Bhasin: Gulag in Gilroy: Finally, some NIMBYism I can get behind

The NIMBY crowd has gotten a bad rap in the Bay Area.

Between helping to prevent the construction of new housing, keep housing prices high, exacerbate homelessness, perpetuate economic and racial segregation, delay green energy, hinder public transit access, restrict social services, weaponize the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and encourage suburban sprawl, it’s safe to say that nobody likes these guys.

Given all of this, you would have been hard pressed to find a cause that NIMBYism might be lauded for. Something to help shift its tarnished reputation.

And yet here we have California and Santa Clara County suing the Trump administration in order to stop the construction of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility just outside of Gilroy. On July 13, the federal government paused construction of the facility while it prepares a response.

Classic moves

The lawsuit is pulling some classic bits from the NIMBY playbook. It’s trying to snag the federal government on technicalities like neglecting to provide an Environmental Assessment or Environmental Impact Statement and claiming the land is meant only for agricultural use.

You see, the state and county aren’t against the Trump administration opening a prison camp designed to dehumanize immigrants. Like any good NIMBY, they’re worried about “the environment” and “animal welfare.” Just like Woodside was when they stopped the construction of housing by invoking the well-being of their mountain lions.

Because they’re suing the feds, these NIMBYs aren’t citing CEQA, but they’ve got something even better: NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act). According to the lawsuit, the federal government failed to “analyze the project’s environmental consequences before approving the lease and beginning construction.”

California and Santa Clara County are also invoking the Administrative Procedure Act, which is NIMBY to the core. There’s nothing NIMBYs like more than bogging people down in administrative procedure. (Just look at the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts.)

And then there’s the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, which basically nails the federal government for not consulting with the county or state on the project. (Like Palatine saying no thanks to a Postal Service facility.)

They’re also throwing the Williamson Act at the feds, which is meant to protect agricultural land. (Apologies to solar energy projects in San Benito and Alameda counties.)

Their lawsuit also mentions the Immigration and Nationality Act, arguing that the facility isn’t an “appropriate place of detention” because “threatened species” live on that land. (Remember Woodside’s mountain lions?)

It is thrilling to watch the NIMBY smokescreen being used for good instead of evil. I hope the federal government likes to conduct years-long environmental reviews, because that’s where they’re headed.

Donald Trump, star of “The Apprentice,” has evaded accountability at every possible level of society, in this life and probably the next, but he’s never come face-to-face with Bay Area NIMBYs. I bet the very idea of it has him falling asleep in national security briefings or babbling incoherently about rigged elections.

American malice

Of course, when it comes to ICE’s for-profit internment camps, I’m less of a NIMBY and more of a NIABYSTCAHTN (Not In Anyone’s Backyard Start The Crimes Against Humanity Trials Now). These concrete monuments to American malice have been built to satisfy a xenophobic bloodlust fueled by this administration and the worst of us in society who support or ignore it.

Despite administration propaganda, detainees aren’t the “worst of the worst.” More than two thirds of detainees don’t even have a criminal record. They’ve lived in their communities for decades, trying to find a legal pathway to residency.

While interned, they’re treated abysmally, deprived of medication and subjected to unsanitary conditions — in the hopes that they’ll self-deport. That’s if they survive. And, increasingly, they don’t. At least 50 people have died in ICE custody since January 2025, many of them by suicide. The mortality rate is more than double what it was during Trump’s first term and four times higher than it was during Biden’s.

And, as we’ve just seen in Maine and Texas, sometimes they don’t even make it to the facility — even if they weren’t actually targets.

The gleeful criminalization of immigration is terrifying communities across the country, targeting U.S. citizens who speak Spanish in public or appear to be Latin. If you’re not White, you don’t belong here, is the overall vibe. But if you are White, and you get in the way of Trump’s anonymous, inadequately-trained goon squad, you might be murdered in the street.

The ICE prisons in Gilroy and elsewhere are symbols of all this degradation and depravity, the brutal architecture of a country that’s lost its way. Unfortunately, there’s more to come.

At least we have NIMBYs.

Nick Bhasin is the deputy opinion editor of Bay Area News Group. He can be reached at [email protected].