More than 100 people gathered Thursday in a Schuylkill County fire hall to learn the latest about a proposed immigrant processing center and organize to stop it.
“I'm a mom, and I'm a grandma, and like many of you, I'm here tonight because I oppose the United States federal government taking over the Big Lots warehouse and turning it into an immigration detention center,” said Jennifer Devine, 53, an Amazon warehouse worker from Frailey Twp. “I am outraged, not just due to the fact that the United States federal government picked this location ... but outraged this is happening at all, anywhere.”
The gathering at Newtown Volunteer Fire Co., a town hall organized by Democratic congressional candidate Rachel Wallace, produced occasional clashes about federal immigration control policy. Mostly, residents united on concerns and wondered what they could do to block the center.
What's in the works
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have not publicly confirmed any plan to use the 1.3-million-square-foot former Big Lots warehouse in Tremont Twp. as a processing center. Efforts to reach an ICE spokesperson were unsuccessful. A WVIA News reporter visited the warehouse Thursday. A security guard said no one was available to speak about the plans, and the building was empty.
Concern about plans for the warehouse started on Christmas Eve with a Washington Post story. The newspaper, citing internal ICE documents, reported a Trump administration plan to renovate industrial warehouses nationwide to house immigrant detainees.
Newly arrested detainees would live temporarily in one of 16 processing centers that would hold up to 1,500. After that, ICE would move them to seven larger centers holding between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
Choosing Tremont Twp.
The newspaper identified Tremont as the location of a potential processing center but did not name the specific location.
However, Tremont Twp. tax collector Nicole Bender received a request Jan. 5 from Charles Jones, a public records search company based in Trenton, New Jersey. The request asked about taxes on the former Big Lots warehouse at 50 Rausch Creek Road. The warehouse closed last year amid Big Lots’ bankruptcy.
The notice referred to a “settlement date” of Dec. 26 with the intended buyer listed as “The United States of America.” In real estate, settlement means the day a seller and a buyer sign documents and transfer money to complete a sale.
At the town hall, County Commissioner Gary Hess said the county has received no deed recording the sale.
Blue Owl, an international real estate company, owns the warehouse. Efforts to reach a Blue Owl spokesperson were not immediately successful.
Battling the plan
A spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Luzerne), whose district includes the warehouse, said he has asked to talk to ICE officials to gain “additional information to better understand the circumstances of the situation.”
“We have not yet received a response,” spokesperson Riley Pingree said in an email.
Wallace urged the audience to contact Meuser and other elected officials but said the lack of a deed recording the sale “means this is not set in stone yet.”
“We still have a say, and I hope that's why you're here, because you deserve to have a say,” she said.
The taxes on the line
Wallace invited Hess and state Rep. Joanne Stehr, a Schuylkill County Republican, to speak first.
Republican state Rep. Joanne Stehr speaks Jan. 29, 2026, at a town hall organized to pressure federal officials to block an immigrant processing center proposed for the former Big Lots warehouse in Tremont Twp., Schuylkill County. Stehr said she will probably oppose the center, but said she understands centers are necessasry to house dangerous immigrants.
Hess pointed out the county already hosts federal, state and county prisons.
“I think we do our share in those types of things. I don't think this is not good for the county at all,” he said. “Number one, it's not good financially.”
The county, the Pine Grove Area School District and Tremont Twp. stand to lose about $1 million in property tax revenues if the federal government buys the warehouse, Hess said. Federal property is tax exempt.
He also pointed to the presence of a daycare center near the warehouse.
“If, supposedly, (as) they're saying, you have all bad people going in there, and you have 50 some children right outside the gate, (this) isn't a good position, anyway,” he said.
No division, no violence allowed
Stehr said she wouldn’t allow the matter “to create a divisive situation.”
“There will be no ICE violence and everything else like that, and anti-protesters and stuff like that,” she said.
She recalled working as a home-health nurse treating immigrant families. Never did she ask their immigration status, she said.
“I love them,” she said before arguing the Biden administration allowed “every kind of murderer, rapist, drug cartel, pedophile” into the country through porous borders.
Audience bristles
That triggered a sharp response from the audience.
“You don't know that,” one person shouted.
“This is becoming a Democrat political kind of rally,” Stehr said. “It's ridiculous, because the first thing is, we don't even know something like this is coming in here, and if it is, it's the best-kept secret.
“Do I think it should be going in our backyard? Probably not ... I'm saying ICE has a job to do, and it's going to get done. We are taking out the trash.”
The audience booed.
The heart of the issue
Wallace asked the audience to concentrate on the main issue: stopping the center.
One woman asked if the center would mean ICE teams fanning out across the county searching for people to arrest.
“Considering what has happened with two people murdered in Minneapolis by ICE agents, I think the biggest concern we have right now is, are we going to be safe with these people running through?” the woman said.
A woman who identified herself only as Carmella pointed out Tremont lacks its own police force and relies on state police who often can’t immediately respond.
“We are too small of a community, and there are too many things that can happen,” she said.
Her husband, who only identified himself as Earl, said he worries about the security of the 160 residents of a nursing home where he’s director of maintenance.
“My biggest concern is we do have some immigrants who work in the nursing home. Are they (ICE) going to barge into our facility, try and raid our facility, being that they don't need warrants now, and scare the living daylights out of every resident that is in that facility,” he asked. “Won't have it ... If bad things happen, guess where they're coming. We're all in a three-mile radius of that place.”
Stick to the point
After Devine criticized the Trump administration at length for pursuing what she described as a racist immigration policy that has led to murder in Minnesota, Tremont resident named Gerry said he “didn't come here to listen to people bash the government [and] Trump.”
“If they didn’t vote for Trump, that's too bad he's doing what he was voted to do,” he said. “But let's cut off the (expletive) about murdering people and this and that.”
“It's the truth,” Devine fired back.
“I'm here to find out what we can do to keep our tax base. I'm not here to worry about ICE agents or anything like that,” Gerry replied.
Enough is enough
The Rev. Brian Beissel, a local pastor from Frackville, recalled a flood that hit Tremont and nearby Pine Grove in 2011, a large fire that destroyed businesses, and the impact of prisons in the community.
“We've already been through so much. This is another thing to throw on top of us,” Beissel said.
“I have been a resident of this county my whole life. I have coal miners' blood running through my veins. I have seen how other outside sources come into this area, take our resources, use what we have, and then leave us high and dry," Beissel said.
"I don't trust the federal government one bit to do anything else.”
