Shortly after the news broke last week that the federal government had paid $145 million for a huge warehouse near Salt Lake City Airport, immigration officials issued a statement praising the economic benefits that the detention center would bring.

Construction and operation of the facility would, Immigration and Customs Enforcement promised, “bring 9,893 jobs to the area.” It would also “contribute $1.1 billion to GDP,” and generate “more than $238.7 million in tax revenue.”

ICE officials didn’t explain where those projections came from, or how they arrived at such precise numbers. The Salt Lake Tribune asked the agency three times over the past five days for comment. ICE did respond Wednesday evening, but their statement did not address any of The Tribune’s questions concerning the agency’s calculations or projections.

Without providing details on expenditures or hiring, ICE said it is using an “innovative approach” in extending its detention network: “Instead of relying on third party owned facilities, ICE is now purchasing properties across the country.” The agency will hire numerous contractors to build out the centers, ICE said.

Undoubtedly, the job of rebuilding the 833,000-square-foot warehouse to accommodate thousands of humans rather than parcels would require a lot of workers, from electricians to architects to plumbers. If the center goes into operation, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, will need to hire hundreds of workers to guard the projected 7,500 immigrants and run the facility. Those employees’ paychecks and purchases would generate significant tax revenue.

But Salt Lake City officials and immigration experts are skeptical of ICE’s economic claims.

In a letter to acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said that the city had not been contacted about ICE’s plans, and that their calculations show the facility would result in a $1 million loss in property taxes.

And Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, said it’s likely that most economic benefits associated with the site would be short-lived. This is because DHS’s “essentially unlimited funding” under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to expire in 2029, he said, and these new detention centers could each cost $1 billion a year to run. He said, “it’s very possible that ICE would just abandon that facility after a few years, if Congress did not fund it.”

The biggest beneficiary of these facilities likely won’t be the local economies where they’re built, he said, but the contractors who would be paid billions to build and operate them.

How we analyzed ICE’s claims

DHS bought this warehouse, located at 6020 W. 300 South, as part of ICE’s broader initiative to reconfigure its patchwork of detention facilities and facilitate mass deportation, Reichlin-Melnick said. Salt Lake City’s warehouse is primed to become one of eight planned “mega centers.”

To evaluate the government’s economic projections, The Salt Lake Tribune asked DHS and ICE to explain their methodologies and assumptions, as well the construction timeline. The agencies didn’t provide any such details.

The Tribune also compared other local industries, as well as institutions like state prisons, to the proposed center.

The Tribune sought comment from economists at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. The institute declined to comment specifically on the ICE facility or the agency’s numbers, but past work by the institute shows that if this detention facility did reach these economic heights, it would be an extraordinary outlier. The Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity also did not respond to requests for comment.

It is hard to gauge the economic benefits of ICE detention centers, especially amid the Trump administration’s accelerated immigration enforcement. However, researchers have been studying the impact of prisons on local communities for years. Their studies show mixed economic results.

A 2018 study found that neighborhoods near prisons saw “temporary boosts to local construction” and that their economies can become more resilient to downturns. But those areas often saw declines in housing values since prisons tend to attract lower-income workers, stated Janjala Chirakijja, who has a PhD in economics from Northwestern University. “Prisons fail to provide a major stimulus to the local economy, despite assertions to the contrary by prison proponents,” she added.

The tax benefits are also murky, Chirakijja found in a 2024 study. “Prisons do not have a significant impact on the overall size of local governments’ revenues and spending per capita,” she determined.

Still, these facilities would be the biggest ICE has ever operated, Reichlin-Melnick said, which gives some context for the breadth of the project and its potential impact.

“If a single one of these large-scale warehouses were to open, we would be looking at the largest federal facility of its kind in modern history, with the only comparisons being the mass detention of Cuban and Haitian migrations at Guantanamo Bay in the 1980s and 1990s,” or the Japanese internment during World War II. (The Topaz Internment Camp operated in Delta held more than 8,000 people at its peak.)

And federal officials want these facilities to begin operating quickly, meaning money would begin flowing soon. In fact, before DHS bought this warehouse, ICE awarded a $10.4 million contract to a Florida-based company to transport people who will be held there.

Here is what we know so far about the agency’s projections:

Jobs

Claim: This new facility would bring in 9,893 jobs.

ICE did not clarify how many of those jobs would be temporary or permanent, nor how many of the roles would be filled by local workers. It is also unclear how much these jobs would pay. In Social Circle, Ga., where ICE spent $128 million in February to purchase a warehouse meant to hold as many as 10,000 detainees, the agency expected the facility would employ between 2,000 and 2,500 staffers, according to information released by the city.

