SAN ANTONIO – Reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has acquired an East Side warehouse to hold detained immigrants had local Democrats burning up Tuesday, even as confirmation remained elusive.
The sale was first reported by the San Antonio Express-News on Tuesday morning. Citing anonymous sources, the paper said ICE had recently completed the purchase of a roughly 640,000-square-foot warehouse by Houston Street and Southeast Loop 410 “in the past day or so.”
A source in the commercial real estate industry later confirmed to KSAT that ICE had purchased the warehouse, though they were not directly involved in the deal.
The owner of the warehouse, Oakmont Industrial Group, did not return KSAT’s phone calls, and a statement from an ICE spokesperson made no mention of a possible San Antonio property deal — whether to confirm or deny it.
The Bexar County Clerk’s Office has not yet received any new land records reflecting a sale, but it can take a week or longer for those documents to be filed.
Reporting by other state and national news outlets indicates the site could be used as “processing center” — part of a larger, feeder system meant to help speed up deportations amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In December, the Washington Post listed San Antonio as one of 16 cities where the administration planned to convert warehouses into facilities with up to 1,500 beds.
Newly arrested immigrants would be booked for a few weeks at the locations, before being sent to large warehouses holding up to 10,000 people, where they would be staged for deportation.
On Jan. 29, the Dallas Morning News also reported it had reviewed an internal ICE document that listed San Antonio as a location for a “processing center.”
The same day, the San Antonio Business Journal was the first to report ICE was considering the recently built East Side warehouse, Oakmont 410, for a purchase.
A City of San Antonio spokesman said the city had “no direct information on the reported sale” of the property.
Councilman Marc Whyte (D10) told KSAT that while he didn’t think the city had any direct knowledge either, based on his conversations with city management, “the city’s belief is that it closed yesterday.”
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones also told KSAT the city had not received formal confirmation of a sale, but she had reached out to local ICE office. She also said the city attorney was looking at options for the council to consider.
“I don’t want to get ahead of that, nor frankly raise anybody’s expectations about what’s in the realm of possible because a lot of that goes away when, in fact, the operator and owner of it is the federal government,” she said during a live interview Tuesday evening.
Bexar County Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert, a Democrat, believes there might be an opportunity to file an injunction to delay or stop the project because he suspects ICE may not have done an environmental impact study.
“Those environmental impacts studies have to be conducted by ICE in order to ensure that there is consideration for the environmental impacts of a detention facility of that size and magnitude on the community,” he said, pointing to the Essence Preparatory Public School on the other side of Loop 410, Herman Hirsch Elementary School a more than two-mile walk away, and “neighbors next door.”
Texas State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins (D-San Antonio) was also unable to confirm whether ICE had acquired the property but said “we all know that having ICE in San Antonio is the wrong thing to do.”
“We don’t need a 640,000-square-feet detention center. Now, we’re talking about tall fences and we’re taking about armed guards,” she said.
Gervin-Hawkins also said, “We’re going to fight it as much as we can.”
“So we’re engaging as many civic organizations that we can. We’re talking to our attorneys,” she said. “And we’ve also reached out our federal partners, our congressional people, to say, ‘What do they know?’ And it’s interesting that no one knows anything."
In response to the reports of the sale, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX-20) and U.S. Rep Greg Casar (TX-35), both Democrats, released a joint statement.
“We should be closing down the facilities where children and families are being held in inhumane conditions—not building more of them. These warehouses that are being branded as ‘processing centers’ are just another way for the administration to indiscriminately lock people up and give the profits to its cronies. We strongly oppose any expansion of ICE’s presence in San Antonio, and we will fight with every tool available to prevent it.”
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D, TX-20) & U.S. Rep Greg Casar (D, TX-35)
Local regulations don’t seem to be an option for stopping the creation of a processing center.
City spokesman Brian Chasnoff told KSAT that “federal facilities are not required to follow city zoning rules, rezoning processes, or local permitting requirements.”
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) represents the area around the warehouse and had been outspoken about trying to prevent ICE’s acquisition of the property. In a Monday video on social media, he urged viewers to contact Oakmont Industrial Group and their broker.
“Our number one goal has to be to stop the sale,” he said.
The councilman reacted to news of the sale with an expletive in a separate post Tuesday morning.
”Give me a couple hours to process and think up next steps,” he wrote. “We’ve contemplated this possibility with the city attorney’s office & there’s still a little hope…”
However, when KSAT reached out for comment, a spokeswoman declined, saying their office was waiting to confirm the sale of the property first.
An ICE spokesperson provided KSAT with a statement Tuesday. While it did not address the San Antonio property sale, it confirmed other purchases.
“ICE purchased land and facilities in Surprise, AZ, Hagerstown, MD, and El Paso, TX. These will not be warehouses — they will be very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards. Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.
“ICE is targeting vicious criminals including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and more. 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S. Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities.”
ICE spokesperson
Read also: