Saturday Rewind: Melting ICE warehouses
Project Salt Box's co-founder explains how publicly posting data is fueling nationwide backlash to a plan to create Amazon "Prime, but with human beings."
Early last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons floated a particularly dehumanizing analogy for his agency’s plans to purchase warehouses to hold immigrants across the United States.
Lyons compared the model to Amazon “Prime, but with human beings,” according to the Arizona Mirror.
Amid nationwide pushback, at least 12 of ICE’s planned contracts have been cancelled, and a small group of Baltimore-based activists operating under the banner Project Salt Box has been helping organize the opposition in red and blue cities across the country.
In an interview, the group’s co-founder Michael Wriston explained that the name came from the Baltimore Department of Transportation’s public safety measure to set up little yellow boxes filled with salt throughout Charm City.
“The idea is that everyday citizens can come out and grab a handful of road salt and throw it out and make sure that the streets are safe,” Wriston said.
Instead of salt, Wriston’s groups empower the public through contracting data about the government’s $38.3 billion warehouse plan, including ownership records, land evaluation, and deed of sale. Some of the information provided on Project Salt Box’s website have persuaded supporters of hardline immigration policies to reconsider the effect immigration warehouses would have in the redder areas of Maryland and Tennessee.
“For fiscal conservatives that have used our data, they show up to these meetings and they say, ‘It’s going to take eight hundred thousand dollars out of our state tax revenue every year,’” Wriston noted.
The data also illustrates the impact of the warehouses on the environment, local infrastructure and public health.
In Lebanon, Tenn., ICE planned to build a warehouse projected to hold 16,000 people, making it “one of the largest detention camps in American history,” dwarfed only by Japanese-American internment camps in California during World War II, according to Wriston.
Following community pushback, Trump-loyalist Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced that the site would not be moving ahead.
Project Salt Box’s ICE Warehouse Tracker stands as a testament to its success. According to the database, the number of cancelled sales (12) is outpacing the number of warehouses acquired (10). That impact will likely widen as the movement’s reach keeps expanding as it receives national attention from MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow and others.
“It’s a huge grassroots effort down at the community level,” Wriston said. “It’s a hyperlocal initiative, and people are succeeding. It’s working.”
Find out more about Project Salt Box in my extended interview with Wriston on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
Also on the playlist this week:
Trump’s DOJ tries to revive their crusade against BigLaw.
Oregon’s AG sues over Trump’s latest tariffs.
Pam Bondi subpoenaed in Epstein probe, plus a House witness list rundown.
