In a Texas town at the edge of the Rio Grande and a tall metal border wall, rumors swirled that federal immigration officials wanted to purchase three hulking warehouses to transform into a detention center.
As local officials scrambled to find out what was happening, a deed was filed showing DHS had already inked a $122.8 million deal for the 826,000-square-foot (76,738-square-meter) warehouses in Socorro, a bedroom community of 40,000 people outside El Paso.
“Nobody from the federal government bothered to pick up the phone or even send us any type of correspondence letting us know what’s about to take place,” said Rudy Cruz Jr., the mayor of the predominantly Hispanic town of low-slung ranch homes and trailer parks, where orchards and irrigation ditches share the landscape with strip malls, truck stops, recycling plants and distribution warehouses.
Socorro is among at least 20 communities with large warehouses across the U.S. that have become stealth targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s $45-billion expansion of detention centers.
This is where zoning laws may become useful.
unfortunately, zoning laws mostly only apply inside city limits. go on county land and anything goes
The supremacy clause of the Constitution means that the federal government is not required to obey local zoning laws.
Not exactly, it doesn’t mean the fed can just do whatever it wants, it means lower laws can’t overrule higher ones, and puts the fed in the position to moderate conflicts between lower laws or contracts between parties that fall under federal law.
The fed doesn’t have a law that specifically allows for the inhuman treatment of detanies, it has a law against it.
Local laws can be made more strict than fed laws, so long as they don’t violate constitutional protections.
So the state or county or city, whichever is relevant, can’t pass and maintain specific laws pertaining to the quality of human detainment facilities, and anyone in the territory, even the fed, would be legally obligated to respect that law.
However they could just buy a facility where they were welcome instead. Then the other territories law wouldn’t apply.