That white-and-blue-trimmed warehouse is the very first thing you see after crossing into the Hutchins city limits from the north. Ten minutes from downtown Dallas — at most, even in morning traffic — then, suddenly, there it is, more than a million square feet of empty-and-waiting just to the left along Interstate 45 before the Palestine Street-Dowdy Ferry Road exit.
Photos don’t do it justice. The thing swallows the horizon.
When construction began a couple of years ago, many of the locals thought it was for a Walmart. So they hoped, seeing as how this town of 8,000, give or take, doesn’t have a grocery store aside from a Family Dollar built along the railroad tracks. There’s the W&W Grocery, too, though it’s more of a place to grab a burger than the ingredients.
“We’ve got plenty of liquor stores, but no grocery stores,” a woman named Quisha said Wednesday afternoon as we walked along North Denton Street. I was headed to the Hutchins Memorial Cemetery, where headstones date to the 1860s; she, to the W&W for lunch.
Quisha said she moved to Hutchins from Oak Cliff four years ago and just couldn’t believe it. “We’ve got plenty of fast food restaurants, but no grocery stores. That’s crazy.”
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Their big-box dreams dashed, word began spreading a few months back the warehouse found another tenant. Amazon, they heard, was going to drop another anchor at the Inland Port. Which meant more employees. More business. More money.
But now they know better.
ICE is planning on using this warehouse as a ‘mega’ detention center, according to an agency document. The location would house about 9,500 individuals on the Southeast corner of Interstate 45 and Interstate 20 in Hutchins, Texas, January 16, 2026. Downtown Dallas can be seen in the distance.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
Because now all they talk about in Hutchins is how that warehouse is on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement wish list of 23 new detention center sites across the country — and, if built, likely to house as many as 9,500 detainees. The human warehouse, one of four ICE wants to build in Texas, would be the largest detention center in the country and more than double Hutchins’ present population.
“We’re all descended from immigrants,” said a woman named Sherri working behind the counter at the Family Dollar when I stopped in Wednesday.
“My grandfather came from Germany, my grandmother came from Italy, and they met at Ellis Island.”
Sherri said she was from Pennsylvania by way of New Jersey, which explained the volume at which she spoke. “They’re trying to take us back to the 1860s!”
She turned to a young Black man trying to check out. “You know what happened in the 1860s.”
His eyes widened as he nodded. She continued: “This world’s crazy.”
Monday morning I asked Mayor Mario Vasquez, a graduate of South Oak Cliff High School, if he’d meet this week for an interview. He declined, saying he didn’t want to panic residents over something that was still just speculation. He pointed me instead to cautiously vetted remarks posted last week to Hutchins’ website, which he said he would repeat at that night’s council meeting.
Which he did until he went off script.
Hutchins Mayor Mario Vasquez (left) talks with Mayor Pro Tem Steve Nichols during a special meeting of the City Council on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. The council met to discuss plans for a “mega” ICE migrant detention center in the community.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
“We’re building a community here, and this doesn’t match what we’re trying to do here,” Vasquez said to a full house. “If you think anybody up here is onboard with it, you’re in the wrong building.”
For days, fearful and frustrated residents have seen their small town on the news and in their social media feeds. They see lawmakers and activists holding press conferences in front of their beautiful new City Hall, which opened in November and is decorated with murals and sculpture by Dallas and Austin artists. They serve food to strangers filing into town with news cameras or anti-ICE signs tucked in their cars.
They’ve seen, too, the pickups with blacked-out windows parked in front the warehouse and whisper about who might be inside. The building, owned by California-based Majestic Realty, is allegedly still on the market. But no one’s quite sure.
ICE is using the same secretive process as the military when it needs to set up a base. Politicians, from Hutchins council members to Dallas County commissioners to state representatives to U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, say they’ve heard nothing from the feds.
