By Staff Reporter |
The planned opening of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Arizona has been delayed.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE, and Attorney General Kris Mayes have entered an agreement to pause the conversion of a property in Surprise into an immigration detention center pending an environmental review.
Mayes sued to halt the property conversion in April, claiming DHS and ICE failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
The agreement reached on Tuesday acknowledged the Trump administration’s duty to adhere to the former through an environmental analysis, but didn’t address the latter allegation pertaining to the federal government’s duty to arrange for “appropriate” places for immigration detention.
Mayes described the agreement as a “significant win” in a press release issued on Wednesday.
“Federal agencies must complete the environmental review process required by federal law before moving forward with these types of projects,” said Mayes.
Similar legal challenges alleging NEPA noncompliance have impacted other immigration detention facility projects in other states: Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey. The Trump administration initially attempted to argue its conversion projects were exempt from the NEPA, but after losing to a challenge in Maryland the administration pivoted on its approach to the Michigan and New Jersey challenges to agree to environmental reviews.
Environmental reviews take typically months, if not years, to complete. However, the Trump administration has recently made a point of expediting environmental reviews in other politically pressing situations.
Last spring, the Department of the Interior announced it would accelerate the review process to be completed in under a month in order to meet the demands of President Donald Trump’s declaration of a National Energy Emergency.
No reports have emerged indicating that the Trump administration plans to undertake similar expediting measures to get the Surprise or other planned immigration detention facilities up and running.
There may not be much of a desire for an expedited turnaround given another recent development.
New leadership within the Trump administration has indicated plans to reverse course on the national buildout of additional detention facilities. ICE announced last month that it would be selling or passing along to other agencies seven of the 11 facilities it had initially purchased to convert into detention facilities. The Surprise facility wasn’t among the seven facilities identified for offloading.
Kristi Noem, former DHS secretary, had directed the facility purchases and guided the conversion plans. The new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said in a statement to The New York Times that ICE would be prioritizing plans that facilitated the expedited removal of illegal aliens, not prolonged “hous[ing of them] on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense.” Instead, DHS will maximize the use of existing detention space through state and county partners.
At present, ICE has four facilities in Arizona: the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center in Florence, the Florence Service Processing Center in Florence, the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, and the San Luis Regional Detention Center in San Luis.
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