Utah erupts after uncovering ICE’s secret detention center deal

Democrats have a lot to say about ICE — at least, according to the mountain of TV advertising candidates have purchased over the past 30 days. According to reporting from NBC News this week, two-thirds of the campaign ads in Illinois’s open Democratic Senate primary mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as do nearly a quarter of campaign ads nationwide.  

The agency is an easy target. Six in 10 Americans say ICE has gone too far in its effort to enforce President Trump’s legally dubious mass deportation scheme. In January, Puck found that ICE was Americans’ most-hated federal agency, more reviled than even the dreaded IRS. ICE is nothing short of political poison for vulnerable Republicans, and so the GOP made sure the worst of ICE’s excesses were pushed into the shadows. 

One of those shadows lifted over the weekend, when the Deseret News reported that ICE secretly paid $145 million for a sprawling, 830,000-square-foot Salt Lake City warehouse that locals fear will be used as a jumbo-sized migrant detention camp. According to councilmember Eva Lopez Chavez, the deal was so hush-hush that Utah’s congressional delegation learned about it from the newspapers.  

It’s easy to understand why locals are fearful that the next front in Trump’s unpopular immigration fight may have just appeared in their back yards.  

More than a month before ICE signed its warehouse deal with Colliers International, federal records show the agency had already inked a $10.4 million deal with GEO Transport, Inc., to move detainees to the facility. If GEO Transport sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a subsidiary of notorious Florida-based private prison company GEO Group, one of the organizations poised to reap huge profits from ICE’s expansion of mass migrant detention. GEO Group has also been connected to inhumane conditions at facilities it operates, including allegedly forcing immigrant detainees in Colorado to work for just $1 per day.  

Despite being ruby red politically, Utahns have deep concerns about the casual dehumanization that seems all too common at ICE’s detention centers. Salt Lake City residents protested an earlier proposal for a 7,500-bed facility located in the city, ultimately persuading The Ritchie Group away from selling its land to ICE. With ICE even less popular today than it was in January, it’s no surprise the Trump administration tried its best to keep its latest Utah detention center plan a secret. 

A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted last month found that 53 percent of Utahns oppose Trump’s immigration enforcement methods, and a majority of voters would not support building an ICE detention center in their community. That’s in part because Utahns have seen the chaos ICE brings to the communities in which it operates. Most residents understandably have no interest in inviting disruption and violence onto their doorsteps. 

“These centers arrive with massive enforcement operations that tear through communities, and the conditions that exist within these centers are violent and inhumane,” Utah’s Democratic House and Senate caucuses wrote in a joint statement. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall flatly stated that “[a] detention center does not belong in our capital city — full stop. The mass detention of people inside a warehouse is inhumane.” 

Even some Republicans worry that ICE’s secret dealings will ultimately backfire among a population that values transparency and open dealing, especially when it comes to criminal justice. Sen. John Curtis, himself a former mayor of Provo, described ICE’s shady deal as “shortsighted.” 

“The decision to move forward with this facility via back-door negotiations, bypassing input from local leaders, is shortsighted and likely counterproductive to supporting the strategic growth and long-term infrastructure plans of Salt Lake City’s west side,” Curtis told the Deseret News. Utahns would have preferred a voice in how their tax dollars were spent, especially if ICE’s new detention center means diverting resources from local public services. Instead, the Trump administration ran right over them. 

Utahns are right to worry about what this deal means for their own safety and prosperity. By trying to slip its latest immigrant detention center past locals in a sketchy secret deal, ICE has only confirmed that it has no interest in the kind of transparency and plain dealing Americans of all political stripes should expect from the federal government. 

If you can only build a detention center under the veil of intense secrecy, you shouldn’t be building it at all. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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