This was supposed to be the month.
Before Mayor Kevin Sartor’s March 31 press conference quietly revised the timeline, DHS had been tracking toward a late May partial opening of the ICE Prison Camp at 13290 W. Sweetwater Ave in Surprise, Arizona. Not the full build-out — just the beginning. A reduced bed count, a soft launch, a first wave of human beings routed into a converted industrial warehouse across the street from tanks of fluorine and hydrochloric acid, in a neighborhood that never agreed to any of it.
That warehouse sits empty. Construction stopped. A federal lawsuit is pending.
Here’s the story of how we got here — and what could have happened if we hadn’t.
Phoenix New Times reporter Morgan Fischer recently published the account of a man named Marcos Gaspar Da Silva. He was held for ten days at the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center at Mesa-Gateway Airport, a facility with no beds and no showers. His wife told Fischer he slept on a feces-covered floor.
That facility was designed for 157 people and a 12-hour stay. When three members of Congress showed up unannounced in April, they found 40 to 50 people crammed into rooms built for 21 — packed so tightly detainees couldn’t sit down, let alone lie down. One person had been there 18 days. The single-day population peaked at 777 human beings. No beds. No showers. Feces on the floor.
This is what ICE detention looks like in Arizona right now, in a facility that already exists, that people have already been suing and demanding answers about for months. Three people died in ICE custody in Arizona last year. Nationally, 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention in more than two decades — 32 deaths, 72% of them at private facilities. Sixteen more people have died in ICE custody in just the first months of 2026. A measles outbreak spread through Arizona ICE facilities this year while the Surprise warehouse was being retrofitted. Female detainees at Eloy reported being forced into the yard in extreme heat without water.
There are no enforceable standards governing ICE detention conditions — not for medical care, not for mental health, not for basic sanitation. And as of this week, there is no longer a watchdog office to report any of it to. The Trump administration has shut down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — OIDO — the congressionally created office charged with receiving detainee complaints, investigating abuse, and inspecting detention facilities. Homeland Security officials have said plainly that brutal detention conditions are meant to incentivize people to “self-deport.” The cruelty, they have made clear, is the point.
The Sweetwater warehouse is an industrial building never designed for human habitation. DHS handed a $313 million contract to GardaWorld Federal Services — the same company that provides security for “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, where former detainees have alleged inhumane conditions and where two active lawsuits are pending. That is the company. That is the model. That is what was coming to this neighborhood.
Starting in January, Northwest Valley Indivisible refused to let it happen quietly.
One of our volunteers tore through public records and found what no government agency had flagged: Rinchem Company, Inc., directly across Sweetwater Avenue, stores fluorine, hydrochloric acid, TMAH, and other federally regulated chemicals — and its Risk Management Plan contains no provisions for a captive, non-ambulatory population locked in a building across the street. That analysis forms the factual core of Count II of the Arizona Attorney General’s federal complaint. AG Mayes stood outside the warehouse and told the public: “If there is a pipe rupture or a chemical spill or a fire, emergency responders will be responding to a potential mass casualty event involving hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are locked in and can’t get out.” NWVI is cited by name on page 23 in that complaint.
Our members filled the council chambers — meeting after meeting, week after week, in numbers that forced the agenda and were cited on page 11 of the Attorney General’s complaint as evidence of the “virtually uniform opposition” to the warehouse facility. We organized a No Kings protest that brought 3,200 people to Surprise in March and nearly 10,000 across the district. We issued formal demand letters to the mayor and council, copying Governor Hobbs, AG Mayes, congressional members, and other elected officials. We earned press that built a public record in national media. And finally, on April 22, DHS issued a stop-work order on GardaWorld’s contract. On April 23, a second modification appeared with explicit language: “THIS MODIFICATION UPDATES THE STOP WORK ORDER IN EFFECT AT THE SURPRISE PROCESSING AND DETENTION FACILITY.” That was one day before AG Mayes filed suit. The work had already stopped.
Now about the mayor and council.
They took a trip to Washington in March and came home with promises. DHS promised a community relations board, facility tours, and a memorandum of agreement. None of it was in writing. Mayor Sartor reported that the facility would open as soon as June, would cap at 542 beds, and that detainees would stay only three to seven days. He presented this as reassuring. Not one word was legally enforceable. Not one word was signed.
Council Member Judd, who has been more willing than most to speak plainly, nonetheless said he wanted to keep lines of communication open with DHS because “if this thing is unstoppable, we still want to have a seat at the table.”
The thing turned out to be stoppable. The seat at the table turned out to be irrelevant. The council passed no resolution. Filed no legal action. Issued no formal objection on behalf of the people who elected them. The lawsuit that halted construction was filed by the Attorney General. The stop-work order was found by volunteers. The public safety case that anchored the legal complaint was built by a community member who read the Risk Management Plan that no official had bothered to read.
Thanks for nothing, Mayor and council members.
The fight is not over. The lawsuit is active. The warehouse still stands. DHS still has tens of billions in detention funding and a political directive to use it. They will try again here, or somewhere close.
But for now, for the first time in weeks, the Sweetwater warehouse is quiet. No construction crews. No buses being routed toward a feces-covered floor in a chemical hazard zone in the middle of Surprise, Arizona.
That didn’t happen because of the mayor and council.
It happened because of Surprise residents.
You’re welcome, Mayor.