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.
“Let this sink in: the federal government wants to open a jail inside a documented chemical hazard zone,” she said, gesturing to two large tankers with multiple warning labels idling on the side of the street, just outside of the entrance to the warehouse’s parking lot.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
SUBSCRIBE
New facility slated to be operational by the fall
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.
The move to erect dozens of new detention centers sparked vehement pushback from elected officials and community members alike. Public criticism of the federal government’s approach to immigration enforcement has spiked in the wake of mass raids and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Goode in Minnesota.
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.
Mayes: ICE violated federal laws protecting immigrants in detention and requiring public notice
During Friday’s news conference, Mayes criticized Sartor’s unwillingness to resist the construction of the ICE facility.
“You lose every battle that you choose not to fight,” she said. “Today, the state of Arizona is choosing to fight.”
The Democrat has vocally opposed ICE’s plans since February, when she wrote a letter demanding more information from then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and warning that she was considering filing a lawsuit to stop the facility under the state’s public nuisance law. On Friday, Mayes said that idea was dropped in the face of the likelihood that it would fail because of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which elevates federal laws above state laws.
Instead, the lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act, which calls for public input on and environmental assessments of construction projects that are likely to impact local communities; the Immigration and National Act, which mandates that the Department of Homeland Security set up “appropriate places” for immigrants to be detained; and the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires the federal government to offer clear explanations for its actions. Hinging the lawsuit on ways in which federal laws were flouted insulates the legal challenge against potential arguments that the federal government’s decisions take precedence over state regulations, Mayes said.
“The Supremacy Clause doesn’t apply to the federal government’s own laws,” she said.
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.
Mayes said that locating a detention facility steps away from a hazardous chemical storage facility violates the mandate to hold immigrants in “appropriate” facilities, because it endangers them. The possibility of a chemical accident occurring, combined with the difficulty of evacuating people who are in detention and unable to leave quickly makes for a “perfect storm,” she said. And, she pointed out, that scenario is only worsened by a potential strain on the city’s water infrastructure because of the detention facility’s demand.
Mayes characterized the lawsuit as nothing more than a request that the federal government follow its own laws.
“We are asking the federal government to do something that should not be controversial: follow the law,” she said. “Conduct the required environmental reviews, communicate clearly the information from those reviews and do not open a mass detention facility in a chemical hazard zone.”
Feds didn’t take into account community impact, fell short of own policies
In the lawsuit, Solicitor General Joshua Bendor lambasted federal officials for failing to consider the facility’s potential impact on the surrounding community and the safety of the people who would be housed in it.
“Defendents appear to have performed no analysis regarding the appropriateness of housing a captive population a stone’s throw from a storage facility for hazardous chemicals,” he wrote.
The chemical storage facility submitted a risk management plan, as required under federal law, in January. But that report didn’t consider the potential hazards represented by the mass detention facility, because it wasn’t revealed until the end of that same month. And the federal government, Bendor said, has so far not issued its own risk assessment of the problem.
Bendor added that an increase in traffic caused by construction efforts and detainee transportation would negatively affect the nearby residents and schools. The road outside the facility is narrow and often full of idling semi trucks and chemical tankers. Bendor said the traffic spike could also make the city’s ability to provide emergency services more difficult if there are emergencies at the detention center or because of accidents at the chemical storage facility.
The lawsuit notes that retrofitting the warehouse to hold even just a few hundred people would be a challenge. The inside of the warehouse is currently one large room, with minimal office space. The Department of Homeland Security has said it plans to construct offices, holding and processing spaces, cafeterias, bathrooms and health care spaces.
“The Surprise Warehouse was not designed or constructed to house, feed, bathe, protect, or provide adequate care for humans,” Bendor wrote.
Bendor added that the strain on local infrastructure like water and wastewater systems would be enormous. The lawsuit estimates that wastewater output alone could be between 35,000 and 104,000 gallons per day, depending on whether the facility houses 500 people or up to 1,500, as originally expected. In the Maryland lawsuit, attorneys for the state made similar claims, arguing that the sewage infrastructure wouldn’t be able to handle a jump in the population. The Maryland facility, like the one in Surprise, was also originally slated to hold 1,500 and then reduced to 542.
The lawsuit also accuses the Department of Homeland Security of fumbling its own public notice practices. The agency published a floodplain notice that included a list of planned renovations, including upgrades to parking utilities, indoor construction and new perimeter fencing. But the deadline for the public comment period included on the public notice was set on Jan. 19, four days before the warehouse was purchased. And the agency’s own website added more confusion to the process by setting the deadline at Feb. 20, instead.
Bendor added that DHS has complied with the National Environmental Protection Act in the past, most recently in 2021 during construction of a detention processing center in Texas, making its failure to release an environmental impact report this year all the more baffling. On top of that, Bendor noted that the agency considered four other warehouses in Arizona, which it claims were each evaluated under the protocols established in NEPA, though the agency provided no other specifics on why they were rejected.
On Friday, Mayes denounced the Trump administration for ignoring the potential fallout the planned detention facility could cause and leaving out the concerns of the community.
“The federal government did not ask the people of Surprise whether they wanted this. They did not ask the parents of the students that attend any of the schools near this site if they were OK with this,” she said. “They did not ask the firefighters and paramedics, who would be the first to respond if something went wrong if this was a good idea.They did not ask whether the water and wastewater and power infrastructure of this community could support a detention facility the size of seven football fields.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
SUPPORT
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.
