In Arizona, ICE Plans to Hold Detainees Across From a Chemical Storage Site. Fire Officials Say No One Has Asked How an Evacuation Would Work.

Rinchem’s own safety filings model a toxic plume that could reach more than 73,000 people, including schools, neighborhoods and the planned detention center.

On one side of West Sweetwater Avenue in Surprise, Ariz., a company stores hundreds of thousands of pounds of hazardous chemicals, among them compressed gases that turn into a toxic, corrosive cloud if they escape. On the other side, the federal government is preparing to hold as many as 2,000 immigration detainees in a converted warehouse — people who, in an emergency, could not let themselves out.

The fire department responsible for both sides of the street says no one has asked it how that would work.

In a written response on June 1, the fire marshal of the Surprise Fire-Medical Department, Steven D. Faraclas, said his department had never been given a plan for how the detention center would handle a chemical accident across the street. Neither the Department of Homeland Security, nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nor the private contractor hired to run the facility had contacted the department about emergency planning or the chemical site next door. Asked whether any of them had been in touch, Faraclas wrote: “Not at this time.”

The chemical facility, run by the Rinchem Company, has operated at 13255 W. Sweetwater Avenue since early 2024, according to state hazardous-materials filings reviewed by Project Salt Box. The filings identify Surprise Fire-Medical as the responding fire department and list dozens of hazardous substances on site, including chlorine, ammonia, fluorine and large amounts of hydrogen chloride — a gas that becomes a choking, corrosive cloud when it is released.

In recently-posted job advertisements for the Surprise site, GardaWorld Federal Services — the company ICE contracted to fit-out and operate the facility — warns that “employees may be exposed to extreme cold or hot weather conditions, fumes, or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, and loud noise.”

Companies that store hazardous chemicals in large quantities must tell regulators how far a dangerous release could spread. In Rinchem’s filing, the company modeled what regulators call an “alternative release scenario”: a realistic accident, not the worst possible case, in which a broken seam or manifold at its outdoor container yard releases 20,000 pounds of hydrogen chloride gas over 10 minutes. The Environmental Protection Agency’s risk model shows a toxic cloud from such a breach could travel as far as 2.7 miles, across an area where 73,642 people live. The detention center across the street, the surrounding neighborhoods and several schools all fall within that distance.

Northwest Valley Indivisible, a nonpartisan civic group in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, raised the issue with Surprise officials on May 29, submitting a public safety briefing based on Rinchem’s EPA filings and offsite consequence data.

The group asked the city to press DHS, ICE and GardaWorld for answers on evacuation, shelter-in-place planning, emergency coordination and chemical-detection systems before the facility opens.

Lynne Gehling of Northwest Valley Indivisible, who provided Project Salt Box with Rinchem records obtained through state hazardous-materials filings and an EPA Risk Management Plan reading-room review, said the unanswered questions pointed to a basic failure of due diligence.

“Did a single person at DHS or ICE look across the street and see one of the largest hazardous chemical warehouse in the Valley before they spent $70 million to lock people up with no way out?” Gehling said. “Did anyone do any due diligence on this location at all? We keep asking. They keep not answering. Surprise residents deserve better.”

In its letter, the group asked officials to demand answers on “how 542 non-evacuable detainees will be protected in a toxic release event,” whether the county emergency planning committee and Surprise Fire-Medical Department had reviewed Rinchem’s risk plan against the detention center’s operations, and “what chemical detection and HVAC isolation systems will be in place before opening.” The group called them “public safety questions with straightforward regulatory answers — or they should be.”

The city of Surprise could not be reached for comment in time for publication.

The questions may extend beyond the 542-detainee figure cited by Northwest Valley Indivisible. ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative describes regional processing centers like Surprise as short-term staging sites that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees for three to seven days before transfer or removal, according to records released by New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s office.

The Arizona attorney general raised a more expansive version of the same concern in its lawsuit against DHS, arguing that the Surprise warehouse was built for industrial distribution, not human detention, and that placing a captive population across from a hazardous-materials warehouse could strain the city’s ability to protect public health and provide emergency services during an accident.

ICE has made at least one site-specific environmental notice public. In February, the agency issued a floodplain notice saying the 24.46-acre property sits in a moderate flood-hazard zone and that ICE had reviewed alternatives before deciding to acquire, renovate and occupy the warehouse as a “temporary detainee dormitory.” The notice said the site was largely paved, already served by roads, utilities and drainage infrastructure, and would require only “minor adjustments” for operations. It did not mention Rinchem, the chemical storage facility across the street, or the evacuation of a detained population during a chemical release.

