Update, August 5, 2026: Hours after we pointed out these omissions to the City, they added the June 30 federal order to its information page, one of the three things we asked for. The page gets corrected when someone shows the City what it left out. But the Mayor told the Arizona Republic the same day that Rinchem, the chemical hazard directly across the street, will not be added to the page until the City finishes its own report, which it does not expect to present until October. So the City has decided that residents will wait two more months to see the most dangerous fact about this site on the page the City created to give them the facts. The hazard is not in dispute. Our own Attorney General put it in a federal complaint. The only question is why a page built to inform residents is holding it back.
This week the City of Surprise published a page on its website titled “Information on the potential ICE facility in Surprise.” The city says the page exists to keep residents informed, to share verified information, and to correct misinformation. Read the whole thing looking for the single most dangerous fact about this site, and you will not find it.
The page describes the city’s public safety concerns as traffic, utilities, protest activity, and demand on police and fire crews. Those are real concerns. But they are not the thing that could put thousands of detainees and tens of thousands of Surprise residents in an emergency room or worse. That thing sits on the same street as the proposed facility, and the city’s page never names it.
The facility at 13290 W. Sweetwater Avenue would sit next to Rinchem, a hazardous materials warehouse. Under the release scenario drawn from Rinchem’s own federal Risk Management Plan, a chemical release of hydrogen chloride reaches 2.7 miles and roughly 73,000 residents. This is not our estimate; it is Rinchem’s. These concerns appear in the Arizona Attorney General’s federal complaint against this facility, where our initial research on Rinchem’s plan is cited in the footnotes.
Now add the part the page does mention. The city says this facility could hold between 500 and 1,500 people. A person locked inside a detention facility cannot evacuate. In a chemical release, every other resident in the hazard zone can get in a car and drive away. The people held inside cannot, unless someone has made a plan to move them or protect them. When Garden Grove, California faced a chemical threat, roughly 45,000 people were evacuated. Large chemical evacuations are not a hypothetical. They happen.
So has anyone made that plan? Project Salt Box asked the Surprise Fire Marshal about emergency planning for this site. The answers they got in writing were “Not at this time” and “No such conversation has taken place.”
Then there is what the page does ask for. Buried in the list of things the city has done is a request that the federal government “explore early creation of a Community Relations Board.” When residents learned an ICE detention facility was being dropped into their neighborhood, they did not ask the city to help set up a board to manage it. They asked the city to stop it. A Community Relations Board is what you request when you have already decided the camp is coming and you want a structure to handle the complaints. It is the language of a city preparing to accommodate, not a city fighting to prevent.
The page is also not up to date. Its timeline runs through the middle of June and no further. It never mentions the June 30 agreement that paused detention and physical conversion at the site pending an environmental review. A page that ends the record before that agreement leaves residents with a picture that is inaccurate, from a page whose entire stated purpose is clarity.
We are not guessing at any of this. We have formally written to the city and asked it to do three specific things: put the Rinchem release scenario on the page, answer plainly whether any emergency plan exists for a detained population that cannot evacuate itself, and add the June 30 agreement so the record is current. We are waiting for an answer.
None of what is missing from this page is missing because the city lacks the information. The Attorney General put the hazard in a federal court filing. The mayor coordinates safety for the school down the road. The city knows. Leaving it off the page was a choice. Other cities pressured the federal government over sites like this one and got them pulled. Surprise can put the truth on its own page and tell residents what it is prepared to do to protect them. So far, it has chosen not to.
If you live in Surprise, call the mayor and your councilmember and ask one question: why isn’t the chemical hazard on the city’s own information page? Then ask what the plan is for the people who cannot evacuate.
[Photo Credit: Rinchem]