Could this Trump-friendly district be turning against him?

When Joe Wiscount moved back to his hometown with his wife, Lara, they found that waste had taken over. To the west and south, biosolids companies trucked in sewage from places like New York City and piled it in the open air, wafting clouds of morning stench toward Main Street. A landfill in the scar of an old strip mine bloated toward a village to the east. To the north, a plant processed chicken manure into fertilizer pellets.

The Wiscounts, retired teachers who often finish each other’s sentences, started calling the state environmental department and speaking out at local meetings, urging officials to stand up to companies. “Other states that have more money and resources, whatever they want to get rid of, whether it’s human crap or garbage, this is where it gets dumped,” Joe says. “People come in from outside the county with big money and just roll in and roll over everybody.” Then in January, the Wiscounts heard a rumor about a new enterprise coming to Tremont, Pennsylvania: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was planning to open a massive immigrant detention center in an empty 1.3 million-square-foot warehouse on the outskirts of town.

Residents were fed up, and they raised hell.

“We are at a tipping point in Schuylkill County,” one Republican voter testified at a recent county commissioners meeting. “We do deserve better than a plethora of data centers, detention centers, warehouses, biosolids processing plants, massive landfills.”

Read the rest of Madison Pauly's story at motherjones.com.