In responding to the theme "The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis,” we foreground the importance of organizing and collaborating, and demonstrate it by co-writing an essay as two scholars who met at the Stanford Humanities Center (SHC) this year. This text is an outcome of the productive and eye-opening conversations we held with each other and other fellows at the SHC. We arrived at this topic via different routes. 

While writing her recent book Architecture and the Right to Heal, Esra Akcan often came back to her starting premise: To insist on imagining the future is sometimes the only resistance against the destructive powers in times of crisis. She decided to write a book about the wounds we live with by explaining how architecture has been complicit in political and ecological harms, and to foreground the history of architects who have worked toward healing.[1] AJ Kim is a former labor organizer, activist scholar, and a member of the 1-in-4 Movement-Research Network; as part of their abolitionist mapping project they work with Freedom for Immigrants on visualizing detention expansion and carceral land-uses under the current Administration. We write this piece for those in professions of futurity: architecture and planning are critical to post-conflict and post-disaster recovery, and we also ask for our colleagues and practitioners to reckon with our own histories of creating unjust and disaster-prone spaces. We ask what kinds of built environmental meanings there are in moving from metaphorical “warehousing” à la the larger Prison Industrial Complex, to literal physical warehousing of human bodies in industrial warehouse spaces inside of this contemporary moment.

During our time at the SHC, we woke up to alarming news every day, such as the bombs that destroyed the buildings we had written books about in Palestine, Sudan, Lebanon, and Iran. This news also included reports that the Trump administration is fashioning the architecture of a deportation machine and buying large warehouses to repurpose them as detention centers.[2] As historians of architecture and city planning, we can hardly miss the analogy between this campaign for mass expulsion and war-time architecture. WWII and its national defense-related industries transformed architecture in the US in multifaceted ways.[3] As a result of the construction of new plants for defense such as army bases, munition plants, shipbuilding, aircraft and steel production towns, seven million workers migrated to new decentralized and car-based locations and into suburban shelters.[4] Private companies and lobbies such as the National Association of Home Builders provided low-cost, fast-produced, standardized houses for masses of workers and their families, some of which served as models during the postwar period, such as Kaiser houses and Levittown. The Pentagon, or the War Department in Arlington, was built during this war (1941-43). Three secret cities were constructed from scratch in record speed with new prefabrication technologies in Hanford, Washington, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, so that the atomic bomb could be invented and dropped on Japan during the final years of WWII, while internment camps were built to imprison Japanese Americans.[5] Architects Antonin Raymond, Konrad Wachsman, and Eric Mendelsohn worked for the military to create replicas of Japanese and German villages so that bombs could be tested before they were dropped on the enemies. Design of subterranean, bomb-resistant bunkers bourgeoned.[6] And the list continues. 

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Beyond the concentration camps developed domestically in the United States during WWII to contain Japanese Americans, today’s detention and deportation architecture very closely extends the carceral design of prisons. In fact, many of the active detention centers are takeovers of shuttered prisons, including those in California City, California and Bunker Hill, Indiana. In their writings and exhibitions, abolitionists such as Mariame Kaba and Vic Liu have drawn clear design parallels between these prison spaces and warehouses.[7] As Angela Davis amply said: “The institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems.”[8] But what does it mean, and look like, to move from the noun “warehouse” to the verb “to warehouse”?

In this essay we explore the proposed infrastructures for warehouses as this administration’s planned extension of the prison industrial complex, where warehouses for storages become warehousing for humans. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purchased eight warehouses in commercial and industrially zoned parcels between January and March of 2026. As of February 2, 2026, 70,766 people have been recorded in detention, and as of April 21, 2026, at least seventeen (17) detainees have died in ICE custody this year—one person a week on average.[9]

Relevant to this conversation on the design evolution of the deportation architecture in-the-works today is the repurposing of large-scale industrial buildings in the past. The US military converted some one thousand automobile and airplane manufacturing plants, such as those designed by Albert Kahn with newly advanced construction methods, into weapons production facilities during WWII.[10]

Today, the rapid repurposing of large warehouses into detention centers, in other words, is a war-time signifier. It reveals that the US is indeed at war against its immigrants and against international law that protects asylum seekers. It is a brutal new phase in the long-standing US deportation policy that had already been predicated on the conscious and self-serving refusal to define legal paths to citizenship for millions of workers whose underpaid and unrecognized labor is essential for the economic growth and prosperity of the country. These repurposed storages have multiple problems when their appropriateness for human habitation is tested. 

As per the Urban Institute's recent examination on the issue of land-use conflict regarding the rapid proliferation of refreshed or converted ICE Detention Facilities, those buildings are already more “akin to prisons than [actual] warehouses both in terms of their use and the risks they pose to the safety and well-being of people detained there"; many ICE detention centers are former prisons. The newly purchased warehouses, having never been designed for human occupancy would “need...enough toilets and space, plus augmented fire safety and ventilation,”[11] and of course infrastructure for potable and non-potable water, wastewater and sewage capacity, cooking and eating facilities and appropriate gas, heating, and cooling capabilities, none of which are currently in place, nor is the land zoned for residential use.

