Absent any official confirmation, there’s been rumor that the Department of Homeland Security was eyeing a Salt Lake City warehouse to convert into a 7,500-bed immigration detention center. It was enough to spark a protest at the property and a letter to the owner from Mayor Erin Mendenhall.
The Ritchie Group, owners of the warehouse alleged to be under consideration, said in a statement that they do not plan to sell or lease the property to the federal government.
A Utah immigration detention site has reportedly been in the works for years. In 2024, Gov. Spencer Cox said he would support one so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have to transport detainees out of state.
While activists and local Democrats are critical of the idea, Phil Kuck, president of the Utah chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association, said a Utah facility might actually offer a small advantage to local detainees.
“I don't think that detention is ever a good thing, but having a detention center local in your area would make a bad situation potentially less damaging,” he said.
Immigration attorneys in Utah currently represent clients in detention all over the country. In Kuck’s experience, they spend a couple of days in a local jail and are then most commonly sent to Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming. That means attorneys are left to communicate with their clients over the phone or through family members, because travel is expensive and time-consuming.
A local detention center could make it easier for attorneys like Kuck to visit clients and save them from having to learn the quirks of multiple courts elsewhere.
When Kuck can meet a client in person, “it makes all the difference in the world,” he said. He notices nuances he couldn’t catch over a phone call, and he can see how his client is being treated, which can be a factor in whether an individual decides to leave the country through voluntary departure or remain in the U.S. and fight their case.
It could also be easier for loved ones to visit detainees who are held locally and for witnesses to testify on their behalf.
Kuck notes that visitation rules can vary. Some detention centers allow in-person visits, while others do not, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Plus, if more people are detained in Utah and need to appear in Utah’s immigration court, Kuck hopes the Trump administration will hire more judges after three departed in 2025. The court is currently served by two local judges and a temporary immigration judge with a military background.
The court’s backlog, meanwhile, remains at more than 50,000 cases as of September 2025, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Rev. Brigette Weier, pastor at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Taylorsville, has been an advocate for immigrants for decades. She joined a protest on Jan. 16 outside the rumored site of a potential ICE facility.
“The thought of warehousing beloved children of God is just horrific,” she said.
If Kuck is right and immigrants detained in the state are kept in a Utah detention center, Weier agrees that there could be some benefit. But she has her doubts. In Minnesota, she noted, a 5-year-old boy was recently arrested by federal agents and transported to a Texas detention center.
“The tactics are designed to dehumanize, to isolate and to ensure that the government can simply do what they want to do and not have to be beholden to the rule of law and to the court systems,” she said.
Immigrants in detention are frequently flown from one part of the U.S. to another. Domestic ICE flights more than doubled between President Donald Trump’s inauguration and the end of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, according to the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First. The nonprofit’s December 2025 report states that “individuals are frequently moved far from their families and legal representation, often isolated in facilities with harsh conditions.”
Attorneys in Minnesota told ABC News they’ve been kept from meeting with clients detained at a federal building there. Homeland Security denies this.
ICE averaged nearly 70,000 people in detention in the first week of January 2026, breaking its December 2025 record high. 2025 also matched the agency’s record for the number of deaths in detention, along with a drop in facility inspections.
Detention centers are often owned by private prison companies, not the federal government.
July’s Big Beautiful Bill gave ICE money for 80,000 new detention beds and the capacity to average 100,000 people in detention.
Weier said there aren’t enough of the “worst of the worst” to fill those beds.
“Who else are they going to start putting in detention?” she said. “Are they going to start putting people that are outspoken political opponents? Protesters?”
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
