VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — A Canadian company announced Friday it will no longer be selling a Virginia warehouse property to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which said it wanted the site as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility.
The pending sale by Vancouver-based Jim Pattison Developments had been subject to intense criticism during an immigration crackdown in the United States. Two U.S. citizens were shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, prompting widespread protests.
“The transaction to sell our industrial building in Ashland, Virginia will not be proceeding,” said the one-line statement posted online by the firm owned by Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison.
The company said earlier this week it was not aware of the final owner or their intended use of the site when it accepted a purchase offer from a U.S. federal contractor.
The board of supervisors in Hanover County, Virginia where the property is located, received a letter from Homeland Security last week saying the department planned to use the 43.5-acre (17.6-hectare) site as a “holding and processing” facility.
The 550,000 square-foot (51,096 square-meter) industrial warehouse is located near a shooting range, a heating equipment supply store and across the street from a hotel in the small town of Ashland, with a population of just under 8,000 people.
Board chairman Sean Davis told residents Wednesday that the board opposed the sale, while hundreds of people had gathered at the county administration building to weigh in on the now-canceled transaction.
Representatives from Jim Pattison Group and Jim Pattison Developments did not immediately respond to further questions.
Point Blank Creative Inc., a digital media agency with offices in Vancouver and Toronto, had issued a letter to Jim Pattison Group this week saying it strongly opposed the transaction with U.S. Homeland Security.
The letter said the agency had spent more than $550,000 of its clients’ media budgets with Pattison companies, but it was suspending all media buying with them until further notice.
The decision was “grounded in a commitment to human rights, dignity and justice, and the labour and social justice movements we serve,” said the letter signed by Point Blank CEO Nat Wilson.
Point Blank did not immediately respond to a request for comment following news the sale was no longer proceeding.
A protest had been planned outside the headquarters of Jim Pattison Group in Vancouver on Friday, along with another outside the offices of tech firm Hootsuite, which is providing social media services to ICE.