Standing at the Arizona border near Yuma with his fellow Republican attorneys general Wednesday, Derek Brown praised the Trump administration for its crackdown on undocumented immigrants and said it would keep dangerous drugs off Utah streets.
Speaking in front of a section of border wall that Brown said was “somewhat symbolic in some respects” — it ended abruptly not far from where they were standing —that “having an administration that’s willing to tackle the hard problems and make some of the really hard decisions has made all the difference here.”
With interstate highways intersecting in the middle of the state, Utah, the attorney general said, can have drugs brought across the border in the state in a “matter of hours.”
“The availability of fentanyl that came from here in this area is mind-boggling,” Brown said. Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced a multi-state bust that included a raid in Layton that resulted in the seizure of $800,000 in currency. Across the five states, some 3 million fentanyl pills were confiscated.
Drug overdoses nationally have been declining, but have continued to rise in Utah, according to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.
Brown touted an agreement that Utah’s Department of Corrections recently struck with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — known as a 287(g) agreement — which delegates immigration enforcement authority to state or local officers.
More than 600 agencies in 40 states have signed such agreements with ICE.
The Utah agreement, enacted last week, lets corrections officers transfer undocumented immigrants in state custody to ICE for deportation. According to the corrections department, Utah has been aiding in the deportation of inmates for years, but without a formal agreement in place.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office is the only other jurisdiction in Utah that has signed a 287(g) agreement.
According to data from ICE, arrests in the Salt Lake City region — which covers Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Montana — were down in the first quarter of 2025 from the previous two quarters, and removals are also down from 2024.
But encounters with migrants crossing the border have plummeted in 2025, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
