Roughly 75 protesters holding “ICE out of Utah” signs, American and Utah state flags, interspersed with clergy in their robes, stood in an industrial northwest corner of Salt Lake City early Friday morning. They were protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a rumor spread that representatives would be touring a warehouse that morning as a potential detention facility.
“When politicians think that they're gonna open a 7,500-person detention center in Salt Lake City, what do we do?” resident TJ Young called into a microphone.
“Stand up, fight back!” the crowd chanted.
ICE did not respond to KUER’s questions about whether the Salt Lake site is under consideration or the status of any search for a facility in Utah. The Washington Post reported in December that immigration officials were considering a processing facility in Salt Lake City.
A 7,500-bed center would be massive. The facility with the current highest average daily population is Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. It has held an average of 2,900 people every day so far in fiscal year 2026, according to ICE’s detention data through Dec. 26, 2025.
Rumors aside, a Utah detention center is something Gov. Spencer Cox said he would support in 2024. The Big Beautiful Bill, passed by Congress in July at the behest of President Donald Trump, gave ICE money for 80,000 new beds.
In the absence of any federal facility in the state, five county jails in Utah hold small numbers of detainees after they are arrested by ICE. The jails in Davis, Salt Lake, Tooele, Washington and Weber counties currently hold between three and 19 detainees per day, according to federal detention data analyzed by Relevant Research.
This count may include individuals arrested and brought to the jail by ICE, along with those arrested by local agencies who are being held up to 72 hours after their scheduled release at ICE’s request.
The federal government reimburses local jails on a per-bed-per-night basis for holding ICE detainees. These jail agreements are separate from 287(g) agreements, in which local law enforcement agencies collaborate with ICE to carry out some immigration enforcement.
On a larger scale, immigrants arrested by ICE in Utah have traditionally been sent to the detention centers in Aurora, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada. But in 2025, as ICE arrests more than tripled in Utah under the second Trump administration, the agency began flying detainees from Utah to other states.
The ICE Flight Monitor at the nonprofit Human Rights First did not log any ICE-contracted flights from Salt Lake City International Airport in 2024. But in 2025, there were 99, according to their December report.
Flights from Salt Lake City started in late March and mostly headed to Las Vegas. In September, they shifted overwhelmingly to El Paso. This coincided with the opening of Camp East Montana, which could eventually hold up to 5,000 people.
Today’s protest was outside a large, new warehouse. KUER asked two brokers at the company that owns the building to confirm whether ICE is considering their property. One hung up, and the other said he didn’t know anything about it.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
