ICE Abandons Salt Lake City Warehouse Detention Conversion, Sends 145M Dollar Building to GSA as Excess Property

August 2026 court filings confirmed that ICE and DHS no longer intend to convert the Salt Lake City warehouse the agency bought in March 2026 for roughly $145 million into an immigration detention center, and that the building will instead be designated excess property for disposition by the General Services Administration. The facility had been planned to hold up to 10,000 detainees. The GSA disposition mechanism is the operative fact: rather than selling the building directly, DHS is handing it back into the federal government’s own surplus-property pipeline, which routes it either to another federal agency or to sale. Program-wide, the reversal is broader than the one building — of eleven warehouses purchased under the initiative, seven are now to be offloaded through sale or transfer to another federal agency, and four remain on schedule to become ICE detention centers.

The retreat tracks a change of leadership at DHS. The warehouse-conversion initiative was favored by former Secretary Kristi Noem and is not supported by current Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose department disclosed the reversal through litigation rather than announcement. This is the first documented large-scale retreat in the warehouse-detention program: prior entries in this corpus record the buildout’s acquisition phase, including DHS paying Deutsche Bank’s DWS/RREEF $145.4 million for this same Salt Lake City building at a 49 percent markup (2026-03-11–dhs-purchases-deutsche-bank-salt-lake-city-warehouse) and the Detention Reengineering Initiative’s warehouse-network design (2026-06-23–ice-detention-reengineering-initiative-100k-warehouse-network).

The reversal follows sustained local legal resistance. Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County sued DHS and ICE in June 2026 to block the conversion (2026-06-08–salt-lake-city-county-sue-dhs-ice-warehouse-detention-conversion — canonical entry; two duplicate captures of the same filing have been merged into it as of 2026-08-27), and an earlier offload of seven of eleven warehouses had already surfaced in the record (2026-06-21–ice-offloads-seven-of-eleven-warehouses-detention-reengineering). What the sourcing supports is a retreat, not a collapse — four warehouse conversions remain on schedule, and the disposition of the seven offloaded buildings, including what the government recovers against the $145 million purchase price, is not yet on the record.