ROXBURY, N.J. — On a warm morning, on Sept. 4, masked immigration agents rolled into Dover, New Jersey.

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.

The warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, 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 Attorney General says they are looking into similar reports.

Contractor says he was told Stephen Miller wanted facilities to be “cruel” and “painful”

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 advisor 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.”