says Wittner. "It just didn't seem probable at the time because of the court order. But it kind of made you scratch your head a little bit."
Then the morning of Sept. 4 happened.
"We were taken to the Roxbury warehouse"
A woman says she was driving to work when she saw a raid taking place in Dover. She decided to follow the car carrying people who were detained. "I just needed to know, is he going to Roxbury?"
She took video as she trailed them up Route 46. She asked that NPR not use her name because what happened next made her fearful of what the government might do.
She says the car she was following turned onto the woodsy road that leads to the warehouse.
She says she waited to see if there was any more movement.
"And then maybe five minutes after that, a white Dodge Durango started kind of circling around me," she says. "And then on his last loop, he started filming me. He had a yellow case on his cellphone. After that, a black Tahoe started doing the same thing. I was on a public sidewalk, and it was intimidating. It was really intimidating. I'm scared. But I am more scared for our community."
Councilwoman Wittner says she strongly suspects ICE is using the Roxbury warehouse: "The immigration enforcement activity happened in Dover between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m." Wittner points to the woman who was able to follow the vehicle up Route 46: "The last vehicle entered the warehouse road at 8:25 a.m."
Meanwhile, footage of the raid started circulating on social media.
Back in Dover, another woman says she saw the videos as she got her kids ready for school. NPR viewed the videos and confirmed their authenticity.
In one of them, a worker is cornered against a wall by two masked agents. She says she was thunderstruck.
"That's my father," she told NPR.
She asked that we not use her name because she fears being targeted.
At 8:25 a.m., she says, she got a call from her father. He's 59, she says, and he sounded disoriented. He told her he was handcuffed in some kind of jail.
She found it strange, she says, because the Roxbury warehouse would be the only place he could have been taken in that short a time span.
She also discovered a friend of hers had been picked up.
She hasn't been able to speak to her father since then, and neither has NPR. But NPR located her friend in Honduras, where he's been deported. He requested anonymity, because he fears repercussions for his loved ones who are still in the U.S.
"I was picked up on my way to work, on Friday, Sept. 4. The agents loaded me into a van. They took us to Roxbury," he said.
He says he and the other people detained were handcuffed and held in the parking lot for several hours. He counted nine other men with him. "I just went into a state of shock," he says. "I signed my deportation papers. The next morning I regretted it. But I was scared. Eventually, they transferred us to a real facility."
In a statement to NPR, DHS did not respond to a question about whether it was holding people at the Roxbury location. But it did give NPR a statement it has previously sent about ICE detention, saying DHS upholds strict standards and that immigrants can choose to leave detention by being deported.
"We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday"
The activists at NINJA say ICE's actions violate the legal order. The order lists several actions ICE can take with the site — mainly upkeep — but nowhere on that list is detention an acceptable action, they say.
Harvard professor Andrew Mergen, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Environment & Natural Resources Division, says ICE may technically not be violating the court order, which stipulated it would not convert the place into a detention center pending an environmental assessment.
Ultimately, Mergen says, the situation shows the limitations of using environmental claims. "The community is acting here to prevent people from being detained," says Mergen. "And the administration seems to have cleverly elided that intention, by sort of saying, 'Well, we're not going to build this facility, but we're going to use this space in furtherance of detention.'"
He says he understands the frustration: "It's just infuriating if what you are trying to do is say 'No. Not here. Not here.' "
Wittner says since the raid, she's heard from other close relatives or close friends of two men who were picked up that day, who say they were inside the Roxbury warehouse.
She says the situation is unacceptable: "We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday, quite honestly. We need our state to aggressively pursue this investigation and demand to get inside."
She says DHS has had time "to go in and clean up their mess if they, in fact, got caught doing something that they shouldn't have."
Meanwhile, in Dover, the streets where the raid happened remain deserted.
At an empty diner at lunchtime, a waitress who did not want to be named because of the climate of fear in town says one of the workers who was taken used to come here for a bite.
Then she leans over and asks: "Do you know where they took those men?"
