Roxbury NJ Warehouse Detention Saga: DHS Reverses to Proceed July 13, Then Walks Back to 'Continuing to Assess' in July 20 Court Filing

DHS notified a federal court on July 10 that it was restarting conversion of its $129.3M, 470,000-square-foot Roxbury Township (Morris County, NJ) warehouse into an immigration detention facility — reversing an earlier June 29 decision to abandon the plan (2026-06-29–dhs-abandons-roxbury-nj-warehouse-ice-detention-after-lawsuit). Bloomberg reported the reversal July 13. Then a July 20 joint status report to the court said DHS is “continuing to assess whether to proceed” — an apparent walk-back of the July 8/13 reversal-to-proceed, producing a three-reversal chronology within roughly six weeks. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, and Roxbury Township are the plaintiffs in the underlying suit (2026-03-20–nj-roxbury-sue-ice-dhs-detention-warehouse).

The oscillating DHS posture suggests active internal and litigation pressure rather than a settled outcome: the $129.3M purchase from a Dalfen Industrial/Goldman Sachs joint venture anchors the asset financially, making resale difficult and giving DHS incentive to eventually proceed despite the litigation. Morris County (FIPS 34027) has no prior detention infrastructure and is roughly 40 miles west of Manhattan. This saga sits alongside other 2026 warehouse-detention fights the state/local resistance corpus tracks, including Salt Lake City/County (2026-06-08–salt-lake-city-county-sue-dhs-ice-warehouse-detention-conversion) and the Pennsylvania Berks/Schuylkill withdrawal (2026-07-22–shapiro-administration-ice-withdraws-berks-schuylkill-pa-warehouses).

CORRECTION, 2026-08-30 — New Jersey’s Attorney General. This entry named Matthew Platkin as NJ Attorney General in both its actors list and its body, six months after he left office. The entry’s own cited source title names Davenport: “Governor Sherrill, Attorney General Davenport, Roxbury Township Sue ICE, DHS…” — so the file contradicted itself, and the correct name was sitting in its own frontmatter.

Corrected to Jennifer Davenport in both places. This is not a succession-boundary judgment call (where an entry legitimately names whoever held the office on the event date); the events here are July 2026, well after the transition. It is a stale name carried forward.

Caught by a brief-writing worker that refused to import it. A prior “fix canon defects” pass missed it — worth noting that a defect can survive a dedicated cleanup task and still be caught by the next worker who actually has to use the fact.