Salt Lake City and County sue DHS/ICE to halt 13,000-bed warehouse detention conversion

On June 8, 2026, Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County jointly filed a federal lawsuit against DHS and ICE to halt the conversion of an 833,000-square-foot warehouse on the city’s west side into a mega-detention facility with capacity for up to 13,000 people — more than twice the capacity of the neighboring Utah State Prison. DHS had purchased the warehouse in March 2026. The filing is one of seven active federal suits that together forced ICE’s June 21 announcement that it would offload seven of its eleven purchased warehouses, with Salt Lake County among the sites slated for abandonment.

The case documents how local government became the binding constraint on the warehouse-conversion buildout. The 13,000-bed target — a single facility larger than most state prison systems’ flagship institutions — illustrates the scale that ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative contemplated, and why municipalities treated the conversions as existential. The suit’s structural weight is that it did not stand alone: it was one node in a coordinated wave of jurisdictions whose combined litigation pressure produced the first measurable rollback of the owned-detention strategy. The facility’s ultimate fate still turns on litigation outcome and deed terms.