ICE’s Planned Arizona Detention Center Just Passed the Environmental Review Kris Mayes Demanded

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said ICE couldn’t turn a Surprise warehouse into a detention center until it did a full environmental study. ICE did the study. It came back clean.

The Department of Homeland Security has put out an 81-page draft review of the plan, along with a draft finding of no significant impact. In plain terms, the government looked at water, traffic, noise, air, hazardous materials, wildlife and history, and concluded that with the right safeguards in place, a 1,500-bed ICE center on Sweetwater Avenue would not do significant harm to the city around it. That means no years-long environmental impact statement is required.

It is a draft, and the public has until Dec. 9 to weigh in. But it knocks out the main legal argument Arizona used to stop the project.

A $70 million warehouse that sat empty

ICE bought the building at 13290 W. Sweetwater Ave. on Jan. 23 for about $70 million. It is a 418,000-square-foot warehouse built in 2024, sitting on about 24 acres in an industrial park in the northwest Phoenix metro, near Sweetwater Avenue and Dysart Road. The plan is to hold up to 1,500 detainees there, staffed by roughly 676 officers and employees.

Mayes sued on April 24, arguing the federal government had moved ahead without the review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that makes federal agencies study the effects of big projects before building them. At the end of June, both sides asked a federal judge to pause the case. Under the order entered in July, ICE agreed not to hold anyone at the site or start any construction, demolition or retrofitting until a final environmental assessment and decision were done, according to the stipulation Mayes’ office announced.

Mayes celebrated that deal at the time.

She got her review. On Nov. 5, Justice Department lawyers told the court that ICE’s contractor had finished a draft and that ICE was going over it. Days later it was public.

Where the water comes from

Water was always going to be the biggest question in a desert suburb, and the report doesn’t dodge it. ICE projects the center would use about 190,000 gallons a day on an average day and about 215,000 at peak. The city, planning for its hottest and busiest days, doubles that and uses 380,000 gallons a day for its figures.

To cover it, Surprise would need about 176 more gallons per minute of groundwater pumping. That means bringing its Rancho Gabriela Well No. 4 online about five years earlier than planned and changing an arsenic-treatment expansion already in the works at the same water plant.

The key line for taxpayers in Surprise: the facility pays for it. Under the city’s water rules, ICE is responsible for the funding and the water-resource obligations tied to those upgrades, and the center can’t start using city water until it meets the city’s Sustainable Water Service Agreement and its High Water User requirements.

Surprise City Council member Chris Judd, who doesn’t want the center, put a number on it. “As a designated provider, we have to give them water, but we can force them to pay for the water they’re making us give them. And so that means that there’s about $9 million in infrastructure that they’re going to have to pay for,” Judd told AZFamily. He said the center would use three to four times more water than the city’s biggest water user does today.

Sewer and power looked easier. The report says the existing eight-inch sewer line on the property can carry about 771,840 gallons a day, more than three times the center’s projected peak discharge. Arizona Public Service confirmed no off-site electrical upgrades are needed. The site would add three transformers and an 800,000-gallon water tank, kept shorter than the existing building and finished to match it.

Traffic, schools and the place across the street

A 24-hour operation with hundreds of workers brings cars, and the report says so. Shift changes would create rush periods, and the afternoon shift change overlaps with nearby school dismissal. ICE’s answer is to keep vehicles queued on its own property, control the gate, and schedule big deliveries and buses away from school traffic. No new public roads would be built and school access wouldn’t change.

An earlier site check found no existing contamination on the property. Fuel, cleaning supplies and medical materials would be handled under a hazardous materials plan. The center would also have its own medical staff, security systems and fire protection, and would coordinate with local police, fire and ambulance crews.

Opponents aren’t satisfied. Brent Peak, co-chair of Northwest Valley Indivisible, told AZFamily that a warehouse across the street that stores hazardous materials, one of the concerns in Mayes’ lawsuit, got only one paragraph in 81 pages. Project Saltbox reported that the company hired to run the facility managed the review. Both points will likely end up in the comment pile.

On the rest of the checklist, the findings were short. The report found no endangered species habitat on the developed lot, so no Fish and Wildlife consultation is required. No archaeological sites were found. ICE is still consulting with the state historic preservation office and tribes about an old 69-kV power line nearby that is eligible for the National Register, though the project wouldn’t touch it.

What Arizona can still do

The stipulation left Mayes room to challenge whether the review is good enough, and she may try. Her office and the City of Surprise both say they are going through the draft. The city also owns a sliver of land, about 0.12 acres at the corner of the property, that ICE wants for perimeter security, and the draft doubles as public notice of that plan.

But the fight has changed. In April, the argument was that ICE skipped the homework. ICE has now turned it in, and on paper it says the center can run without significant harm as long as the water bill gets paid.

ICE says it needs more detention and processing space in the Phoenix area to handle the people it arrests. Surprise residents get 30 days to make their case. After that, DHS reviews the comments, makes any changes, and issues a final decision. If that decision holds, the warehouse that has sat idle since January can finally start becoming what the government bought it to be.