ICE’s ambition to incarcerate 7,000-10,000 ICE detainees in an 833,000-square-foot warehouse 9.6 miles and 17 minutes from Temple Square deserves careful consideration by all Utahns. The number of detainees would exceed the number in Utah’s entire state prison system.
This plan is already called Topaz 2.0 after the Topaz War Relocation Center near Delta, Utah, where around 8,100 Japanese Americans (two-thirds U.S.-born citizens of Japanese descent, the rest first-generation immigrants) were incarcerated for three years during World War II based on rank suspicion without charges, trials, or convictions — a permanent stain on our nation’s reputation.
Are Utahns ready for another relocation center for “undesirables” — this time in our capital city? Are we going to prostrate ourselves before ICE’s onslaught, or will we rise up and say STOP! — like we rose up on moral grounds in 1981 to stop the placement of 200 nuclear-tipped MX missiles in western Utah?
We’re being targeted again as a “dumping ground,” either because ICE takes us for a MAGA rubber stamp, or because the Trump administration assumes it won’t offend our sensibilities to turn a chunk of the west desert into a “legal desert” where constitutional rights and humanitarian concerns are sacrificed in pursuit of a type of ethnic cleansing.
If we green-light indiscriminate mass incarceration of Latinos — so many of whom are long-time, law-abiding, tax-paying U.S. residents, including parents who would face separation from their children — can we welcome the world to an Olympic Games or a six-month Salt Lake Temple open house with a straight face?
Utah authored the lauded Utah Compact on Immigration promoting humane immigration policies, opposing extreme enforcement actions, and emphasizing family unity. Do we believe what we say? We’re about to find out.
Fast-tracking a mass detention center in Utah is a slap in the face even to backers of President Donald Trump. He expects them to bend the knee while he ignores normal legal processes, checks and balances, and consensus. Transparency, community input, environmental study and a deliberative process are all missing here. This is an attack on Utahns of all political stripes.
Acting by fiat is the way a police state operates, not a constitutional republic. That’s why strong bipartisan pushback is erupting in other states targeted for super-sized ICE warehouses. Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker recently persuaded DHS to ax an ICE warehouse in Mississippi. Sen. Mike Lee could do the same, but he sits on his hands instead.
Our Constitution guarantees immigrants residing here illegally the right not to be detained or deported without a formal charge, an opportunity to confront their accuser and a fair hearing before a neutral judicial officer. Detained immigrants are also entitled to challenge their detention via habeas corpus.
Utah’s immigration bar and U.S. Immigration Court lack the capacity to protect these rights for 10,000 warehouse detainees. As of early 2026, the court’s four immigration judges (two permanent and two temporary) already had a backlog of more than 60,000 deportation cases. Deportation hearings are now being scheduled as far out as 2034. Adding thousands of warehouse cases to the court’s docket would push hearing dates out much further, amounting to life sentences for older detainees. Clearing the backlog by summarily deporting detainees in violation of their due process rights could prove irresistible to the Trump administration.
How do we know the Trump administration has no qualms about illegal, summary deportations and housing human beings in inhumane conditions? Because it has a track record to prove it. They’ve done it before. Riding roughshod over individual rights is nothing new for this administration.
Early last year, in willful violation of a federal court order, ICE officers shackled and herded 250 Venezuelan refugees — most of whom had no prior criminal records — onto airplanes and flew them to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal and appallingly inhumane maximum-security mega-prison known as CECOT. When they arrived, the prison warden told them, “Welcome to hell. You are in a prison you will never leave. The only way out is dead.”
I know something about this. My law firm represents one of these Venezuelans, a 19-year-old young man who entered the U.S. legally with his family, seeking escape from political persecution and hoping to resume their lives among members of their religious faith in Salt Lake City.
In CECOT, the Venezuelans were jammed into overcrowded cells for months on end, denied contact with the outside world, refused medical treatment, routinely and viciously kicked and beaten by prison guards, and even shot and wounded with pellet guns.
Such is man’s inhumanity to man, and such is the callousness of this administration.
Twenty-three people have died in ICE confinement since October. Fear and anxiety are driving whole populations underground. How is that acceptable in America?
What happens when thousands of desperate people are herded into an indoor human cattle yard — a gulag without the forced labor? The only way to pacify them is by fierce and inhumane regimentation that robs them of human dignity and reduces them to the level of animals.
Do we really want a humanitarian debacle in our midst the size of a small city? Is 9.6 miles far enough away to appease our minds? Only a seared conscience could stand the shame.
Utah is not a place for repression of “unwanted” minorities. We won’t be a proving ground for experiments in mass incarceration. If we want a just Utah, now is the time to light a fire of public furor that burns hot enough to singe the pants of our dithering politicians and make them into heroes.