This story was updated after residents made comments regarding the reported lease at a March 2 Wake County Commissioners meeting and a March 5 Cary Town Council meeting.
In mid-February, WIRED reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was planning late last year to massively increase its footprint in most major cities with 150 new or expanded offices—including one in Cary.
Details about ICE’s reported lease of office space at 11000 Regency Parkway near Koka Booth Amphitheatre are scarce, but that hasn’t stopped community members from making their opposition clear.
Some 1,300 people have signed a petition opposing the reported lease, which Cary local Kathy Martin presented to the Wake County Board of Commissioners on March 2. Near tears at times, Martin told the board the ICE facility is a “terrible idea … and I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
Across the Triangle, activists have been holding anti-ICE protests—including on the pedestrian bridge over Interstate 440, where they held a large sign reading “400+ kids in ICE camps, sad & shameful!” On March 5, dozens of protesters gathered outside Cary Town Hall before mayor Harold Weinbrecht’s state of the town address to ask the town council to take some kind of stand against ICE. Town officials have said they have no authority to intervene.
INDY hasn’t been able to independently confirm WIRED’s reporting that the Regency Parkway lease is for an ICE office. Many of the agency’s new offices nationwide, reportedly for use by deportation agents and attorneys, are located near schools, hospitals, and community gathering places. ICE already has a field office in Cary at 140 Centrewest Court; the Regency Parkway location would be its second in town.
The address appears in the U.S. General Services Administration’s Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties. The website says the lease took effect in October 2025 and expires in October 2030, but doesn’t say which agency is using the space. INDY visited the location, a large office building with multiple tenants, and did not see any signage outside or inside indicating the presence of ICE or any federal agency.
An ICE spokesperson wrote in an email to INDY that the agency will not confirm office locations due to a “coordinated campaign of violence” against its officers, including an “8,000% increase in death threats against them and a 1,300% increase in assaults.”
(ICE has been making these claims for months. An NPR data analysis from last fall showed a roughly 25% increase in charges for assault against federal officers year-over-year, a significant uptick but nowhere close to ICE’s claims.)
“Is it really news that when a federal agency hires more personnel that they need more space?” ICE public affairs officer Lindsay Williams wrote. “Thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we have an additional 12,000 ICE officers and agents on the ground across the country. That’s a 120% increase in our workforce.” (The Atlantic reported in January that thousands of those newly-hired deportation officers have not yet deployed to American cities and may not be ready for months.)
A separate General Services Administration list of federal contracts indicates that the value of the contract on the 11000 Regency Parkway property is just over $7.6 million for a 10-year lease with a 5-year minimum. The building’s property manager, Foundry Commercial, did not respond to questions from INDY seeking to confirm that ICE is the agency leasing the space.
Laura Paye, the creator of the Durham Resistance website, who organized the petition, said the expansion of ICE across the country and in Cary is “upsetting and frustrating,” especially because the details are being obscured.
“This is not, most likely, going to be a detention center. But I don’t think that should diminish our alarm or opposition to it,” Paye said. “Even if this is an OPLA [Office of the Principal Legal Advisor] office, that is still connected to and supporting the guys on the streets with masks. And people being held in secret locations or held without access to lawyers, held without access to medical care.”
Siembra NC, one of the local immigrants’ rights groups leading the effort to track and verify immigration agent sightings in North Carolina, also hasn’t been able to confirm the purported new ICE office location.
“We have heard the troubling news that ICE may be expanding their presence in Cary, and we have reached out to the property manager ourselves—and still are waiting for answers,” Emanuel Gomez Gonzalez, a communications strategist for Siembra, wrote in a statement to INDY. “We encourage local elected officials to inquire into the issue and use their role as the people’s representative to get to the bottom of these plans.”
Weinbrecht wrote on his blog in February that the town has received “dozens of emails” about the Regency Parkway lease, but did not confirm ICE’s presence there.
Town of Cary spokesperson Carolyn Roman told INDY in February that 45 residents had contacted the town to express their opposition to the reported lease.
Roman said the town has not received any rezoning or development applications for the Regency Parkway Property, and that “it is important to recognize that federal agencies have independent authority and will operate in ways that do not require local rezoning or municipal approval.”
At the March 2 Wake commissioners’ meeting, Martin said that while Cary and Wake County “may not have a lot of legal authority to intervene, you can absolutely put political pressure on these people. Don’t sit on your hands and do nothing.” She implored the board to make a public statement, pass a resolution, or speak informally to the leasing office.
“We’re depending on you to lead us and protect us in these times,” Martin added.
Paye says she and others want to see the Town of Cary issue a statement avowing that ICE is not welcome.
“Standing up and speaking out is something that every local government should be doing, but I understand why they’re hesitant to take that step,” Paye added. “They feel the fear that they’re intended to feel. That if they speak up, then people in their community will be further targeted.”
In response to audience questions about ICE after his State of Cary address, Weinbrecht signaled that no such statement is coming.
“We have no idea what’s going on [at Regency Parkway] … if we did, we have absolutely no authority to stop it,” he said, noting that since North Carolina is a Dillon’s rule state, Cary has “no authority, no permission, cannot do any ordinances to stop ICE.”
“Take action against the decision-makers,” Weinbrecht said. “I’m not one of them.” When audience members called that response “cowardly,” the mayor pushed back, saying his immigrant neighbors have asked him not to draw ICE’s attention. A public statement from the town would “put the very people you want me to protect in danger,” he said.
Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, whose district includes the Regency Parkway address, was also unable to provide information about ICE’s presence there.
“Congress and the public have been kept in the dark about ICE’s secretive expansion plans, and the lack of transparency is unacceptable,” Foushee said. “As a cosponsor of the Respect for Local Communities Act, I am working to require full public reporting and oversight of ICE’s lease and enforcement activities. I firmly oppose this possible expansion.”
After immigration enforcement agents carried out a spree of arrests in the Triangle in November, Cary residents organized a recurring protest outside ICE’s field office at 140 Centrewest Court on Friday mornings. And petitioners have made their feelings clear in comments, with many writing that ICE would terrorize residents and disrupt the diverse community they love.
“We don’t need the increase in crime these thugs would bring to Cary,” wrote one Cary resident. “Human warehouses are not a service I want my government to provide,” wrote another. One Cary resident said they would put their house on the market if ICE opened another office in town.
“My children deserve to be driven around by my mother without worrying whether ICE will capture them or not,” wrote one Mexican American and Cary resident.
“Even as U.S. citizens we are targeted just by the way we look,” wrote an Apex resident who identified as Hispanic. “Our children don’t need to go to school fearing that they may come home to an empty home, just to find out their parents/guardians have been taken without notice.”
Correction: Regular bridge protests are over Interstate 440, not 40, as a previous version of this article stated.
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