r/WeThePeopleAtWhipple

Credit: A Mighty Girl via FB

For months, one of the leading voices in the fight to block a massive ICE warehouse detention center from opening in Surprise, Arizona has been Cali Overs -- a 17-year-old who walks past the planned facility every day on her way to school. The Department of Homeland Security quietly purchased the $70 million warehouse in January without notifying the city, the state, or school leaders whose building sits just half a mile away -- with plans to convert it into a detention facility holding up to 1,500 people. No community meeting. No environmental review. No warning.

When Cali found out what was happening in her own neighborhood, she didn't wait for someone else to do something about it. A senior at Dysart High School in El Mirage and vice president of the student body, she started organizing.

Her school's student body is 60% Hispanic, and one of her first and most urgent concerns was what the facility would mean for her classmates once it was staffed with ICE agents -- pointing to a recent Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents to use race and ethnicity as a basis for stopping someone.

"Students are scared they will be stopped on their way to school just because they are Hispanic," Cali wrote. "These are not hypothetical fears. Many students have told me they are too scared to go past this area and are switching to online classes. These are American citizens changing the course of their education because they no longer feel safe going to school anymore."

The physical reality for students is stark. Due to budget cuts, every student living within two miles of school is not provided with bus transportation -- meaning hundreds of children walk, drive, or bike past the warehouse every single day just to get to class.

"By placing an ICE detention center on the same route that hundreds of children use to get to school," Cali observed, "DHS is creating unnecessary danger. This is reckless, irresponsible, and completely avoidable." Someone already tried to set the building on fire, she noted -- and it's not even open yet.

She drafted a proposal calling for a mandatory three-mile buffer between any detention facility and a school, and began taking it directly to elected officials. She wrote letters, spoke at town halls, started an online petition, and took her case all the way to the Arizona Attorney General's office. She spoke at a press conference alongside Attorney General Kris Mayes in April when Mayes announced a lawsuit against DHS and ICE -- the day before her senior prom. She stayed for hours afterward giving interviews, went home exhausted and sunburned, and decided to skip the prom entirely.

When the Dysart School Board and Surprise City Council repeatedly failed to respond to her emails, she showed up at the school board meeting and posted every unanswered email publicly. "Every single one of these leaders sat there watching me spend the last few months of my senior year doing their job," she wrote, "because they refuse to do it."

No one in the community "fought harder, or more visibly" than Cali Overs, observed Rook Winchester, who has been covering the fight for the investigative newsletter Closer to the Edge.

The lawsuit, filed April 24th, argues that DHS failed to conduct required environmental reviews and that the facility's location -- directly across the street from a hazardous chemical storage site -- makes it unsuitable for housing human beings. A stop work order was issued to GardaWorld just days before the suit was filed -- the private security firm awarded a $313 million contract to retrofit the warehouse -- but was rescinded in early May.

DHS says it is "reviewing agency policies and proposals" under new Secretary Markwayne Mullin, but the facility's status remains uncertain. As Cali put it when the stop work order was first announced: "Although it's a big win, the stop is not permanent."

Since new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin took over, there are signs of growing recognition inside the department that the warehouse conversion program, conceived under his predecessor Kristi Noem, was poorly thought through. There is now talk of selling some of the already-purchased properties back but DHS is moving forward with warehouse conversions in other cities.

The price tag alone tells part of the story -- warehouses purchased for tens of millions of dollars, contracts worth hundreds of millions more, an entire $38 billion architecture of industrial-scale detention that is now, as Winchester described it, "a plan under review." Cali has responded by requesting a virtual meeting directly with Secretary Mullin to push for the three-mile buffer as official DHS policy.

None of this means the fight is over. The administration has not abandoned its mass detention agenda -- it may be recalibrating it, shifting toward purchasing existing, already-operational detention facilities that require no retrofitting and generate less community resistance. Advocates who follow detention policy closely warn that the history of these pauses is not encouraging -- the federal government has a pattern of stepping back when attention is high and quietly resuming when it drifts.

Cali Overs graduated last week -- and she's already shown what one person, paying attention and refusing to stay quiet, can do.

