Immigration and Customs Enforcement has halted plans to build a new facility in Utah’s Salt Lake City, after progressives and some Republicans raised questions about the proposal.
ICE acquired the $145 million warehouse near Salt Lake City International Airport in March, with plans to convert it into a detention center. The move placed the proposed facility in the state’s most liberal hot spot, triggering a lawsuit from the city challenging the plan in June, intense demonstrations, and outspoken opposition from Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, who argued it would take an “enormous toll’ on local infrastructure.
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Amid the backlash, ICE wrote in court filings Wednesday that the Trump administration no longer intends to build the facility. ICE and Salt Lake City attorneys both asked U.S. District Court Judge Jill Parrish to pause the lawsuit over the proposed detention center, since the agency intends “no longer to convert the Salt Lake Facility into an immigration detention facility and to instead designate the facility as excess property for disposition,” meaning the federal government will look to sell or transfer the building.
The development comes after Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) said Wednesday he personally expressed concern to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose department oversees ICE, that the proposed facility would place an undue burden on community infrastructure.
“I don’t want to take credit for the change, but I was able to talk to Markwayne and tell him how it was being received here,” the Republican senator said of the detention center.
“I … was very firm that you cannot take away authority from local leaders to plan zoning and things that are good for their community,” Curtis added. “Coming in and mandating from the federal government that this facility that was never built for that many people, never built for that kind of traffic, never built for anything, should go into that community was wrong.”
Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has expressed some reservations about how the Trump administration was going about planning the proposed facility. But in March, he defended the idea of building a detention center in Utah, arguing the West desperately needs a new holding center to provide adequate temporary housing for millions of illegal immigrants being detained during the Trump administration’s surging ICE operations.
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“We have millions of people that should not be here,” Cox said. “And so now we’re picking up the pieces because every single state system has got completely overwhelmed, and now we have to process millions of people, and many of them should not be here, and that means we have to figure out a way to get them back, which means there has to be a detention facility.”
“We don’t have enough resources to get people who have caused some serious trouble in Utah where they need to be,” he added. “And it’s not just Utah, by the way. Idaho, Montana, lots of states that have to transport down there, that facility was routinely full.”
