Faith leaders from across Dallas gathered on Friday to condemn federal plans for a massive 9,500-person ICE detention facility in Hutchins, Texas.
The proposed warehouse conversion would create the nation’s second-largest immigration detention center just 12 miles south of downtown Dallas.
The gathering at Kessler Park United Methodist Church comes as immigration enforcement has intensified nationwide, and local officials question whether their small town can handle such a facility.
Carl Oscar Sherman, a Church of Christ minister in Hutchins, former state representative, and former Hutchins city manager, warned that the city lacks adequate infrastructure for the proposed center.
“I can tell you that Hutchins does not have the infrastructure, does not have the water supply or the sewage infrastructure, to sustain and accommodate the more than doubling of its current population by 150%,” Sherman said, per Baptist News Global.
“If we sit back and do nothing, if we think that it can’t happen where we live, if you just can’t imagine that it would ever happen in your own hometown, that could be the next city, the next community that faces it,” Sherman said, the Dallas Observer reported.
The Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (CLEAR) organized Friday’s assembly. The group has held weekly prayer vigils outside Dallas’s ICE field office since last spring.
A December Washington Post investigation revealed plans to convert seven industrial warehouses into large-scale detention centers nationwide. Government documents indicate these facilities would “speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system” near major logistical hubs.
The proposed Hutchins facility would dwarf existing regional centers. Prairieland Detention Center near Alvarado currently holds 700 people — less than one-tenth of Hutchins’s planned capacity.
The Department of Homeland Security has released limited public information about the warehouse conversion plans. Local officials and faith leaders continue pushing for transparency as they mobilize opposition to the project.