Let’s look closely at the footprint of a new detention center: 

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One of eight confirmed warehouse purchases in early 2026,[12] this one million square foot warehouse site in Social Circle, Georgia, is a turning point in the current US detention and deportation architecture. This site will be the first of what is being called a “Mega” center for detention. The property was bought from a private seller in February for $128 million, approximately triple its market value, and is slotted for occupancy as early as April 2026. Tentative plans for its interior re-design have already been published by the wastewater management corporation AUC Group, based in Texas. 

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Even though a complete set of drawings or interior photographs is not publicly available, one can imagine what it would be like to be a detainee in this facility. You would be living with 10,000 people in a box-like storage and sharing a cell with 53 fellow occupants with no daylight, fresh air, or glimpse of the outside. Considering that the largest detention facilities currently accommodate 3,500 people—which is already inhumane—the plans for 8,500 detainees and an additional estimated 2,000 staff/officers suggest a new low in the construction of city-scale boxed spaces with none of the programs or infrastructures that make a city. 

The design for the first floor includes approximately 4,250 beds, while a total of 8,500 beds is intended for the facility. There are no plans that suggest demarcation of outdoor recreation or rest space for detainees. Approximately one third of the existing first floor of warehouse square footage is reserved for operations (processing, heath services, kitchen, cafeteria, security, and a gun range) with more than 4,000 beds and associated sanitation facilities allotted to the remaining two thirds of the space. This means 4,250 people will be housed in about 623,000 square feet of holding/sleeping/living space, with an additional 4,250 or so people housed on a purported second floor. There are 80 holding cells depicted on the first floor, and each cell is about 62'x125'.

In this storage for humans, your cafeteria and multi-purpose activity room would be roughly the same size as the gun range, used by ICE agents who would be training for more precise shooting of migrants like you. You would be fulfilling your sanitary needs in cells of overcrowded spaces that do not allow privacy. The lack of proper infrastructure for sewage, waste, and climate control is not encouraging regarding the expected odors, temperature, and hygiene in the facility. The City of Social Circle has indicated the sewage system has no capacity for the 10,000 person facility, nor is there enough water to accomodate the needs of the proposed converted warehouse. The room for health services seems suitable only for emergency conditions, rather than customary bodily and mental health requirements. There are no visitors' or educational facilities indicated in the drawings for family members and children.

Warehouses are not designed for the continuous occupancy of people. The absence of “life safety measures” for a building constructed primarily for industrial use and the addition of an on-site kitchen (not part of the current plan), as well as sanitation measures for 10,000 people on a daily basis, is not just a gross under-calculation: it is a human hazard. The proposed mega-center will more than double the occupancy of Social Circle, Georgia, itself a town with a population of 5,000. The city has already issued a public statement with concerns about local zoning and coding violations, lack of permits and permissions, and the current incapacity of the city and county to accommodate the estimated waste and water needs of the detention facility. The project designers state that they “do not have the data” to determine capacity overload, but the City of Social Circle has issued a clear response with their concerns: In addition to the lack of capacity to accommodate 10,000 additional people on this site, the planned infrastructure development will take approximately 12-18 months.[13] However, ICE planned to begin holding occupants at this undeveloped warehouse in the next few weeks from the time the report was circulated. At the time of this writing, Social Circle has not received any response from ICE or DHS about how water and waste would be managed at the site. The city has “placed a lock on the water meter,” cutting off access to water on site.[14] Elsewhere in the US, states and cities are trying to resist through lawsuits and regulations, by questioning the compliance of practices with either the Immigration and Nationality Act or Administrative Procedures Act.

While we have made some design comparisons here to distinguish the warehousing of people in warehouses from the warehousing of people in prisons, it is only to point out the extreme lawlessness and inhumanity that these current plans represent. These examples suggest that today’s deportation architecture is not only a war-signifier, but also a much more brutal production than the architecture of WWII mobilization, when automotive factories were repurposed for weapons production facilities. Even the secret city of Oak Ridge, built from scratch for the US's covert atomic program during WWII, accommodated not only uranium enrichment plants, but also residential, educational, leisure, commercial, religious, athletic, and health buildings. The planners’ goal was the efficient and fast production of a weapon for mass destruction, rather than justice or the well-being of habitants, but even they sought qualified spaces to attract masses of workers. Today, storages turned into incarceration cities have loads of problems when their appropriateness for human habitation is tested. 

