NJ Attorney General Reviewing Claims ICE Used the Roxbury Warehouse, a Site Covered by a May 12 Court-Ordered Stipulation Limiting Conversion Activity

The New Jersey Attorney General’s office confirmed in mid-September 2026 that it is “carefully reviewing” allegations that ICE transported a person arrested in Dover on September 4 to the Roxbury warehouse in Morris County — a 470,000-square-foot site covered by a May 12 joint stipulation, so-ordered the same day (D.N.J. 2:26-cv-02884, ECF 35 and 36), in which the defendants agreed that they “shall not undertake any activities at the Roxbury Warehouse site for purposes of converting it into a detention center other than those identified in paragraph 4” (site security and maintenance) until seven days after an agency decision document relying on a final environmental assessment. The stipulation does not in terms bar holding people; whether the alleged use breaches it is a question for the court. The Project No ICE North Jersey Alliance (Project NINJA) sent a September 11 letter to the AG’s office documenting the incident, including video collected by activists of ICE vehicles entering and leaving the facility. ICE has neither confirmed nor denied the allegation. In the September 15 joint status report (ECF 50) the plaintiffs said they “have recently learned of reports that Defendants have used the Roxbury Warehouse in connection with immigration enforcement” and, “If they determine that Defendants have not complied with the stipulated order, Plaintiffs will seek appropriate relief from the Court.” No motion to enforce, order to show cause or contempt motion appeared on the docket in the RECAP copy last updated October 13; the next joint report is due November 16, 2026.

This entry is status: reported rather than confirmed, and the reason is the evidentiary posture: the central claim — that a detainee was brought inside a barred facility — rests on community-collected video and a resident advocacy group’s letter, with no agency confirmation and no filing yet. The AG’s “carefully reviewing” is the only official language on the record.

Corrected 2026-10-14: the entry called the May 12 instrument a court agreement requiring a NEPA review before any ICE use; it is a stipulation restricting conversion activity until a decision document relying on a final environmental assessment, entered in federal court, not a consent decree or injunction.

The structural interest is what a court agreement is worth once the litigation attention moves on. Roxbury is the site DHS abandoned after suit in June (2026-06-29–dhs-abandons-roxbury-nj-warehouse-ice-detention-after-lawsuit), then declined to foreclose in a July status report that kept its options open (2026-07-20–roxbury-nj-dhs-flip-flop-continuing-assess-status-report). If the allegation holds, the sequence is that a warehouse removed from the detention network by consent was used anyway, which would say something specific about the durability of the state-by-state wins that stalled the Detention Reengineering Initiative program-wide (2026-08-19–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-stalls-program-wide-11-purchased-sites) — namely that a stalled acquisition and an unusable building are not the same thing. The person arrested in Dover is not named in these sources; per the deploy-with-dignity standard this entry does not supply one, and the individual is class-level-only for the victim-story index.