Yesterday I stood on the far west side of Salt Lake City, staring at a gigantic empty warehouse the Department of Homeland Security bought for $145 million, with plans to turn it into an ICE detention center. A warehouse. Near our airport. In our city. As though human beings are inventory. As though the right word is “facility” and not what it really is: a place built to disappear people behind walls and fluorescent lights.
Let’s start there. Warehouses are for packages. Not for people.
Salt Lake City’s mayor has already said what should be obvious to anyone with a pulse: mass detention inside a warehouse is inhumane, outside the city’s zoning allowances, and contrary to the values of Salt Lakers. She is right. Full stop.
And the obscenity of the timing should make every Utahn furious. Homeland Security has somehow found $145 million to buy an empty building for detention expansion while the department’s own budget fight has left TSA officers working without pay. Tens of thousands of airport security officers have been showing up unpaid, absences have surged, and some airports have faced serious disruptions. So let me get this straight: there is money for cages, money for contracts, money for detention infrastructure, but not enough political courage to pay the people keeping airports running? That is not governance. That is moral failure with a spreadsheet.
Utah should know better.
This is a state with a living memory of Topaz, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated behind barbed wire in one of the worst civil-rights violations in this country’s history. They were never charged. Never convicted. Just removed, confined, and treated as a problem to be managed. If you think history repeats itself with the exact same haircut, you have not been paying attention. History comes back wearing a lanyard, holding a procurement document, calling the camp a warehouse conversion.
And this land was not ours to begin with. The Salt Lake Valley has long been a gathering place for Indigenous peoples. This is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. We are on borrowed land, whether or not that phrase makes people squirm in their expensive boots. The least we can do is refuse to add one more chapter of sanctioned cruelty to soil that has already held too much.
Standing there yesterday, I realized something uncomfortable: outrage alone is no longer enough. We know how to chant. We know how to hold signs. We know how to post the photo and go home. But the image that stayed with me was not the rally as it was. It was what it could have been: a living human chain around that building. Bodies linked arm in arm. A fence made of conscience. A line that said, in the oldest language there is, No. Not here. Not in our name.
I have done this before in other fights. I have put my body where my values were. I have stood in the road for old-growth forests. I have blocked entrances where animals were being tortured in the name of research. I have been arrested for refusing to move while weapons were being built. None of that came from some romance about confrontation. It came from understanding that sometimes the body is the last honest instrument left. Sometimes you do not merely raise your voice. Sometimes you physically interrupt the machinery.
That does not mean performative menace. It does not mean trying to out-tough the state by dressing like a junior militia and smashing windows. A very small group at the protest seemed to think covered faces, body armor, graffiti, and property damage were the message. They were wrong. Utah will not be moved by cosplay intimidation. Broken glass does not build a broader coalition. It hands the story to the people who would much rather talk about vandalism than detention. I understand the rage. I do. But if your politics make you look like a mirror image of the force you claim to oppose, then you have already wandered off the path.
What wins here is not theater. It is moral clarity.
What wins here is grandmothers, veterans, students, clergy, tribal voices, teachers, artists, airport workers, neighbors, and yes, the loudmouth dog mamas too, showing up again and again with enough discipline to make the truth impossible to ignore. What wins here is refusing the lie that this is normal, or necessary, or inevitable. What wins here is making Utah look directly at what is being built and asking: Is this who we are now?
I do not believe it is.
I believe Utah can still choose decency over fear. I believe Salt Lake City can reject the idea that people should be warehoused three miles from an airport like delayed freight. I believe we can remember Topaz not as a museum field trip, but as a warning. I believe we can honor this land by refusing to make it host one more machine for disappearing human beings.
Enough is enough.
You can build a warehouse. You can hire guards. You can print forms and call it policy. But you cannot make a cage moral by giving it a budget line and a neutral-sounding name.
Utah has seen this kind of shame before. We do not need a sequel.
NAKEDJEN 