A group of Utahns wants to block U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from opening a massive detention center in Salt Lake City.

To that end, Uproar Utah — a part of the nonprofit Utah Refugee Justice League — plans to sue ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, alleging that the federal government broke the law when it bought an empty west-side warehouse for the purpose of turning it into a detention facility.

Uproar Utah fired off a letter to DHS and ICE lawyers notifying them of its intent Tuesday morning.

“In their zeal to purchase and convert the Salt Lake City warehouse into a mega immigrant jail,” the letter states, “DHS and ICE have run roughshod over federal law and trampled on the interests of the state and the public.”

The group’s notice comes on the heels of Monday’s complaint filed by Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County in Utah’s federal court. It also seeks to halt the proposed detention center.

[Read more here about the city-county lawsuit against the detention center.]

Uproar Utah leaders said at a news conference Tuesday morning that they supported the city-county lawsuit and had talked to Salt Lake City Attorney Mark Kittrell about it.

Uproar Utah’s arguments in its letter hinge on two key federal laws: the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Those rules, the group states, require federal agencies to conduct a public environmental review of a project and provide reasonable explanations for their decisions.

Attorney Jim McConkie said Tuesday that the group would also look into possible civil rights violations under the 14th Amendment related to the warehouse as a part of a future case, a concern that the city-county filing did not address.

A DHS spokesperson did say in regards to the city-county lawsuit that the agency was reviewing its policies and proposals as it transitioned to new leadership under former Republican U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. The agency repeated that response when asked for comment on the Uproar Utah letter.

“As Secretary Mullin said in his confirmation hearing,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “‘I will work with the community leaders and make sure that we are delivering for the American people what the president set out. … We want to work with community leaders. We want to be good partners.’”

About the planned detention center

The federal government bought the building, which is at least 833,000 square feet, in mid-March for $145.4 million. ICE later confirmed it planned to operate a detention center there.

ICE wants to hold between 7,500 and 10,000 people detained for immigration-related cases there. The center is a part of a nationwide push by President Donald Trump’s administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.

At the time of the purchase, the warehouse was vacant and owned by a property trust affiliated with Deutsche Bank. Salt Lake City officials are waiting for ICE to provide more details about how the center would run and how the federal agency would provide health and safety to any detainees.

“We cannot allow fear-based narratives to justify the suffering of families who have done everything right,” Liliana Bolaños, a program manager for Mormon Women for Ethical Government, said at Tuesday’s news conference. “And we cannot look away from the human cost: the children left behind, the communities destabilized, the trauma that lingers long after detention ends.”

The federal plan has generated significant pushback. Protests are ongoing, while Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall has vowed to use every tool at her disposal to stop it. Opponents have criticized the proposed facility as inhumane and fear that its establishment will lead to more arrests of immigrants living in Utah.

“The federal government cannot impose a massive immigrant jail on Salt Lake City without complying with environmental laws, administrative requirements and basic principles of public health and government accountability,” former federal prosecutor Brent Ward, a lawyer with Uproar Utah and the law firm Parker & McConkie, said in a news release Tuesday. “This proposed facility threatens immigrant communities, promises to separate immigrant children from their parents, threatens public health, and raises serious legal, environmental and humanitarian concerns.”

Ward and others at the news conference called on Utahns to raise their voices against the facility and framed the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants as a moral issue.

The principal allegations

The group’s letter spells out three main allegations. It asserts that:

• The federal government did not conduct an adequate review of the facility’s capacity nor its effects on Utah and its residents.

• The facility, if opened, would do environmental harm, specifically by guzzling 2 million gallons of water per day that might otherwise go to the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

• The center would be so crowded that disease could spread among detainees and staffers. The group also alleges that the current sewer system would not be able to handle an additional 7,500 people or more living in a nonresidential neighborhood.

Those arguments are similar to those made by city and county lawyers in their Monday complaint. Ward said the two lawsuits will not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

Uproar Utah’s planned lawsuit follows in the footsteps of similar cases in other communities where ICE has sought to open new detention centers. A federal judge recently ordered ICE to stop construction on a proposed facility in Maryland on grounds that the agency had violated the environmental review law.

Ward said Uproar Utah is still gathering information to use in its eventual formal lawsuit and is looking for other plaintiffs to join the case.

“I am doing this because I want my community to be safe for everyone,” said Marie Cornwall, executive director of Uproar Utah, “my landscaper and the men who replaced my roof this summer and the men who mow my lawn.”