GET THE FUCK OUT

A message to ICE, their warehouse landlords, their no-bid contractors, their investor calls, and everyone who looked at seventy thousand human beings in cages and complained it wasn’t enough.

Get the fuck out.

Get the fuck out of Social Circle, Georgia. Get the fuck out of Hutchins, Texas. Get the fuck out of Williamsport, Maryland and Ashland, Virginia and Surprise, Arizona and every other American community where you showed up in the middle of the night with a purchase agreement and the assumption that nobody was paying attention.

Get. The fuck. Out.

Todd Lyons, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, described his vision for human detention in this country as “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” He said this out loud. At a conference. In front of contractors who responded not with horror but with their order books open.

Congress gave him $45 billion to make it happen.

GEO Group — one of the two corporations whose entire business model is profiting from human captivity — just reported $254 million in profit for 2025. A 700 percent increase. Their chairman called it “the most successful year for new business wins in our company’s history.” They donated nearly $2 million to Trump before the election. Congress returned $45 billion. CoreCivic nearly doubled its ICE revenue in a single quarter. On their earnings call, an investor complained — actually complained — that ICE wasn’t detaining people fast enough.

Seventy thousand human beings in cages and the complaint was that it wasn’t enough.

I’ve written about the facilities. The Bishop Henry Whipple Building in Minnesota. Broadview in Illinois. Dilley in Texas. I’ve written about the people who were detained – Ayman Soliman, Donna-Hughes Brown, Gabriela Lozano Sousa, and Denis Cabrera Rodríguez, whose story in this publication became Exhibit 7 in his federal habeas corpus petition.

I’ve written about people like Justo Betancourt – still caged inside “Alligator Alcatraz” – while his daughter sat outside a Senate office pleadng for people to give a shit.

And now they want to build more of these facilities.

The plan — the “ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative,” which is the most bureaucratic name ever given to the construction of concentration camps — is to buy commercial warehouses across America and convert them into facilities holding up to 10,000 people at a time. Eight mega-centers. Sixteen processing centers. One hundred thousand beds by November 2026, funded by your taxes, operated by corporations that donated millions to make sure the right man won.

Here’s the one thing they didn’t count on:

The warehouses aren’t built yet.

In Hutchins, Texas, community pressure convinced a real estate developer to walk away from a million-square-foot sale. In Social Circle, Georgia, city leaders cut off ICE’s water. In Oklahoma City, a council meeting killed the deal. These aren’t blue cities. These are American communities that looked at what was coming for their backyards and said the same four words this headline says.

The strategy works. Organized local pressure defeats detention profiteers. Every time. The problem has always been knowing where to show up before it’s too late.

GTFOICE.org solves that problem.

Sign up with your zip code. Get an immediate alert the moment ICE eyes a warehouse in your community — before the permits, before the sale, before the first human being gets processed like a two-day delivery.

This isn’t a hashtag. This isn’t a petition. This is a website and an early warning system.

The concrete hasn’t poured yet.

Go to GTFOICE.org. Sign up. Show up. And when ICE comes shopping in your community, give them the same message:

Get the fuck out.

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Rook T. Winchester is the founder and editor-in-chief of Closer to the Edge, a gonzo political journalism publication based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Paid subscriptions and continued support from readers are the only things keeping it alive.