05/14/2026
For months, one of the leading voices in the fight to block a massive ICE warehouse detention center from opening in Surprise, Arizona has been Cali Overs -- a 17-year-old who walks past the planned facility every day on her way to school. The Department of Homeland Security quietly purchased the $70 million warehouse in January without notifying the city, the state, or school leaders whose building sits just half a mile away -- with plans to convert it into a detention facility holding up to 1,500 people. No community meeting. No environmental review. No warning.
When Cali found out what was happening in her own neighborhood, she didn't wait for someone else to do something about it. A senior at Dysart High School in El Mirage and vice president of the student body, she started organizing.
Her school's student body is 60% Hispanic, and one of her first and most urgent concerns was what the facility would mean for her classmates once it was staffed with ICE agents -- pointing to a recent Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents to use race and ethnicity as a basis for stopping someone.
"Students are scared they will be stopped on their way to school just because they are Hispanic," Cali wrote. "These are not hypothetical fears. Many students have told me they are too scared to go past this area and are switching to online classes. These are American citizens changing the course of their education because they no longer feel safe going to school anymore."
The physical reality for students is stark. Due to budget cuts, every student living within two miles of school is not provided with bus transportation -- meaning hundreds of children walk, drive, or bike past the warehouse every single day just to get to class.
"By placing an ICE detention center on the same route that hundreds of children use to get to school," Cali observed, "DHS is creating unnecessary danger. This is reckless, irresponsible, and completely avoidable." Someone already tried to set the building on fire, she noted -- and it's not even open yet.
She drafted a proposal calling for a mandatory three-mile buffer between any detention facility and a school, and began taking it directly to elected officials. She wrote letters, spoke at town halls, started an online petition, and took her case all the way to the Arizona Attorney General's office. She spoke at a press conference alongside Attorney General Kris Mayes in April when Mayes announced a lawsuit against DHS and ICE.
When the Dysart School Board and Surprise City Council repeatedly failed to respond to her emails, she showed up at the school board meeting and posted every unanswered email publicly. "Every single one of these leaders sat there watching me spend the last few months of my senior year doing their job," she wrote, "because they refuse to do it."
No one in the community "fought harder, or more visibly" than Cali Overs, observed Rook Wi******er, who has been covering the fight for the investigative newsletter Closer to the Edge.
The lawsuit, filed April 24th, argues that DHS failed to conduct required environmental reviews and that the facility's location -- directly across the street from a hazardous chemical storage site -- makes it unsuitable for housing human beings. A stop work order had been issued to GardaWorld just days before the suit was filed -- the private security firm awarded a $313 million contract to retrofit the warehouse. The project is now officially "paused." As Cali put it when the news broke: "Although it's a big win, the stop is not permanent."
Since new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin took over, there are signs of growing recognition inside the department that the warehouse conversion program, conceived under his predecessor Kristi Noem, was poorly thought through. There is now talk of selling some of the already-purchased properties back.
The price tag alone tells part of the story -- warehouses purchased for tens of millions of dollars, contracts worth hundreds of millions more, an entire $38 billion architecture of industrial-scale detention that is now, as Wi******er described it, "a plan under review." Cali has responded by requesting a virtual meeting directly with Secretary Mullin to push for the three-mile buffer as official DHS policy.
None of this means the fight is over. The administration has not abandoned its mass detention agenda -- it may be recalibrating it, shifting toward purchasing existing, already-operational detention facilities that require no retrofitting and generate less community resistance. Advocates who follow detention policy closely warn that the history of these pauses is not encouraging -- the federal government has a pattern of stepping back when attention is high and quietly resuming when it drifts.
Cali Overs will graduate this spring -- and she's already shown what one person, paying attention and refusing to stay quiet, can do.
To support Cali's fight and help push her proposal for a three-mile buffer zone between ICE detention facilities and K-12 schools into federal law, you can sign her petition at https://www.3milebuffer.com/
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To read Cali's op-ed in the Phoenix New Times, visit https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/opinion/surprise-arizona-ice-detention-center-school-op-ed-40656297
To read more about Cali in a profile on AZ Central, visit https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/surprise/2026/05/03/surprise-ice-facility-cali-overs/89073544007
To read the Arizona Agenda's profile of Cali, "Disrespected, But Not Discouraged," visit https://www.arizonaagenda.com/p/disrespected-but-not-discouraged
To read the Arizona Attorney General's lawsuit announcement against DHS and ICE, visit https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-block-proposed-ice-detention-facility-surprise
To read Axios's reporting on DHS pausing the warehouse detention program nationally, visit https://www.axios.com/2026/05/07/ice-immigrant-detention-private-contractors
To follow the community organizing effort in Surprise, visit https://www.noiceinsurprise.com
