Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County Jointly Sue DHS Over $145M Warehouse Conversion to Mega-Detention

Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County filed a joint lawsuit against DHS and ICE on June 8, 2026 over DHS’s $145.4 million purchase of an 833,280-square-foot warehouse slated for conversion into a mega-detention facility — a capacity described as more than twice the nearby Utah State Prison. The joint city-county suit represents the full combined legal weight of both a municipal and a county government opposing a single facility, a more aggressive posture than the single-jurisdiction NEPA and permit challenges documented elsewhere in the warehouse-conversion pipeline.

This extends the pattern of joint or multi-jurisdiction legal challenges to the warehouse-to-detention buildout already tracked through Judge Hurson’s Maryland NEPA precedent, which cascaded to parallel challenges in Arizona and New Jersey (2026-04-15–hurson-maryland-nepa-precedent-bexar-tx-warehouse-pause), and the Washington County MD NEPA lawsuit over the Williamsport warehouse — adding Utah as a new state in the growing map of local-government legal resistance to the same procurement pattern.