Suffolk is letting large property owners know it doesn’t want them to repurpose warehouses as federal detention centers.
The city manager’s office will send letters to everyone owning a facility larger than 100,000 square feet. Council gave assent to alert owners at Wednesday’s meeting.
For Leslie Rinaldi, Suffolk’s Democratic Party chair, the city’s decision was a win.
“Thank you for standing with us, both on moral and practical grounds,” she said during the meeting.
The city has other regulations that limit warehouse owners from leasing buildings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jails and detention centers are only permitted in heavy industrial areas under Suffolk’s zoning ordinance. Several of those, including the Port 460 Logistics Center, signed agreements that prohibit their use for detention when the city approved their developments.
Though Suffolk has several warehouses, they can be smaller than those along the I-95 corridor, according to Councilmember Shelley Butler Barlow.
“We really are probably not an area that they would be looking,” she said.
Despite that, Barlow wanted council to know its options and asked the city manager and attorney to look into it earlier this month.
“What I would like is for government not to have human beings stacked up in warehouses waiting to be deported,” Barlow said. “It’s a sickening thing to think about.”
There aren't any active proposals to turn a warehouse into a detention center in Suffolk, though they are surfacing in other areas in the commonwealth and U.S. more broadly. The sale of a Hanover County warehouse to DHS fell through earlier this year amid resident and county board member opposition.