Twice Thursday I spoke with the assistant to Majestic’s chairman of the board, Edward P. Roski Jr. At one point I even thought the decorated Vietnam War veteran, minority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and son of Polish immigrants, might return my call. He did not.
There are two grocery stores in Hutchins — the Family Dollar and the W&W, home of the King Burger.
Robert Wilonsky
But that’s how it’s been going all over the country — complete and utter silence, until suddenly, “there it was,” a Schuylkill County, Pa., commissioner told The Philadelphia Inquirer this week about ICE’s purchase of a 1.3 million-square-foot Big Lots warehouse.
“Everyone’s nervous, everyone’s scared,” said Magaly Vazquez, the 37-year-old owner of Taqueria Chicaly on Palestine, just a few hundred yards from the warehouse in Hutchins. She was sitting across a table from me in her restaurant. She was smiling, but her eyes were damp.
“Scared of what,” I asked.
“Of everything,” she said.
A Hutchins City Council member told me earlier this week the normally packed restaurant — where the chips are thick, the salsa is served warm and the plates are piled high with family recipes — had grown empty since news broke of the proposed ICE detention center. That’s only at night, Vazquez said, when customers get their orders to go because they no longer feel comfortable driving after dark.
The restaurant began filling up shortly after noon Wednesday with men outfitted in fluorescent green and yellow vests, most of whom seem to spend their days arranging small rocks between the curbs and sidewalks beneath the highway as part of a beautification project. Nearly all spoke Spanish with the servers they seemed to know like old friends.
One server said her Dallas friends have already stopped driving down, and that regulars talk all day every day about moving away if the detention center opens. The town’s growing, she said, which is true.
The mayor told me some 1,000 new homes are planned nearby, just down Palestine. Newly planted for-sale signs fill empty fields across from the elementary and high schools. Workers are upgrading the utilities along Dowdy Ferry Road heading toward the Trinity River. The mayor likes to talk about Hutchins as “a city on the rise.”
Demonstrators hold signs during a protest outside Hutchins City Hall prior to a special meeting of the City Council on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. The Hutchins City Council held a special meeting to discuss plans for a “mega” ICE migrant detention center at a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in the community.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
“But if this happens,” the Chicaly server said, “it will all stop. It will all go downhill.”
Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins told me this week it’ll be bad for business down in the Inland Port, because “do you really want to be in a town synonymous with this facility? And when you put aside all the political, human rights and constitutional concerns — which I am not, because they’re in the front of my mind 24 hours a day — this would overwhelm Hutchins’ infrastructure.”
Sonia Mancha, who runs La Mancha Coffee & Tea with her son, worried about an influx of “protesters, like in Minneapolis,” bringing chaos to her “small town with the big-city feel.” The town’s only coffee shop, which got its doors open in 2024 with financial assistance from the city, is a small, quaint place adorned with signs about God and Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven.
“We’re Christian-owned,” Mancha said. “But we treat everyone the same.”
Vazquez, who moved from Mexico 19 years ago to be with her husband, owns Chicaly and two more businesses in this strip mall that replaced an old Bank of America, including the next-door ice cream shop and the tortilla factory tucked next to La Mancha.
She opened Chicaly about nine years ago, with her father, husband, sister and sister-in-law, all natives of Mexico, behind the counters and cooktops. Nearly 50% of Hutchins’ residents are Hispanic, but even a decade ago, she said, there were no Mexican restaurants.
“I love Hutchins,” she said of this small town on the edge of the big city, where the rare apartment complex looks out of place across a gravel road from dilapidated barns surrounded by barbed wire. The only time there’s traffic is when the train takes forever to clear the tracks that cut through Palestine Street.
“It’s so quiet here. And the people …” Vazquez’s voice drifted off.
“The people all know each other,” she said, tearing up again. “We’re all neighbors. It’s a small town. It’s so hard when you think about all of this. About your family. Your employees. Your customers. This is where we live. It’s sad. It’s sad.”