Tony SemeradUtah’s Inland Port Authority on Monday disavowed any involvement in the sale of a massive Salt Lake City warehouse for use as an immigration detention center by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE purchased the 833,000-square-foot warehouse on the city’s west side last week. The 25-acre facility at 6020 S. 300 West falls squarely within the inland port’s boundaries, near Interstate 80 and Salt Lake City International Airport.
At first during their Monday meeting, members of the inland port board, which oversees development on 16,000 acres on the city’s west side and rural areas across Utah, declined to address the warehouse intended for immigrant detainees, despite heartfelt testimony from the public.
But after hours of other discussion on unrelated rural development projects, the port authority’s executive director Ben Hart weighed in.
“We had no collaboration, coordination, facilitation, or even awareness of that facility before it was announced last week,” Hart said. “So just to be clear, the port had no role in that new facility at all. We will just put that to rest, make sure everyone understands that conclusively.”
The site was sold to the federal agency by a firm tied to German-based real estate asset manager DWS Group for $145.4 million, according to property records. ICE has confirmed the facility will ultimately be used as part of stepped-up enforcement efforts.
It’s unclear how the property’s location within the inland port might affect any environmental or zoning review toward its conversion from a logistics warehouse into a facility for detaining people.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall, with support from the City Council, has vowed to oppose the center from opening, including with moves to block it legally and a focus on evaluating zoning and utility capacity of the building.
“The use of a warehouse facility for this purpose,” Mendenhall said in a statement, “is also wholly outside the scope of our available resources and zoning allowances.”
Resident Joan Gregory on Monday urged the inland port board to reveal any role it might’ve had in the warehouse sale, which caught many elected officials off guard. That prompted Hart’s short statement.
Gregory also said the board should join opposition to the center to “stop this from happening in our beloved state of Utah.”
“I’m going to ask you to join us in this fight against warehousing people, families and children,” she said. “It’s OK to reevaluate what you’re doing, to open your eyes and look at what is happening here.”
Although it distanced itself from the sale, the port authority has issued no additional statements on the future ICE facility.
Also Monday, Brittney Nystrom, executive director of ACLU of Utah, called for greater transparency in ICE’s efforts to turn the industrial facility into a detention center.
Similar ICE sites elsewhere “have become synonymous with inhumane and even deadly conditions, secrecy, and egregious deprivations of due process,” Nystrom said.
“This enormous warehouse was purchased with the intent to detain our neighbors, friends, and families in an industrial building without any public notice or community input,” Nystrom said in a statement. ”Retrofitting an urban warehouse to detain thousands of people calls for greater transparency and oversight, not less.”
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