The Roxbury ICE warehouse deal is dead. Roxbury already knows what it cost.

For five months, the 470,000-square-foot warehouse at 1879 Route 46 was the most fought-over piece of real estate in Morris County. Now, weeks after the federal government walked away from its plan to turn the building into an immigration detention center, a new detail has surfaced — one that hasn't made it into other coverage of the saga: Roxbury Township says the property has already been sold again, and the township has put a number on what that's cost its budget.

How we got here

What Potillo's letter actually says — and doesn't

The mayor's letter was written in a different context: it was pressing Governor Sherrill to declare a state of emergency over the July 3 storm, and cited the tax loss as evidence that Roxbury's finances are already strained heading into a costly storm-recovery effort. But buried in that argument is a fact nobody else appears to have reported — that the warehouse sale DHS backed out of has already been followed by another transaction.

What we don't yet know: who bought it, what it sold for, and — critically for Roxbury's budget — what tax classification the new owner falls under. If a private industrial buyer purchased the site, it would return the property to the tax rolls, which cuts against a straightforward reading of Potillo's $1.8 million loss figure. If the loss instead reflects the gap between the property's prior assessed value under private ownership and its value while under federal — and therefore tax-exempt — ownership, that's a different and more explainable number. Potillo's letter doesn't specify which, and we haven't been able to independently confirm the transaction through county property records as of publication.

Why this matters beyond Roxbury

The Roxbury fight was one of the more closely watched local flashpoints in a national pattern: ICE spent roughly $1 billion acquiring warehouse properties around the country to expand detention capacity, then reversed course on seven of those sites — including Roxbury — reportedly transferring or reselling them. How those properties land, tax-wise, is a live question for every one of those seven towns, not just this one. A federal court case tied to the Roxbury property has also been described as pending in earlier reporting; we have not confirmed its current status and are treating that as open.

For Roxbury specifically, the stakes are concrete: a township that spent five months fighting to keep the facility out now has to account for a real budget hole, on top of whatever overtime and cleanup costs come out of the July storm. Getting the actual disposition of the property on the record — deed, buyer, assessed value — is the next reporting step, and it's one we're actively pursuing through Morris County property records.