Northwest Valley Indivisible renews its call for the Surprise City Council to formally oppose the project.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 25, 2026
SURPRISE, Ariz. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the federal government may revoke Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and Syria, and that the lower courts may not review whether it followed the law in doing so. Similar cases involving other countries remain pending. Northwest Valley Indivisible says the decision enlarges the population that can be detained nationwide and adds to the pressure on the ICE facility planned for Surprise. The group renews its call for the City Council to formally oppose the project.
The ruling fits a broader pattern of withdrawing legal status to create people who can be arrested. The administration has already ended humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Since May 2025, ICE has asked immigration judges to dismiss pending cases so that people who appear for their own hearings can be detained on the spot and placed on a fast track to deportation. In Phoenix, an attorney reported that two of his clients were arrested moments after a May 2025 hearing. The sequence is deliberate, and it serves a stated goal: Stephen Miller has publicly set a target of at least 3,000 ICE arrests a day, a floor rather than a ceiling. Each step strips a protection before the person can act on it themselves.
DHS has described the Surprise site to Mayor Kevin Sartor as a short-term processing center, holding 542 people at a time and cycling roughly 250 through each week before they are transferred elsewhere or deported. At that pace, the facility would process about 13,000 people a year. The 542 figure, though, is a starting point rather than a ceiling. The building was first slated for 1,500 beds, and the cap can be raised at the agency’s discretion without input from the city.
Even as ICE retreats elsewhere, the Surprise project moves ahead. One of the transfer destinations DHS named, a facility in Salt Lake City, is now among seven warehouses the agency is offloading nationwide. Of the eleven it purchased for conversion, only four remain active, and Surprise is the only one west of Texas. There is no sign of a slowdown here. GardaWorld, the contractor hired to operate the site, is actively recruiting security, medical, and management staff.
The timing is difficult. National immigration detention has reached a record of roughly 73,000 people. The DHS Inspector General has repeatedly found ICE holding more people than its facilities were built for, and holding them longer than its own rules allow, including a September 2025 finding of noncompliance at Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center, which already operates near capacity. A processing center that takes in detainees faster than it can move them out would reproduce that problem in Surprise.
The consequences would not stop at the facility’s security fence. Overcrowding will place added demand on Surprise and Maricopa County services, from medical calls to emergency response. The site also sits within the hazard zone for multiple chemical release senarios at the neighboring Rinchem warehouse, the basis for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’s lawsuit to halt the conversion. In a chemical emergency, detained people could not evacuate on their own, complicating the emergency response for surrounding neighborhoods in Surprise and El Mirage.
“DHS told this city 542 beds and a one-week stay. Nobody should believe a number from an agency that strips people of their legal status to meet an arrest quota. The Supreme Court just handed that operation 350,000 more names, and Surprise volunteered to help process them. The Council can’t stop this prison camp on its own, but it can stand with the community and say no. It keeps choosing silence instead,” said Brent Peak, Co-Chair of Northwest Valley Indivisible.
Northwest Valley Indivisible is asking the City Council to adopt a formal resolution opposing the facility rather than bargaining over bed counts the federal government is not bound to honor. ICE has walked away from seven of these warehouses. It continues to move forward with this one.
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Northwest Valley Indivisible is a grassroots civic organization serving Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of Surprise, Glendale, Peoria, and Phoenix, as well as Sun City, Sun City West, and Anthem.