Federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement toured a large warehouse in south Kansas City today, as part of a federal plan to renovate industrial buildings to hold immigrants detained by ICE.
Several federal agents appeared at the warehouse at 14901 Botts Road on Thursday morning, following speculation on social media this week that ICE may be ramping up their presence in the metro area. Rumors had also been circulating about the possibility of ICE opening a massive detention center in Kansas City, which Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca IV confirmed on Thursday morning.
“They are ICE, they are Homeland Security,” Abarca said.
When Abarca arrived at the warehouse, he said he was confronted by six ICE agents who surrounded his car. A video Abarca posted on social media shows federal officers without name badges standing outside his car, shining a flashlight into his car as he films them.
Abarca said the federal agents confirmed to him that they were touring the empty warehouse with contractors as a possible site for a future detention center.
“They are national, regional, local teams that are looking to open an ICE facility, a mega detention facility — something that will have a regional impact that's pretty dramatic,” Abarca said.
Hours after confirmation that federal agents toured the warehouse, city council members swiftly approved a moratorium on all city approvals for nonmunicipal detention facilities.
The moratorium is in effect until Jan. 15, 2031, and applies to any permits, zoning applications, project plans, or development plans that would need city approval — including those a federal immigration detention center would need to open in Kansas City. To legally operate as a detention facility for federal immigration needs, the south Kansas City warehouse would require a special use permit. But it's still unclear if such a measure would be enough to stop the federal government from building an immigration detention facility in Kansas City.
A possible ICE detention facility in south Kansas City?
In late December, The Washington Post reported on the Trump administration’s plans to renovate industrial warehouses across the U.S. and overhaul the immigrant detention system. According to documents obtained by the Post, the administration is eyeing Kansas City as the location for one of the larger warehouses.
Abarca said he joined the tour inside the warehouse along Botts Road, off Missouri Route 150. The warehouse is in an industrial area in southernmost Kansas City, near Grandview.
“It's an atrocity,” Abarca said. “This is a Midwest facility that we're talking about, at least. And so what we're seeing happen here is a new wave of investment into these types of facilities.”
According to documents obtained by the Post, ICE plans to establish a “deliberate feeder system” to speed up deportations. People who are arrested by ICE “would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation,” the Post report said.
ICE did not respond to KCUR requests for comment.
Abarca said federal officials are touring other sites in Kansas City, but said he was not told where they are located. At the warehouse officials toured Thursday, Abarca said they’re looking to place around 7,500 beds inside.
“It's a massive facility, this is one of the biggest warehouses I've ever seen in my entire life,” Abarca said. “It's huge, so it's going to be very damaging to a whole lot of people.”
The Kansas City commercial real estate agency CBRE posted late last year that the warehouse officials toured, I-49 Industrial Center 7, was available for lease.
The listing page is no longer active, but an archive of the webpage shows the site boasts 920,400 square feet of space, according to the Wayback Machine.
Kansas City Parcel Viewer lists Port KC as the current owner of the building because of a tax incentive deal on the site that the agency entered into with Kansas City real estate company, Platform Ventures, according to a statement released by the agency on Thursday.
In the statement, the agency said it entered into a development agreement with Platform Ventures in 2022 to build multiple industrial buildings on the site. Port KC said the development plan intended to bring logistics and manufacturing jobs to the area, on the site of the former Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base.
Port KC said the site is owned by a private entity, and that the agency has very limited ability to stop a sale of the facility.
“The reclamation of the former airbase has been a success story because it is a hub of manufacturing and private logistics development,” Port KC said in the statement. “It is our intent to ensure that the area, now named 49 Crossing, stays true to the vision of being an innovative jobs hub.”
ICE-branded cars near Worlds of Fun?
Recent video and images from local news reports showing dozens of ICE-branded vehicles in a parking lot near Worlds of Fun also caused fear of mass raids in the Kansas City area this week. But Kansas City Council member Johnathan Duncan told The Kansas City Star earlier this week that the cars are being worked on by a local company.
Abarca also inquired about the ICE vehicles, and said federal officials told him that some of the vehicles will stay in Kansas City, though it’s unclear how many.
Of the seven locations where The Washington Post reported the Trump administration is planning a warehouse detention facility, Kansas City is one of two locations controlled by Democratic local leaders.
Democratic leaders in the Kansas City area are already speaking out against plans to build an immigrant detention center.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, a Democrat from Kansas City, sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Tom Lyons, acting director of ICE, demanding more clarity on the issue.
“Since day one, this administration has fractured communities with ICE raids and severed families with hundreds of thousands of deportations, sweeping up legal residents and American citizens in the process,” Cleaver wrote. “While we believe strongly in an orderly immigration system, Kansas Citians and I do not want to see the stench of these extreme mass deportation policies centralized in Kansas City.”
Cleaver asked in his letter why the Trump administration awarded a $29.9 million no-bid contract to Kpb Services LLC for services relating to “processing centers and mega centers throughout the United States,” if the administration will provide Congress with the locations of the proposed detention facilities, and how the administration will coordinate with local governments and local zoning laws.
“Kansas Citians do not want this administration’s reckless, deadly, and incompetent deportation policies in our back yards,” Cleaver wrote.
‘A homegrown concentration camp in my district’
The Botts Road warehouse federal officers toured Thursday is in Johnathan Duncan’s city council district.
“Our worst fears are coming into reality,” Kansas City council member Johnathan Duncan told KCUR on Thursday, after the presence of ICE and DHS was confirmed at the warehouse. “Our worst nightmares are becoming real.”
If the detention center is built, he said, it will disrupt the city.
“The fact that we will have a mass detention facility that equates to a homegrown concentration camp in my district, in the 6th District, makes me sick,” Duncan said. “I strive as a city council member and as a community leader to ensure that everyone feels welcome in our city. This will rip all of our work to shreds.”
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas wrote in a social media post that “we will work to ensure we see no such facility anywhere in our region on either side” of the state line.
“Warehousing 10,000 people in an industrial factory is not the move of enlightened or humane societies,” Lucas wrote in the post.
But Abarca said there’s fear that the Trump administration may come in and use federal power to steamroll any local opposition and ensure the detention facility gets built. The Trump administration may also have an ally in Missouri’s Republican leadership — lawmakers previously answered the White House’s call to redraw the state's voting map for the midterm election this year.
“What do we do as local government officials to try and figure this out?” Abarca said. “Because I don't think we can stop it. I mean, the federal government tells us this is what's going to happen, and so this administration, more than any, is going to force us to do it, but we get to decide how to respond.”
If federal officials decide on a location, they will have to negotiate buying the warehouse from whichever company owns it currently.
