Arizona AG Sues Trump Over Surprise Immigration Detention Warehouse

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is suing the Trump administration over its plan to turn a warehouse in Surprise into an immigration detention center, saying that federal law prohibits its construction because the building is directly across the street from a hazardous chemical storage facility.

During a Friday news conference announcing the lawsuit, Mayes argued the building was never meant to house people and accused the Trump administration of violating multiple federal laws to support its mass deportation campaign. Standing in front of the 418,400-square-foot commercial warehouse that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought earlier this year, Mayes warned that its proximity to dangerous chemicals could result in a “mass casualty event,” if a chemical spill or fire occurred.

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The warehouse is one of at least 24 across the country the Trump administration is aiming to retrofit into new immigration detention facilities to deliver on the White House’s goal to deport one million people every year. ICE originally set the capacity for the Surprise facility at 1,500 people, which would have made it one of the largest detention centers in the state. There are currently six ICE detention facilities in Arizona. The Eloy Detention Center has a bed capacity of 1,500 and the San Luis Regional Detention Center, the second largest, can hold up to 704 people. But the warehouse retrofitting program has seen revisions under new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and the planned capacity for the Surprise center was recently reduced to 542, with plans to house 250 by September.

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Hundreds of Surprise residents have consistently packed city council meetings to voice their disapproval of the planned facility, located a mile away from a public high school whose student body is over 60% Hispanic. One council meeting saw over a thousand attendees. But it’s unclear what the city council could do to oppose the federal government. And city leadership has shown little interest in taking up the issue. Mayor Kevin Sartor said he believed the city has no legal grounds to take action against the Trump administration over the facility in an April 15 interview on The Mike Broomhead Show. Instead, Sartor and four other city officials met with the Department of Homeland Security in March to lobby for a reimbursement of lost city revenue and an agreement that ICE operations won’t spill over into the nearby schools.

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Similar legal arguments against a facility in Maryland accusing the federal government of failing to conduct environmental reviews and allowing public input convinced a federal judge to block construction last week.

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