As of publication, ICE had not filed its response to the state’s complaint. In other warehouse cases, DHS responses have included records of environmental consideration that Project Salt Box previously reported were completed on compressed timelines and relied on categorical exclusions rather than fuller environmental assessments, including at the proposed detention site in Roxbury, N.J.

That narrow record leaves unanswered the broader public-safety question raised by the warehouse’s location — namely, how would emergency officials protect hundreds, if not thousands, of locked detainees during a chemical release, industrial fire, hazardous-materials crash, smoke event or other fast-moving emergency.

Two major chemical emergencies struck the West in the same week. In Longview, Wash., a tank containing roughly 900,000 gallons of “white liquor,” a caustic chemical mixture used in paper production, imploded at a Nippon Dynawave Packaging facility on May 26, killing 11 workers, USA Today reported. Days earlier in Garden Grove, Calif., about 50,000 residents were evacuated after a tank holding 6,500 gallons of methyl methacrylate became unstable at a GKN Aerospace facility, according to ABC7 Los Angeles.

When the evacuation order came in Garden Grove, residents could, for the most part, get in their cars and leave. People held in a locked detention center would depend on a plan — and on staff, contractors and emergency responders — to evacuate, shelter in place or move them out of danger.

A general emergency plan already exists for the Rinchem facility, Faraclas said, and his department has reviewed it. But that plan covers the chemical company alone. The detention center, he said, “would prepare its own general emergency or evacuation plan” — a separate document, not yet written, that the operator would produce on its own.

Asked what it would take to protect people who cannot evacuate themselves if an accident occurred, Faraclas said his department would coordinate with the facility’s managers at the time. “No such conversation has taken place at this time,” he wrote. He said the department is responsible for emergency planning in the area and that the work is “ongoing.”

A chemical release could also draw a federal response through Regional Response Team 9, a multiagency coordination group co-chaired by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard that supports preparedness and response to oil and hazardous-substance spills on land in Arizona, California and Nevada. But the local agency with immediate responsibility for the corridor, Surprise Fire-Medical, said no such conversation has taken place.

Asked about the gap the fire marshal described, a DHS spokesperson did not address the specific questions. The spokesperson said the agency was reviewing its policies and pointed to the homeland security secretary’s pledge to “work with community leaders” and “be good partners.”

The spokesperson then attacked critics of the project. “Let’s be honest about this. This isn’t about the environment,” the spokesperson said. “It’s about trying to stop President Trump from making America safe again.” Critics, the spokesperson added, were “feigning concern” because they wanted immigrants in the country illegally “to stay forever and vote here.”

On the question of environmental review, the spokesperson said ICE had “carefully evaluated” the site before buying it to limit harm to “protected species, sensitive natural resources, and valued cultural resources.” The statement did not mention Rinchem, the schools within the modeled hazard zone, Surprise Fire-Medical or the detained population that would be unable to leave on its own.

GardaWorld referred all questions to DHS. Rinchem did not respond to an emailed list of questions from Project Salt Box.

The federal government bought the 418,000-square-foot warehouse on Jan. 23 for $70 million in cash, according to county property records, and later awarded GardaWorld a contract worth $313 million to convert and operate it — a deal that could exceed $700 million if extended through 2029, Project Salt Box previously reported. The Surprise warehouse is one of 11 that ICE has bought around the country as it builds a new network of detention sites, purchases Project Salt Box has tracked since January.

The Surprise project is part of a nationwide warehouse detention expansion that has drawn legal challenges in Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan, Arizona and Social Circle, Ga. State and local officials have argued that DHS moved ahead without completing the environmental review required under federal law. In Maryland, a federal judge halted one warehouse conversion in April; at a hearing, the judge asked whether the government’s review could pass “the laugh test.” DHS has said in court that it conducted the review the law required. Work on the Surprise contract was stopped under federal orders the same month.

Unlike the city of Romulus, Mich., which joined the Michigan attorney general in suing the Trump administration over a proposed detention site there, the city of Surprise has not joined its state’s lawsuit. When the purchase became public in late January, the city said it had not been told about the sale or the building’s intended use. It has since negotiated a $300,000 annual payment from DHS and a promise to cover the cost of police, fire and medical response — an arrangement whose details, as of late spring, had not been settled.

The only agency with the authority to respond to a chemical emergency on West Sweetwater Avenue is the Surprise Fire-Medical Department. It has not been asked to plan for the people who would soon be held across the street from the chemicals.

“Our department would work in conjunction with their facility managers if such an accident were to occur,” Faraclas wrote. “No such conversation has taken place at this time.”