ICE and Data Centers Aren’t New, But Face Growing Pushback as They Intertwine

On July 13, residents of Neptune Township, New Jersey, voted to ban AI data centers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails from being built in their town. While protests against the construction of AI data centers and ICE facilities have increased since Donald Trump’s reelection, the Neptune Township ordinance is the first in the U.S. reflecting a connection between the deportation regime and Big Tech.

Neptune residents’ move to oppose technofascism in their town also demonstrates the potential to form new coalitions, powered by grassroots organizing, for more democratic participation in local development. Ben Dziobek, executive director of Climate Revolution Action Network (CRAN), a New Jersey-based organization that helped mobilize support for the bans, told Insider NJ, “Banning ICE detention centers is the same fight as banning data centers … Neptune is deciding what it wants built in its town and what it doesn’t.”

Of course, the current upsurge in demonstrations against AI data centers and ICE immigrant jails is not in response to new phenomena. On the one hand, tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have been building data centers for years, mostly to warehouse large amounts of data that governments, corporations, and consumers use for digital storage. However, the construction and operation of these new AI data centers raise questions about the undemocratic nature of economic development and Big Tech. Elon Musk’s xAI bypassed federal environmental regulations to build gas turbines for its Tennessee facilities. Meta worked covertly with some of Louisiana’s state elected officials to plan and build AI centers. And Trump, in his second term, has sought to restrict local and state regulation of AI, further greasing the skids for construction. These data centers pose environmental, health, and economic threats to residents and workers. They are linked to noise pollution and exorbitant levels of water and electric usage — and residents have complained of increases in utility bills.

On the other hand, ICE has relied on a network of hundreds of facilities since its formation in 2003. According to a 2024 Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse report on immigration, ICE held nearly 40,000 adults at the end of Joe Biden’s presidential term in January 2025. The Trump administration has sought to dramatically escalate ICE arrests and detentions to enact its white nationalist immigration agenda.

This craven drive to detain and deport as many immigrants as possible is fueling this administration’s attempts to expand its network of camps, including by converting closed prisons and warehouses into ICE facilities. Florida’s infamous South Florida Detention Center, also known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” is one of the most prominent examples of a swiftly built detention camp enacting this administration’s cruel immigration policy. People detained there complained of the inhumane conditions in which they were held, saying that they faced overflowing toilets and were denied prescribed medication and adequate food.

This prison, like some of the AI data centers, also threatens ecosystems and several endangered species in the Everglades. The construction of the South Florida Detention Center generated protests from Floridians and others opposing the construction of the facility and the conditions inside. In fact, protesters gathered for “Freedom Vigils” outside of “Alligator Alcatraz” every Sunday since August 2025. The political and legal pressure from protesters, people being detained, environmental and civil rights groups, and elected officials forced its closure in June 2026.

The movement to stop data centers and detention camps during Trump’s second term has been relatively successful. Between March and June 2025, protests helped delay or stop 20 data center projects, Kristin Toussaint from Fast Company reports. Opposition to AI data centers continues to stymie Big Tech in 2026. Between January and March of this year, people across the U.S., from Arizona to Virginia, have obstructed or blocked more than $130 billion in data center development.

On the surface, the fight against data centers and detention camps might seem unrelated. However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) touts its use of AI in immigration enforcementon its website. Tech companies have forged relationships with DHS and ICE to assist in immigration enforcement. Spotify, to much outrage from listeners, ran recruitment advertisements for ICE. The federal government awarded Palantir a $30 million contract last year to develop an “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform to track people suspected to be undocumented. Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (“ELITE”) app tracks and maps people targeted by ICE. And surely, immigrants are not the only people that ICE targets using these apps, as one Minneapolis activist suspected that ICE used these apps to surveil them as well. New data centers would surely help support DHS and ICE’s use of AI in immigration enforcement and the squashing of dissent. And, if DHS’s and ICE’s uses of AI are not enough, former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons articulated a sinister aspiration for the expansion of the U.S.’s deportation machine through neoliberal and technofacist rhetoric. Lyons said at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in 2025 that the U.S. needed “to get better at treating this [deportation] like a business.” The country needs to build a system that operates “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings,” he added.

This relationship between tech companies and federal and state governments in constructing and fortifying immigration enforcement highlights further threats to rights of Americans, undocumented people, and to nature. CRAN demonstrates their understanding of this relationship on its website. The organization points to Palantir Chair Peter Thiel’s disdain for democracy and billionaire Larry Ellison’s musings about using AI to police everyone to illustrate how Big Tech seeks to use generative artificial intelligence to plunder communities of resources, accumulate capital, consolidate political power, surveil people, and conduct destructive wars. This presidential administration has proven that it is a willing partner in this endeavor.

Neptune residents’ and the Climate Revolution Action Network’s fight against data centers and detention camps underscores how the struggle for democracy extends beyond voting in elections every two and four years. This battle against AI data centers is also about how local communities should invest public resources. As organizers Astra Taylor and Saul Levin stated about the data center opposition: “It’s about who controls the economy and whether regular people have a say in the decisions that affect them.” Neptune’s refusal to build these centers and CRAN’s statewide struggle to ban data centers in New Jersey contribute another model for fighting undemocratic AI data centers and ICE facilities and to assert a more humane vision for development.

Few people should want to live in the shadow of energy-sucking and noisy AI data centers with their neighbors living in fear of ICE kidnapping. This sentiment about economic development applies to policing, immigration, and citizenship. The communities that are opposing ICE detention camps are refusing complicity in this administration’s deportation regime. And many opponents of these detention centers are demanding a more expansive understanding of citizenship that might not include an undocumented person’s ability to vote in elections, but a community life that supports their human rights as workers and residents. It is time that all of us see these struggles as linked and as part of a larger vision that rejects undemocratic development and tech-fueled policing.