On September 1, 1998, the gathering of the Salt Lake City Council began as most municipal legislative meetings do. Officials recited the Pledge of Allegiance. They ticked through a litany of appointments and reappointments. They sorted through the business of little fiefdoms like the Golf Enterprise Fund Advisory Board.

A large retinue of residents waited in the wings, but not for this. They had come to speak on what everyone knew would be the big-ticket item of the evening, which the council ominously referred to as the “MOU,” or memorandum of understanding. Championed by the city’s controversial police chief, Ruben Ortega, it would enter Salt Lake into the newly created federal 287(g) program, deputizing some local law enforcement officers to, among other things, check the immigration status of people in custody and temporarily hold them for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, the precursor to modern-day Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to the meeting minutes, Ortega told the council that he had heard of 287(g), which was enacted as part of sweeping immigration restrictions signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, from Janet Reno, the attorney general at the time, at a law enforcement conference the year before. Arguing that the program would help Salt Lake combat crime, Ortega rattled off statistics in which the undocumented were perpetrators or victims. His testimony was followed by that of the U.S. attorney for Utah, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and an INS agent, all of whom laid out the same case: The MOU would help them target hardened criminal immigrants. On the opposing side, elected and appointed officials and representatives from advocacy groups argued that it would be impossible to run the program without violating the rights of immigrant communities.

In the end, after the testimony of dozens of locals mostly against the MOU, the council narrowly defeated the measure. Deeda Seed, who had moved to Salt Lake from Chicago at the age of 18 and was shocked by its lack of diversity, was among the “no” votes on the seven-member council. The city’s demographics had changed over the decade and a half since she first arrived, and the stakes of the vote were acutely apparent to her and her colleagues. “It was close,” Seed recalled. “It was emotional. There was a lot of opposition to it. There wasn’t that much support.”

Although Salt Lake City was the first city in the nation to consider such a program, it was not the last. Today, dozens of local law enforcement agencies across the country have implemented similar agreements, including at least 11—eight this year—in Utah alone. Salt Lake City and the surrounding county, however, never reversed their position.

The city’s refusal to adopt the MOU is all the more striking because Utah’s own Senator Orrin Hatch pushed for it in the first place, according to Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the INS at the time. “Senator Hatch quite immediately … said, ‘We want to have this 287(g) authority. How do we proceed?’” she recalled. The defeat in Salt Lake left the program deflated, even dormant; for years, few cities sought similar agreements, until 9/11 renewed interest.

This unusual sequence of events—a hometown senator bringing forth an immigration enforcement provision that is defeated so roundly it kills the program for years—is emblematic of the contradictions of Salt Lake’s unique, even bizarre, political culture around immigration. A mix of genuine ideological affinity for the idea of the refugee, fostered by the Mormon church, and a cultural tendency toward minding one’s business has engendered a sort of recalcitrant support for immigration. This attitude developed largely on its own, parallel to a mainstream conservative approach that has diverged toward a totalizing xenophobic revulsion, first focused on the undocumented and eventually spreading to foreign students, workers, and humanitarian immigrants.

In 2025, as Donald Trump makes antipathy for immigrants a centerpiece of his broader authoritarian efforts, Utah’s homegrown identity is under threat. In March, state lawmakers passed a bill making it easier to deport people convicted of misdemeanors. There are reportedly plans in the works to build or convert a facility to hold thousands of ICE detainees, perhaps at Hill Air Force Base, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake. There are the inevitable questions about whether and when federal forces will crack down on the area, and how it will react. And there are disagreements among the state’s politicians about the appropriate response. Will Salt Lake’s peculiar approach snap under these tensions? Or, if it holds, could it embody a wholly separate conservative vision of immigration, stubbornly and notably inimical to Trump’s in a state he won by over 20 points in the 2024 election?

Luz Escamilla, a Democratic state senator who represents bits of Salt Lake City and parts west, resisted the idea that Utah’s treatment of immigrants would fundamentally change. “It’s getting more difficult and it’s getting more painful,” she told me, “but I still believe people are going to do the right thing in Utah. I mean, I have to believe that.”

When a reasonably informed person thinks of immigration hubs nationwide, first on the mind will be New York City, Chicago, parts of Florida and California, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, and so on. Unlikely to come to mind is Utah and its Salt Lake metro area, a southwestern enclave associated mainly with its striking landscapes and the Mormon religion. Yet Salt Lake City is around 15 percent foreign-born, roughly on par with Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Neighboring West Valley City—just west of Salt Lake City proper, within a metro area that also includes communities like West Jordan and Oquirrh—sits at around 22 percent. Immigrants, including contingents from Latin America, Asia, and, increasingly, Africa, have been a consistent part of Salt Lake over the past century.

Their presence in the city is palpable. More than 6,800 entrepreneurs with immigrant backgrounds live there, said Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake City’s Democratic mayor. “The spending power of immigrants and refugees in Salt Lake City contributed $3.4 billion to our local economy and paid $1.1 billion in taxes,” she said. “So they’re not only a key part of our identity and cultural core as a community, but incredible economic contributors as well.” Mendenhall touted initiatives like the Know Your Neighbor program, which pairs refugees with local volunteers to help them navigate job applications, public transit, and other aspects of daily life.

These are services often funded by the federal government, but Utahns pride themselves on going above and beyond, especially as the federal government under Trump has pulled back. The state has its own refugee resettlement program, with a focus on “integration and self-sufficiency,” which may as well be the state motto. These efforts don’t necessarily stand out in comparison to those of other states, but they’re notable when you consider how relatively uncontroversial they are in a state that Trump crushed the last three elections running.

Indeed, private refugee resettlement groups that fight tooth and nail in other conservative states have cordial, even friendly relationships with Utah’s GOP legislative supermajorities. “It’s like this little bubble where........

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