To support Cali's fight and help push her proposal for a three-mile buffer zone between ICE detention facilities and K-12 schools into federal law, you can sign her petition at https://www.3milebuffer.com/

To read more about her story in The Washington Post, visit https://wapo.st/4nIadkj

To read Cali's op-ed in the Phoenix New Times, visit www.phoenixnewtimes.com/opinion/surprise-arizona-ice-detention-center-school-op-ed-40656297

To read more about Cali in a profile on AZ Central, visit www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/surprise/2026/05/03/surprise-ice-facility-cali-overs/89073544007

To read the Arizona Agenda's profile of Cali, "Disrespected, But Not Discouraged," visit www.arizonaagenda.com/p/disrespected-but-not-discouraged

To read the Arizona Attorney General's lawsuit announcement against DHS and ICE, visit www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-block-proposed-ice-detention-facility-surprise

To read Axios's reporting on DHS pausing the warehouse detention program nationally, visit www.axios.com/2026/05/07/ice-immigrant-detention-private-contractors

To follow the community organizing effort in Surprise, visit www.noiceinsurprise.com

zuzan.omriko only egocentric, narcissistic people know how to play this role to a tee (the chosen ones- left or right same ish) and sadly, they often gain massive followings and "support," while exploiting that support for their own image and gain.
they are often the most skilled at performing care while exploiting support for their own gain. their morals are flexible aligning themselves to an opposition that would still grant them personal power and "relevance"
no one is coming to save us.
Everything successful movement was a collective effort, even though it is written a "one man show"!

I’m not a huge fan of this post not using person first language, but the advice is still good.

Do you all remember the young men who convinced Natalie, founder of Safe Haven, to create a GoFundMe? Now they are trying to help a family in Ohio.

I know what I am about to share is not ICE related, but as an empath, former medical assistant and creator of this subreddit, which now has 14k members, I feel it’s important to use this platform as a voice for this family.

I’ve contemplated sharing this for a while and I can no longer keep the video saved on my phone. It must be shared and spread widely.

https://justiceformahad.com/

https://www.change.org/p/reunite-baby-mahad-with-his-family

https://www.gofundme.com/f/give-mahad-a-chance-at-life-and-family-reunification/cl/s

https://www.6monthsinvestigates.com/blog/categories/deqa-haji

If you have any information please send it to: SELENAPTSRInJURYLAW. COM

Last week, Minnesota lawmakers passed $40 MILLION for rental assistance. This victory is no small feat in a divided House, where organizers were told more funds for rent relief would be politically impossible. It is the result of tireless organizing which will continue growing - as we keep struggling toward a housing system in which no one lives under the threat o exploitation, displacement or forced removal.

This money will keep people housed, but we need Hennepin County and partner organizations to move quickly - especially in Minneapolis, where the City Council's efforts to extend the eviction timeline were vetoed by Mayor Jacob Frey.

A new Brookings Institution analysis estimates more than 145,000 US citizen children have had a parent detained by ICE since January 2025. Twenty-two thousand of them watched every parent in the household get hauled away.

More than a third are under six. Some are still in diapers.

DHS officially admits to detaining 18,277 parents. Brookings calls that a "substantial undercount" because ICE agents are supposed to ask about children and routinely don't, and terrified parents often don't volunteer that they're leaving kids behind.

So nobody is keeping count. Not ICE, not DHS, not the federal child welfare system. A toddler whose mother gets snatched outside a courthouse vanishes into the care of whoever happens to be standing nearby.

The Marshall Project found ICE is now holding around 170 children in detention on any given day, a sixfold jump from the Biden years. At Dilley in Texas there's a two-month-old infant inside what Rep. Joaquin Castro called "a monstrous machine."

More than 1,000 children have already been held past the 20-day legal limit on child detention.

ProPublica found the average kid is now stuck in federal custody nearly six months.

Two years ago it was one month.

Congress just handed this operation another $45 billion in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill to expand the cages. The administration is openly working toward removing 13 million people. There are 4.6 million US citizen kids living with a parent at risk of deportation, and 2.5 million who could lose every parent in the household.

These children are Americans. They sit in American classrooms. Their parents pay billions in US taxes every year.

And the government doing this to them refuses to even count them, much less protect them.

When you put a baby's mother on a plane to Honduras and shove her child into the back of a stranger's car, that isn't enforcement. That isn't security. That's the state manufacturing orphans on an industrial scale.

Anyone who voted for this owes those kids an answer.