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A reliably Republican part of NJ, until ICE came to town
By
Mike Hayes
Published Oct 20, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
By
Mike Hayes
Published Oct 20, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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Rick Carroll is changing his vote this year. The 71-year-old Roxbury, New Jersey resident said he’s voted ”straight line Republican all the way” for most of his life, including two consecutive ballots for his current member of congress, Republican Rep. Tom Kean, Jr.
Roxbury Township has been good to Kean, delivering him his highest 2024 vote count in all of Morris County, the most populated of the six counties in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional district.
That was before the Trump administration purchased a warehouse in Roxbury earlier this year with plans to transform it into a 1,500-bed ICE detention facility, one of the largest in the country. The move has been met with bi-partisan opposition from locals who say the warehouse is unfit to hold human beings. Roxbury’s all Republican township council condemned the plan, which is on hold pending a lawsuit.
But Kean was largely absent from the fight, and it’s left many longtime Roxbury Republicans like Carroll and his wife Paula rethinking their votes, questioning whether Kean is willing to stand up to the president on issues that matter to them.
“ I just think he does what Trump says, so he won't go against him,” Paula Carroll said.
The ICE-owned warehouse is a three minute drive from their house they’ve lived in for 36 years. They support strong borders, but Rick Carroll said “throwing” undocumented immigrants into a converted warehouse is “not the way to go about it.” He’s also worried the facility will “destroy my property value.” Both plan to break from their party and make an exception in this year’s midterm elections.
“I'm leaning just for that one Democrat,” Rick Carroll said.
Paula and Rick Carroll of Roxbury, New Jersey
Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
Political experts say those kinds of one-off defections could pose a danger for Kean, who is locked in a tight race this year with his Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett and did ultimately voice some opposition to the detention facility last month.
”If he's losing a lot of support [in Roxbury], that's going to matter,” said Dan Cassino, government and politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “When you have a close race like this, we're in street fight mode. They're going street by street, block by block. You need to be competitive there, especially when it's a town where you'd expect to do very well.”
Kean’s campaign did not respond to questions about the loss of some Republican support in Roxbury over the warehouse and how Kean plans to respond to residents’ concerns over the facility.
Not just ICE – Kean “disappeared”
News that the White House planned to use the 470,000-square foot warehouse off Route 46 in Roxbury as part of its rapid expansion of ICE’s detention capacity, first reported by the Washington Post in January, landed like a meteor in what is otherwise a sleepy suburban community roughly 43 miles west of New York City.
Locals and activists packed town council meetings demanding answers from local officials. The fully Republican township council said the White House had provided no information about its plans. Councilmembers immediately passed a unanimous resolution opposing the project, arguing the warehouse lacked the sewer capacity and other infrastructure needed for such a large detention center.
Anger in the town and surrounding area only grew in February when the Trump administration paid Goldman Sachs and a partner nearly $130 million dollars for the property.
Local officials said they asked Kean for help in fighting the Trump administration. In a statement a day after the sale of the warehouse was reported, Roxbury’s Republican Mayor Shawn Potillo released a statement saying the township committee raised concerns with “every level of government.”
“Despite repeated outreach, our federal representative, Congressman Tom Kean Jr., did not engage to the level we had hoped to provide the advocacy our residents deserved,” Potillo said.
Kean responded to the criticism with claims that he had engaged high-level staffers at the Department of Homeland Security. At the time, he did not say whether he opposed the facility or not.
It wasn’t clear at the time, but it was the beginning of what would be a long absence for Kean from public life. On March 5, Kean cast his last vote in Washington before mysteriously vanishing from Congress for over 100 days and offering little explanation about where he had gone. When he reemerged at the end of June. Kean revealed that he’d been hospitalized for severe depression.
On the campaign trail, Bennett has commended Kean for getting the treatment he needed. But for some Roxbury residents, the lack of clarity around his absence, and his failure to intervene in ICE’s warehouse purchase, has soured their opinion of a Republican with a long history in New Jersey. His father is a former governor of the Garden State. Before Congress, Kean served in the state Legislature for two decades.
“He just disappeared,“ Rick Carroll said. “He should've put it out there in some fashion for us to understand why he's been MIA for four, five months, during this critical time really.”
Brian Kiernan of Roxbury, New Jersey
Aristide Economopoulos for Gothamist
Brian Kiernan, who has lived in Roxbury for 37 years, said he’s voted Democrat since the first Obama administration but was a Republican prior to that, including time spent campaigning for Richard Nixon as a Young Republican.
This year, Kiernan has been knocking on doors in Roxbury, canvassing for Bennett. He said Kean’s lack of involvement in the ICE facility has shifted some people’s opinions in the heavily Republican town.
“There’s dissatisfaction with respect to what our congressman has not done, where he could have done things to protect our local interest,” he said.
But both Kean, and Trump’s plans for the warehouse, continue to find support in Roxbury and the surrounding area.
Vanessa Gleason lives about two miles from the warehouse. She is in favor of ICE using the facility to detain people, and unhappy that Kean eventually opposed Trump’s plan. Nonetheless, she said she’s still “all for” Kean in order to keep Democrats out of power.
”I don't think I can support the Democrats, any day of the week,” she said.
Steve Langland, a Republican from Mount Olive, which borders Roxbury, lives about 5 miles from the warehouse. He said he’s also voting for Kean because someone from the “alternative party” would be worse.
”It's just getting too lunatic. And the higher [the Democrats] numbers, the worse it's going to get,” he said.
Debate comment means little
It wasn’t until the candidates’ one and only debate last month that Kean was finally forced to take a position on the ICE facility in Roxbury. He was asked if he understood Roxbury residents’ frustration over not knowing where he stood on the issue.
Kean responded by saying he is against the Trump administration’s plans for the warehouse, one of the few times during the campaign he’s come out against one of Trump’s policies.
“ My focus is to make sure we don't have an ICE facility in Roxbury,” he said.
Bennett, tongue-in-cheek, thanked him for his answer.
“ This is the first time we have heard Congressman Tom Kean Jr. actually be explicit about his position on the detention facility in Roxbury,” Bennett said.
But some local residents remained just as frustrated by Kean’s debate response.
Megan Dray, another longtime Roxbury resident, is a Democrat who said she was raised Republican and only recently changed her party affiliation. She said she believes Kean only denounced the facility at the debate because it’s “what he thinks people wanted to hear.”
Dray said she’s frustrated with both parties’ inability to come together and find a solution for immigration reform, but she’ll still be supporting Bennett.
“ I am voting for Rebecca because she is not Tom Kean. And I wish I could say something stronger or better than that,” she said.
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Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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