Among the cotton fields and mesquite stands of southern Arizona, two of the nation’s most contentious political issues — immigration detention and data centers — are converging in a sleepy farm town nestled in a swing House district that will help determine control of Congress in November.
On the north side of the town, Marana, a community of 60,000 outside Tucson, a sprawling A.I. data center will soon rise from fallow agricultural land. A few miles away, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility is poised to open at the site of a defunct state prison.
The projects have convulsed a place that also happens to sit squarely inside the district of Representative Juan Ciscomani, a Republican near the top of the Democrats’ target list in the midterm elections.
“It really feels like it’s just one shoe dropping after another,” said Sue Ritz, a 64-year-old retired mining engineer who has lived in Marana for 20 years. “Detention centers, data centers, what’s next?”
Marana, long used to placid local politics, has become a microcosm of the fractious national moment. The two projects are separate, but residents trying to derail them see both as the results of outside forces intervening in their town.
The detention facility has mostly outraged liberals, who see it as a moral stain on the community. The data center, however, has disrupted the usual divides; some of Marana’s conservatives are standing shoulder to shoulder with progressive environmentalists to denounce it, while unions and chambers of commerce are its champions.
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