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Democratic Gov. Maura Healey is calling on her counterpart in New Hampshire, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte, to “do everything in her power” to stop ICE from building out a new detention facility north of the Massachusetts border.
Documents released Thursday by Ayotte’s office, marked Department of Homeland Security, detail plans by the feds to open a new ICE detention facility in Merrimack, about 11 miles from the Massachusetts state line. In the document, DHS laid out plans to spend $158 million to turn a warehouse into a “processing site” that would house between 400 and 600 detainees.
On Friday, Massachusetts’ governor had a message for Ayotte: “We certainly should not be allowing ICE to build new human warehouses when they can’t be trusted to keep people safe and protect due process,” Healey said in a press release. “I oppose this in the strongest possible terms.”
Healey’s comments follow a public spat between ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons and Ayotte, who until this week has denied having received details of the facility plans.
Testifying before the U.S. Senate on Thursday, Lyons said officials had shared an economic impact summary of the Merrimack facility with Ayotte. The governor responded that his comments were “simply not true.”
But on Thursday evening, Ayotte’s office posted two DHS documents, including the economic impact analysis for the Merrimack facility.
The second document details the government’s broader plan to spend $38.3 billion — money allocated through President Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill — and add tens of thousands of beds to the nation’s now-strained immigrant detention network.
The “Detention Reengineering Initiative” seeks to build out eight “large-scale detention centers,” each housing up to 10,000 detainees for periods averaging fewer than 60 days. The Merrimack site appears intended to be one of 16 “processing sites,” which would house up to 1,500 people for up to seven days, according to the document.
An ICE facility in Merrimack would introduce incarceration into an area intended for industry and technology. Located at 50 Robert Milligan Parkway, the Merrimack site is a 324,000-square-foot warehouse. A marketing brochure for the 43-acre property promotes it as an “industrial environment designed to support a range of users, from logistics and distribution to advanced manufacturing.”
Ayotte’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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