That facility was expected to be modular, “so that capacity can be scaled up or down as needed.” As of February, the agency had said the facility would take 60 to 75 days to complete, with detainees being held there as early as May.

Another point of reference for ICE’s 9,893-job estimate: Utah’s financial technology industry, or fintech, created 8,000 jobs across 67 companies in 2023, according to a Gardner Institute report.

Another institute report said the state’s total nonagricultural employment was expected to grow by 1.5%, adding 26,000 jobs in 2026. An addition of 9,893 new ICE-related jobs would amount to more than a third of that number.

A more relevant comparison point might be the state’s prison system. In its most recent annual report, Utah’s Department of Corrections said it employed nearly 2,300 workers — not just guards, but all employees — to oversee 6,250 inmates, along with thousands more on parole. That would mean that the state employs a fraction of the workforce that ICE envisions would be needed for its Salt Lake City detention center.

There might also be a cost to state and local corrections systems. Given the nationwide staffing crisis for prisons — an issue Utah recently announced it had overcome after years of reform — Reichlin-Melnick said state officials should be concerned that ICE will try to lure away staff with higher-paying federal jobs.

ICE’s jobs number might also include people who would be hired to renovate the warehouse. Such a project wouldn’t be cheap or easy.

Mayor Mendenhall wrote in her letter to ICE that there aren’t enough existing public utilities to operate a facility of the size ICE is planning. It would require significant improvements to the water and sewer systems.

“The area’s utility system has been built specifically for warehouse use, not high-occupancy residential use, and there are downstream constraints,” she wrote.

She also is concerned about the “enormous strain” increased traffic would put on local roads, interfering with railroad networks, in an area zoned for “light industrial uses.”

“The zone,” Mendenhall wrote, “is not suitable and this building was not built for human habitation for any period of time.”

The government in Social Circle, population of nearly 5,500, had similar concerns, writing in a February statement that “The City’s concerns regarding water and sewer infrastructure have not been addressed to our satisfaction. We continue to have more questions than answers.”

It added that ICE’s analysis included capacity from a wastewater treatment facility that is “not owned by the City of Social Circle, is not located within the city limits, is in a different county, and does not connect to the City’s utility system or this building.” The remaining capacity, it said, was attributed to a facility the city was planning but had not yet begun to build.

“Documents provided by DHS indicate this detention facility alone would have a sewage demand of 1,001,683 gallons per day,” Social Circle officials said. “The City’s current wastewater system processes 660,000 gallons a day and is already operating at capacity.”

Tax revenue

Claim: The facility would bring in more than $238.7 million in tax revenue.

This is a difficult number to analyze because ICE did not explain whether its figure represents local, state or federal taxes, or some combination of those.

The detention center would certainly generate income taxes from workers, and there would also be sales-tax revenue from the goods and services those workers buy.

But the federal site would be exempt from paying property taxes, Mendenhall wrote. That would result in a loss of $1 million a year.

The warehouse is in the Utah Inland Port Authority boundary area, land set aside “with the mission of creating generational regional economic growth,” Mendenhall wrote.

“If this facility were used as a large-scale detention center, it would have troubling ramifications for neighboring properties and a chilling effect on the potential of this area to thrive as an economic driver of the state,” she said.

How does ICE’s figure compare to other sources of tax revenue? It is about $103.9 million less than the local and state tax revenue generated by Utah’s ski industry, which employs 31,800 people at 15 resorts, according to a 2025 Gardner institute report.

GDP growth

Claim: The detention center would contribute $1.1 billion to the GDP.

Again, it isn’t clear whether ICE is referring to the city, state or national GDP.

By means of comparison, Utah’s GDP is about $319 billion, according to data released in January, so the ICE facility would represent a gain of about 0.3%.

Another metric for comparison: The Gardner Institute found that in 2024, Salt Lake County’s entire life-sciences industry accounted for more than 41,400 jobs in 2023 and contributed $5.75 billion in GDP.

It isn’t clear whether ICE’s analysis considered the impact of detaining and deporting thousands of immigrants, who would otherwise be working or spending money. The American Immigration Council found that mass deportations would significantly shrink the country’s GDP.

“It’s not just workers. Undocumented immigrants are consumers. They are supporting American businesses, and their departure from the labor force would cause the overall economy to shrink.” Reichlin-Melnick said.

ICE said there would be a benefit from “removing criminals from the streets” which “makes communities safer for business owners and customers.”

Reichlin-Melnick called that “public relations and nothing else.” It doesn’t take into account ICE’s own data which shows that about 40% of people detained by its agents have no criminal record, he said, adding that only about 10% have been given a ranking reserved for people “considered the most dangerous criminals.”

“The idea that everyone who’s going to be held in the detention center is going to be some hardened criminal they took off the street is just not accurate,” Reichlin-Melnick said.