Salt Lake City learned it was getting one of the largest detention facilities in America from a property record.
In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought an 833,000-square-foot warehouse at 6020 West 300 South for $145.4 million, a sale that surfaced in county property records. It was the most expensive property DHS bought for its detention program, roughly the size of 15 football fields, purchased from a real estate group partially owned by Deutsche Bank for nearly 50 percent above its assessed value, the Associated Press reported. The plan: a hub for the Intermountain West, holding 7,500 to 10,000 detainees. Mayor Erin Mendenhall was not consulted. Neither was County Mayor Jenny Wilson. Gov. Spencer Cox said the deal was news to him.
Mendenhall vowed legal action that same month. Residents rallied outside the warehouse, more than once. In April, the city asked the federal government for information about its plans and got what one report called crickets. When ICE filled out an application for city utility services, the form asked about anticipated water and sewer needs. The agency wrote "TBD." In early June, semitrailers appeared in the parking area behind the building.
On Monday, the city and county sued.
The complaint, filed in Utah's U.S. District Court, names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, ICE, and acting ICE director David Venturella. It alleges violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, and asks a judge to halt the conversion. The federal government has 20 days to respond.
The numbers
The case rests less on rhetoric than on arithmetic.
Under its previous owner, the warehouse used about 5,600 gallons of water a day. The complaint estimates the facility at full build-out, detainees and staff together, would serve roughly 13,000 people and require 1 to 2 million gallons daily. The county is managing through drought. The Great Salt Lake sits near historic lows. The suit also cites sewer capacity, air quality, disease risk, and the police presence a facility of this size would demand. For scale: the Utah State Correctional Facility, a few miles away, holds 3,600 beds. The warehouse would hold at least twice that.
"This kind of facility has no place in Salt Lake City," Mendenhall said. Wilson called it "a dire threat to the very essence of our community values."
ICE and DHS did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. The department has defended its detention expansion as essential to immigration enforcement, and it has dismissed environmental suits against other facilities as obstruction by "open-borders activists." When a Georgia town filed a similar suit in May, DHS said Mullin was reviewing agency policies and wanted to work with community leaders on their concerns.
The support at home is not unanimous. The county council's Republican caucus raised questions about the lawsuit's objectives, legal strategy, and cost to taxpayers. The Democratic caucus backed it without reservation. The mayors are not alone in court, either: a newly formed advocacy group, Uproar Utah, planned its own litigation announcement for Tuesday.
A program its own government is questioning
The warehouse was one of 11 that DHS purchased for a combined $1.074 billion, most in the final weeks of Kristi Noem's tenure as Homeland Security secretary. Her $38.3 billion plan to expand detention capacity to 92,000 beds called for eight large detention centers holding 7,000 to 10,000 people each, plus 16 smaller regional facilities. The Salt Lake purchase closed days after Noem was fired.
Her successor paused the program. The DHS inspector general opened an audit into whether the purchases were wasteful. By late May, DHS officials told NBC News the administration was exploring selling some of the warehouses, and that ICE no longer needs the capacity to hold 100,000 people. At his confirmation hearing, Mullin told senators he wanted the department to be a good partner to the communities where the centers would operate.
Salt Lake City is suing over a building the government bought in a hurry and may no longer want.
What other communities learned
Maryland won, for now. In January, DHS paid $102.4 million for a warehouse of more than 800,000 square feet outside Williamsport, a town of 2,000, to hold up to 1,500 detainees. According to the state's filings, the building had an approved water allocation of 800 gallons a day; the state calculated the facility would need around 187,500. Maryland's attorney general sued in February on the legal theory Salt Lake City is using now, that DHS skipped the environmental review federal law requires before major federal action. On April 15, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the retrofit while the case proceeds. Hundreds rallied outside the Baltimore courthouse the day of the hearing.
Georgia locked the meter. ICE bought a warehouse in Social Circle, east of Atlanta, for $128.6 million, with plans for 7,500 to 10,000 detainees. The city, worried about its water supply, put a lock on the warehouse's water meter. DHS suggested trucking drinking water in and waste out, a plan the state's U.S. senators called unworkable. In May, the city sued, alleging ICE paid more than five times the property's assessed value.
Pennsylvania used administrative power. Gov. Josh Shapiro's administration issued orders blocking two planned detention centers until DHS shows compliance with state and federal environmental rules. DHS is appealing.
Kansas fought for a year and granted the permit. Leavenworth's fight was with CoreCivic, a private operator seeking to reopen a shuttered prison as an ICE facility. The city required a special use permit. The company insisted it needed none. The Kansas Court of Appeals sided with the city, ruling it was merely enforcing zoning rules that apply to everyone. Then, on March 10, the city commission voted 4 to 1 to grant the permit after a process one commissioner called agonizing. The company had promised 300 jobs and more than a million dollars in impact fees.
Newark is still fighting. The city sued GEO Group over inspection rights at the Delaney Hall facility. Federal agents arrested Mayor Ras Baraka outside its gates during a protest. The detention center opened anyway. Litigation over conditions continues, following hunger strikes and complaints about food and medical care.
Florida shows the limits. Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe won a district court order winding down the Everglades facility known as Alligator Alcatraz. In April, the 11th Circuit reversed it, 2 to 1. The majority held that Florida, not the federal government, built and ran the facility, so the environmental review law never applied. No federal action, no federal review.
Why the deed matters, and what could still go wrong
The Florida loss and the Maryland win turn on the same question: who owns the project. Florida's plaintiffs lost because the courts could not find a federal action to review. Salt Lake City's warehouse presents no such ambiguity. DHS holds the deed. The agency bought the building, plans the conversion, and would run the detention. That is the Maryland posture, where the injunction held.
But the 11th Circuit's ruling contained a second holding that should concern the plaintiffs here. The majority said the lower court's injunction partly violated a federal statute that limits courts from enjoining immigration enforcement. If that reading spreads, it gives DHS an argument in any circuit: even where environmental review was skipped, a court may lack the power to stop the facility. The Maryland judge did not find the argument disqualifying at the preliminary stage. A Utah judge will hear it fresh.
City Council chair Alejandro Puy has been consulting officials in other states about how to fight these facilities, and the complaint follows the Maryland model closely.
The Utah question
There is an older story underneath this one. Utah's politics were forged in resentment of distant federal ownership, of decisions about Utah land made without Utah voices. Most of the state is federal ground. The argument has usually run one direction, with Utah's leaders demanding the federal government loosen its grip. Now the federal government has bought a square of the capital city, declined to say what it will pour into the sewer, and answered the city's water questions with three letters.
Utah also wrote its own chapter on immigration. The Utah Compact of 2010, signed by business, law enforcement, and faith leaders, committed the state to a humane immigration politics and was held up nationally as a model. Whether that tradition still governs is now a live question, and so far the state has left it to the cities to answer. Cox said in March the purchase was news to him. He has not joined the suit.
The federal government has 20 days to respond. The warehouse sits where it has always sat, on the west side, near the airport, semitrailers parked out back.
