This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 2 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

On Jan. 21, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to officials in Hanover County, Virginia, informing them that the government would be building an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the town of Ashland.

For context, Hanover is a reliably red county just outside Richmond. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 26 points there in 2024.

Specifically, the government told the Hanover officials that it wanted to build out the facility on a former cattle farm, where there is now a 500,000-square-foot warehouse constructed by a company owned by Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison.

After hearing from residents in deep-red Hanover Country, the board of supervisors announced that it would oppose the sale.

Pattison’s company intended to sell that warehouse to ICE. But after the news about that plan became public, the Canadians got going.

The head of the Green Party in British Columbia announced a boycott of all the companies owned or operated by Pattison if he went through with the plan. Days later, the union representing workers at Pattison’s grocery stores also raised concerns about the sale.

In response, Pattison’s company put out a milquetoast statement thanking people for their concern but essentially vowing to move ahead with the sale.

The next day, a big advertising company sent a letter notifying Pattison that it would “suspend all media buying” with the billionaire’s businesses due to the deal.

That night, back in Virginia, the Hanover County Board of Supervisors held a meeting about the facility. The place was absolutely packed with locals, and the public comment period went on for hours.

There were so many people there, in the cold and snow, that once the room was full, residents were queued up outside. They knew they wouldn’t get in, but they refused to leave.

At the end of that meeting, after hearing from residents in deep-red Hanover County, the board of supervisors announced that it would oppose the sale and called on the residents’ state representatives and federal delegation in Congress to take action.

Then, less than 48 hours later, Pattison’s company put out a one-line statement: “The transaction to sell our industrial building in Ashland, Virginia will not be proceeding.”

This isn’t just happening in Virginia. In the past couple of weeks, residents in Salt Lake City have also banded together to stop another huge warehouse from being turned into a prison camp.

Organizers there focused their attention on a real estate company trying to broker the sale of that warehouse and protested at their local offices.

The county’s mayor even got involved, noting that the facility would hold more people than all the state prisons in Utah. She pledged to use “all available legal and policy avenues, including land-use authority, regulatory review, and coordination with local partners” to oppose it.

On Saturday, the real estate group that owns the warehouse put out a brief, to-the-point statement, writing it had “no plans” to sell or lease the building to ICE or any other federal government agency.

In Oklahoma, the local government in Durant passed a resolution that it will not allow ICE to have a facility there. In Oklahoma City, protests led the mayor to stop the sale of a similar project.

There are variations of this happening everywhere. From San Antonio, Texas, to Merrimack, New Hampshire, to Social Circle, Georgia, people are telling the administration they do not want ICE prison camps in their communities.

On Monday in Maryland, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball revoked the building permit for an ICE facility that the government planned to build there.

“As we continue to witness the devastating consequences of federal enforcement actions across our nation, including loss of life and civil unrest, it is more important than ever that local government acts with clarity, restraint and compassion,” Ball said. “It is our responsibility as local leaders to act before harm occurs and not after.”

Now, if the federal government wants to construct these camps on military bases or other land it already has control over, there’s very little leverage to stop them. But people can still show up and protest the heck out of those facilities.

Over the last few days, demonstrations were held outside a facility in Dilley, Texas, where the government is holding men, women and children.

Last week, the prisoners inside that facility revolted in peaceful protest when they heard about the unrest nationwide over what has happened in Minneapolis.

That facility is also where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was held after being sent there from Minneapolis, before a judge over the weekend ordered him and his father freed and sent home. But hundreds of other kids are still being held there, where the government now admits there is a measles outbreak.

If they build them, they will fill them up. 

People have also been protesting at Camp East Montana, which is located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas. At least three people have died there in just the past two months, including a man whose death has been ruled a homicide by the local medical examiner.

Under the existing system, the administration is already holding more than 73,000 detainees, and the 16 new processing facilities and seven huge warehouse facility camps that it wants to build will give it space to more than double that number.

Camp East Montana, the largest of these current facilities, holds about 3,000 people. But the administration wants the new centers to house closer to 10,000 people.

If they build them, they will fill them up.

If history tells us anything, it’s that once facilities like this are built in these kinds of numbers, while they may start as immigration detention centers, they are available to the government to use indefinitely for whatever it wants to do.

But everywhere they are trying to build these things, including in some of the country’s reddest states, people are pulling out all the stops to prevent them from being built. And if the country stops the government from building them, it will never again have this kind of momentum to try to construct a constellation of prison camps outside the reach of the law.

Allison Detzel contributed.