An ICE agent directs observers after an arrest on Jan. 13 in Minneapolis, Minn.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Avison Young, the Canadian commercial real estate giant, is brokering a deal to turn two warehouses into a processing centre that would hold up to 1,600 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push.
The planned facility, in Hall County, Ga., is drawing furious opposition, with local officials saying they were not consulted and one group urging residents to put pressure on Avison Young to stop the transaction.
The President’s campaign of mass immigration roundups is becoming increasingly unpopular and conditions in detention facilities are under particular scrutiny.
The secretive deal joins a string of cases in which Canadian companies have drawn opprobrium for helping facilitate Mr. Trump’s agenda, including a cancelled transaction last month by a Vancouver company involving another planned ICE detention centre.
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The plan in Hall County, about 70 kilometres northeast of Atlanta, involves a pair of newly built warehouses in an industrial park between the towns of Oakwood and Flowery Branch. The buildings are owned by Houston-based Alliance Industrial Company.
The sales brochure lists Avison Young as the broker, with Gainesville, Ga.-based agent Andrew Joyner and Atlanta-based agent Chris Hoag as the ones handling the transaction. The buildings, which sit one in front of the other, have square footages of 113,536 for the front building and 426,872 for the back one, the pamphlet says.
Neither Mr. Hoag, Mr. Joyner nor Andrea Zviedris, Avison Young’s Toronto-based director of media relations for North America, responded to requests for comment. After The Globe and Mail contacted them, the listing for the warehouses disappeared from Avison Young’s website.
Avison Young isn’t the first Canadian company with ties to Mr. Trump’s immigration roundup.
Last month, Vancouver-based Jim Pattison Developments drew boycotts on both sides of the border for trying to sell a warehouse in Virginia to ICE. The company subsequently announced that the deal would not happen. This past summer, a U.S. subsidiary of Montreal-based private security company GardaWorld qualified to bid for up to US$138-million in ICE detention contracts.
People protest the planned sale of a warehouse property in Hanover County, Va., to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Kelly Geraldine Malone/The Canadian Press
In a statement to The Globe, ICE said it had “purchased” the Hall County site and fired back at criticisms of this and dozens of other new jails the agency is working to set up across the country to expand Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“These are not warehouses – these will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards. Sites will undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase,” the agency said.
Local leaders, however, say that ICE never contacted them about assessing the facility’s effect on infrastructure or anything else. Instead, their information has come from the office of Andrew Clyde, the local Republican member of Congress, who said he had been briefed by Trump administration officials.
According to Mr. Clyde’s information, the site is meant to serve as a processing facility, where 1,400 to 1,600 detainees at any one time will stay for up to seven days before they are sent off for deportation or detention in other locations.
B.R. White, Oakwood’s city manager, said that the city was “blindsided” when it learned of the facility and has not been able to get ICE or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to talk to local officials.
“It’s real frustrating not having anyone from the federal side contact us and at least share information,” he said in an interview on Friday.
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Mr. White said the municipality doesn’t currently have additional capacity for the estimated 180,000 gallons per day of sewage that the processing centre would produce. He’s also concerned immigration sweeps would ensnare members of the county’s large Latino community, who power the poultry plants at the centre of its economy.
“There’s going to be some disruption if they just start grabbing everyone who’s a naturalized citizen and start trying to process them,” Mr. White said. Previous ICE operations have regularly detained Latino U.S. citizens and legal residents.
The mayor and council of Oakwood last week passed a demand that ICE stop its plan to set up the facility until local governments have been consulted.
“Warehouses are not constructed to life-safety standards for habitation,” such as for fire safety, the council’s statement said. “Warehouses typically lack climate-controlled environments, raising concerns about suitability for human occupancy.”
Gregg Poole, a county commissioner who is challenging Mr. Clyde in the Republican House primary, said in a statement that he is also opposed to the detention centre. “Due to the lack of communication from our federal and state officials, I’m not for this facility.”
One local group, the Rainbow Collective, has been running a social media campaign urging people to call and e-mail the Alliance Industrial Company and Avison Young demanding they stop the sale.
At a rally outside Oakwood City Hall last week, the group’s chair, Matéo Penado, addressed the two companies directly. “You have a choice. You can decide that your property will not be used to cage human beings. You can decide that your name will not be associated with family separation, violations of human rights and detention expansion,” he said.
The group is planning another protest this Saturday in Gainesville.
Richard Leblanc, an expert in corporate governance and ethics at York University, said many Canadian companies have instituted new controls around doing business with the U.S. government over the past year.
“The threshold is an ethics threshold: If management is proposing a contract or a business that’s related directly or indirectly to the U.S. administration in the current environment, that needs to go to the board,” Prof. Leblanc said.