Salt Lake City and County Sue DHS/ICE to Block $145M Warehouse Conversion to Mega-Detention (Up to 10,000 Beds)

Correction, 2026-08-27: This entry is the merged canonical record of Salt Lake City/County’s June 8, 2026 lawsuit against DHS/ICE, consolidating three near-duplicate captures of the same filing that had accumulated three different bed-count figures in canon: this entry originally said “7,500-Bed” in its title while hedging “7,500–10,000” in the body; a sibling entry (2026-06-08--salt-lake-city-county-sue-dhs-ice-13000-bed-warehouse.md) said 13,000; a third (2026-06-08--salt-lake-city-county-sue-dhs-145m-warehouse-mega-detention.md) stated no bed count at all. The surviving figure is “up to 10,000,” matching the later August 2026 court filings reported by KUER and Utah Public Radio (both tier-1, reporting directly on court documents) and already used in this corpus’s 2026-08-19--ice-abandons-salt-lake-city-warehouse-conversion-gsa-excess-property.md entry, which links to this file as its primary Salt Lake litigation reference. The original June 8 filing complaint itself is PACER-gated and was not independently reread for this correction; the 13,000 and 7,500 figures both appear to derive from early press estimates at filing time rather than the complaint’s own operative language. The two duplicate entries have been converted to stub/coverage records pointing here; their distinct sources are preserved as sources: entries above per corpus discipline (preserve every distinct source even when entries duplicate).

Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County filed a joint federal lawsuit on June 8, 2026 seeking a temporary restraining order against DHS’s plan to convert an 833,000-sq-ft (833,280 sq ft per the deed) warehouse — purchased for $145.4 million in March 2026 — into a mega-detention facility with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees at 6020 W. 300 South, more than twice the capacity of the neighboring Utah State Prison. Early press coverage at filing time reported figures ranging from 7,500 to 13,000 beds; the up-to-10,000 figure reflects later court filings (as of August 2026) and is the figure this corpus now treats as canonical. The suit alleges Administrative Procedure Act violations for failure to consult local government and NEPA violations for the absence of environmental review before the conversion, and 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 is the litigation stage following the warehouse’s acquisition (2026-03-11–dhs-purchases-deutsche-bank-salt-lake-city-warehouse, the $145.4M purchase from Deutsche Bank/DWS/RREEF at a 49% markup). It joins a documented wave of local-government suits against warehouse-to-detention conversions: Romulus, Michigan (2026-03-24–michigan-romulus-sue-ice-dhs-detention-warehouse) and Roxbury, New Jersey (2026-03-20–nj-roxbury-sue-ice-dhs-detention-warehouse), plus municipal ordinance counter-moves like San Antonio (2026-04-17–san-antonio-restricts-detention-facilities-ordinance). The APA/NEPA failure-to-consult pattern is the recurring legal hook across these suits — the warehouse-conversion buildout outruns the administrative process that would normally gate it. The suit is one node in a coordinated wave of seven jurisdictions whose combined litigation pressure produced ICE’s June 21, 2026 announcement that it would offload seven of its eleven purchased warehouses (2026-06-21–ice-offloads-seven-of-eleven-warehouses-detention-reengineering), with Salt Lake City among the sites ultimately abandoned (2026-08-19–ice-abandons-salt-lake-city-warehouse-conversion-gsa-excess-property).