Utah erupts after uncovering ICE’s secret detention center deal

Democrats have a lot to say about ICE — at least, according to the mountain of TV advertising candidates have purchased over the past 30 days. According to reporting from NBC News this week, two-thirds of the campaign ads in Illinois’s open Democratic Senate primary mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as do nearly a quarter of campaign ads nationwide.  

The agency is an easy target. Six in 10 Americans say ICE has gone too far in its effort to enforce President Trump’s legally dubious mass deportation scheme. In January, Puck found that ICE was Americans’ most-hated federal agency, more reviled than even the dreaded IRS. ICE is nothing short of political poison for vulnerable Republicans, and so the GOP made sure the worst of ICE’s excesses were pushed into the shadows. 

One of those shadows lifted over the weekend, when the Deseret News reported that ICE secretly paid $145 million for a sprawling, 830,000-square-foot Salt Lake City warehouse that locals fear will be used as a jumbo-sized migrant detention camp. According to councilmember Eva Lopez Chavez, the deal was so hush-hush that Utah’s congressional delegation learned about it from the newspapers.  

It’s easy to understand why locals are fearful that the next front in Trump’s unpopular immigration fight may have just appeared in their back yards.  

More than a month before ICE signed its warehouse deal with Colliers International, federal records show the agency had already inked a $10.4 million........

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