The new detention and deportation architecture is a blatant indicator of the new political realities of our times. By essentially creating carceral-townships under the full jurisdiction of the federal government rather than the city municipalities and states they are within, these detention centers suspend and bend laws as if we are living in a state of exception or a war. They are reminders that we have transitioned into an age when local and international laws, zoning codes, and building regulations no longer matter. They need to be seen as cautionary examples that remind us of the historical moments when armed forces “began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcends the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.”[15]

We reiterate that we need to name a prison for what it is—a prison—and that there is no such thing as an illegal human being whose right to freedom can be violated unjustifiably. We fear that the disregard of local regulations and city autonomy, and the violation of national laws and international human rights are clear indicators of the road to fascism. They are not just responses to war “abroad,” but indicatives of the war at home. The disrespect for zoning laws and regulations for an immigrant detention center might seem trivial at first sight, but it should be alarming as a signifier of a new world order where rulers and armed forces act outside the law with impunity by citing war-time excuses. A world without international and domestic law is one where none of us is protected. That is why the new detention and deportation architecture threatens many more of us than the migrants it targets.

Notes

[1] Esra Akcan, Architecture and the Right to Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Duke University Press, 2025). 

[2] https://www.tnonline.com/20260226/schuylkill-presses-for-detention-center-answers/ Accessed 3/10/2026; https://www.aclu-nh.org/press-releases/aclu-nh-unveils-state-documents-confirming-ices-detailed-site-plans-for-a-merrimack-detention-facility/ Accessed 3/10/2026.

[3] Donald Albrecht, ed., World War II and the American Dream (MIT Press, 1995); Gwendolyn Wright, “Architecture, the Public and the State, 1933-1945,” in USA: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, Chicago University Press, 2008), 112-149; Eric Mumford, “Mid-Twentieth Century Modern Urbanism,” in Designing the Modern City: Urbanism since 1850 (Yale University Press, 2018), 202-252.

[4] As Eric Mumford summarized: “The 1940-42 period of National Defense Migration was pivotal in the transition from the older rail-based American society dominated by the industrial cities to the auto-based American metropolitan and regional patterns still evident today.” Eric Mumford, “National Defense Migration and the Transformations of American Urbanism, 1940-1942,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 3 (Feb. 2008): 25-34, quote, 33.

[5] Peter Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (University of Illinois Press, 1997); Deanna Sheward, “Building for the Bomb: Monumentality and the Manhattan Project,” doctoral dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2013; Hyun-Tae Jung, “'Technologically Modern': The Prefabricated House and the Wartime Experience of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,” in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, Cladimir Kulic, Timothy Oarker, Monica Penick, eds. (University of Texas Press, 2014), 186-218.

[6] Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Canadian Center for Architecture, 2011); David Monteyne, Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

[7] See for instance the exhibit at the Bedford Public Library (2026), and James Kilgore and Vic Liu, The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration (PM Press, 2024).

[8] Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2016), 25; emphasis added.

[9] Democracy Now coverage, accessed April 21, 2026,  https://www.democracynow.org/. Also see Detention Watch Network’s website, accessed April 21, 2026, https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/.

[10] Claire Zimmerman, Albert Kahn Inc. Architecture, Labor and Industry 1905-1961 (MIT Press, 2025).

[11] Yonah Freemark, Will Curran-Groome, Lydia Lo, Jorge González-Hermoso, Rick Su, “What Happens When ICE Detention Facilities Conflict with Land-Use Rules Designed to Promote the Public’s Interest?” in Urban Wire from Urban Institute, accessed 4/1/2026, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/what-happens-when-ice-detention-facilities-conflict-land-use-rules-designed-promote.

[12] "Warehouses Map Layer" by AJ Kim, available at https://www.unauthorizedcity.com/facilities.

[13] “The City’s concerns regarding water and sewer infrastructure have not been addressed to our satisfaction. We continue to have more questions than answers. DHS referenced a wastewater analysis to support its claims of available capacity; however, a portion of that capacity was attributed to the A. Scott Emmons Treatment Facility. This treatment facility is not owned by the City of Social Circle, is not located within the city limits, is in a different county, and does not connect to the City’s utility system or this building. The City’s plan was to construct the plant with an initial capacity of 1.5 million gallons per day and then increase capacity incrementally as the City grows, with long-term expansion to 3 million gallons per day. Documents provided by DHS indicate this detention facility alone would have a sewage demand of 1,001,683 gallons per day. The City’s current wastewater system processes 660,000 gallons a day and is already operating at capacity. It cannot accommodate an increase in usage of this magnitude.” "Updated Statement Regarding ICE Detention Facility  2/18/2026," accessed March 16, 2026, https://www.socialcirclega.gov/Home/Components/News/News/241/16.

[14] "Social Circle officials cut off water to site of planned Georgia ICE detention 'mega-center,'" CBSNews, accessed March 16, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/social-circle-planned-georgia-ice-detention-center-water-cut-off/.

[15] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Crown Penguin Random House LLC, 2017), 44.