Judge Lee Grants Preliminary Injunction Freezing Gilroy ICE Facility Construction on NEPA Grounds

U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee (N.D. Cal.) granted a preliminary injunction on September 12, 2026 freezing construction of the planned ICE detention facility on the 24.5-acre Holsclaw Road property outside Gilroy. Construction, demolition and development are halted except for immediate safety work; the parties have until September 30 to agree on the order’s exact scope, with a final resolution not expected until October. The suit — County of Santa Clara v. ICE, N.D. Cal. 5:26-cv-05604, brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County — argues the federal government broke ground without the environmental review NEPA requires.

This is a distinct ruling from the July halt, and the difference is the point. On July 13 the same judge approved a consent agreement pausing construction — an arrangement the government agreed to. This is a contested preliminary injunction, which requires the court to find a likelihood of success on the merits. The pause is now the court’s order rather than the defendants’ concession, and it rests on a judicial finding that the agencies failed to study potential environmental contamination at a site previously used as an agricultural resource center.

The contamination question is what gives the NEPA claim traction here. The parcel housed agricultural research labs; the plaintiffs’ argument is not that environmental review is a formality the government skipped, but that it was skipped on land where there is a specific, foreseeable reason to look. That is the difference between a procedural objection and one a court can find likely to succeed.

Read against the wider record, Gilroy joins a pattern of NEPA becoming the operative constraint on detention buildout where zoning cannot reach: Williamsport, Maryland halted in April over sewage; the Surprise, Arizona warehouse where DHS agreed to environmental review; and the Romulus, Michigan warehouse where ICE abandoned the conversion entirely in June rather than face a preliminary-injunction hearing. Federal facilities are exempt from local zoning; they are not exempt from NEPA. The statute is doing the work the zoning code cannot.

Sourcing note. The injunction date, the 24.5-acre Holsclaw Road parcel, the safety-work carve-out and the September 30 scope deadline are confirmed across KQED, Palo Alto Online and SFist. The case number and Judge Lee’s assignment are carried from the existing canon entry 2026-08-26–gilroy-ice-lawsuit-docket-posture-reply-brief-hearing-date-discrepancy, which pulled them from the docket. The California AG press release cited in the capture ledger returns HTTP 404 and was not read; the order itself has not been retrieved from the docket.