A large retinue of residents waited in the wings, but not for this. They had come to speak on what everyone knew would be the big-ticket item of the evening, which the council ominously referred to as the “MOU,” or memorandum of understanding. Championed by the city’s controversial police chief, Ruben Ortega, it would enter Salt Lake into the newly created federal 287(g) program, deputizing some local law enforcement officers to, among other things, check the immigration status of people in custody and temporarily hold them for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, the precursor to modern-day Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the end, after the testimony of dozens of locals mostly against the MOU, the council narrowly defeated the measure. Deeda Seed, who had moved to Salt Lake from Chicago at the age of 18 and was shocked by its lack of diversity, was among the “no” votes on the seven-member council. The city’s demographics had changed over the decade and a half since she first arrived, and the stakes of the vote were acutely apparent to her and her colleagues. “It was close,” Seed recalled. “It was emotional. There was a lot of opposition to it. There wasn’t that much support.”
The city’s refusal to adopt the MOU is all the more striking because Utah’s own Senator Orrin Hatch pushed for it in the first place, according to Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the INS at the time. “Senator Hatch quite immediately … said, ‘We want to have this 287(g) authority. How do we proceed?’” she recalled. The defeat in Salt Lake left the program deflated, even dormant; for years, few cities sought similar agreements, until 9/11 renewed interest.
In Salt Lake City, a mix of genuine ideological affinity for the idea of the refugee, fostered by the Mormon church, and a cultural tendency toward minding one’s business has engendered a sort of recalcitrant support for immigrants.In 2025, as Donald Trump makes antipathy for immigrants a centerpiece of his broader authoritarian efforts, Utah’s homegrown identity is under threat. In March, state lawmakers passed a bill making it easier to deport people convicted of misdemeanors. There are reportedly plans in the works to build or convert a facility to hold thousands of ICE detainees, perhaps at Hill Air Force Base, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake. There are the inevitable questions about whether and when federal forces will crack down on the area, and how it will react. And there are disagreements among the state’s politicians about the appropriate response. Will Salt Lake’s peculiar approach snap under these tensions? Or, if it holds, could it embody a wholly separate conservative vision of immigration, stubbornly and notably inimical to Trump’s in a state he won by over 20 points in the 2024 election?
When a reasonably informed person thinks of immigration hubs nationwide, first on the mind will be New York City, Chicago, parts of Florida and California, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, and so on. Unlikely to come to mind is Utah and its Salt Lake metro area, a southwestern enclave associated mainly with its striking landscapes and the Mormon religion. Yet Salt Lake City is around 15 percent foreign-born, roughly on par with Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Neighboring West Valley City—just west of Salt Lake City proper, within a metro area that also includes communities like West Jordan and Oquirrh—sits at around 22 percent. Immigrants, including contingents from Latin America, Asia, and, increasingly, Africa, have been a consistent part of Salt Lake over the past century.
These are services often funded by the federal government, but Utahns pride themselves on going above and beyond, especially as the federal government under Trump has pulled back. The state has its own refugee resettlement program, with a focus on “integration and self-sufficiency,” which may as well be the state motto. These efforts don’t necessarily stand out in comparison to those of other states, but they’re notable when you consider how relatively uncontroversial they are in a state that Trump crushed the last three elections running.
Will Salt Lake’s peculiar approach snap under the pressures of the second Trump regime? Or, if it holds, could it embody a wholly separate conservative vision of immigration, stubbornly and notably inimical to Trump’s?
Former state Representative Dan Johnson—a Republican lawmaker who went straight from the statehouse to leading the Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection, an immigration services nonprofit—embodies this attitude. “This idea of wanting to help people, lift people up, help them be able to make their own way, that is what you would listen to our governor or other people say is the Utah Way,” he said. This “Utah Way”—a spirit of consensus and cooperation mixed with a belief in the contributions of the individual—was raised constantly throughout my travels in Salt Lake and my conversations with its denizens. Like New Hampshire’s “Live free or die” motto or Texas’s “Lone Star” ethos, the moniker seems to be a point of pride and a legitimate lodestar, anchoring Utahns’ approach to welcoming the stranger.
To understand this odd consensus, you have to jump back over a century and a half, to the 1847 arrival of Brigham Young, who descended through the mountains surrounding Salt Lake with his band of Mormon exiles to set down roots for what would become the global Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The passage Young and his followers took—in what they consider their own escape from persecution in the United States to a free territory then claimed by Mexico—is now known as Emigration Canyon.
Some of these young women—part of a corps of thousands of young Mormons on assignment around the world, including the church’s own headquarters—sport U.S. flags, but on a recent weekday evening most did not, instead wearing flags from Malaysia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea, among others. As these international arrivals converge on Salt Lake, thousands of homegrown Mormons fan out across the globe to the church’s 450-odd missions abroad, getting an early-life crash course in internationalism. (Sometimes they get a very intimate look; as one chatty Uber driver explained to me, “They go off and they get married.”)
That number is stagnating, though, as the Trump administration has put the nation’s entire refugee infrastructure on ice; since Trump took office, he has reserved the resettlement program almost exclusively for small numbers of white South Africans, forcing resettlement organizations to focus on supporting refugees who have already arrived. In keeping with the state’s frontier ethos, the emphasis is on self-sufficiency. In West Valley, the IRC has leased land for one of various community farms and gardens where refugees can grow produce, some of which is sold at farmers markets the organization facilitates.
While refugees are some of the most visible immigrant populations in the area, they’re not the only demographic. The state has some 140,000 undocumented people, about half of them from Mexico, and thousands more work and student visa holders, among other statuses. Ze Min Xiao, the CEO of the Center for Economic Opportunity and Belonging, suggested that Utah’s growing population and the city’s low unemployment rate made it particularly open to embracing the talent in its newer populations.
These ingredients—the international reach and refugee identity of the Mormon church, local labor needs, and a frontier mindset that holds that each person should have a chance to make their own way—have coalesced into Utah’s political culture around immigration under the heat of anti-immigrant trends in other conservative states. If the 1998 consideration of the 287(g) proposal was one shot across the bow, the passage of the now-infamous SB 1070 in 2010 in neighboring Arizona was a much more acute test of where the state was going to stand.
In Salt Lake City, the questions raised by SB 1070 quickly went from abstract to very concrete, as state officials, the business community, and civic groups considered how Utah would contend with the practicalities so uncomfortably shunted to the forefront by their neighbors in Phoenix. In the end, they settled on a sort of hybrid approach. The Republican governor, Gary Herbert, signed a package of four bills, including one that would create an innovative guest worker program to allow the state to issue work authorization to people without status, and another that would establish a milder version of “show me your papers,” allowing police to investigate immigration status.
This period also produced the Utah Compact, a more focused manifestation of the Utah Way, often presented to me as the fundamental document of the state’s immigration approach. First developed by the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, endorsed by civic and religious groups including the Mormon church, and presented by Herbert in late 2010, it is not what you would expect to see trotted out by the Republican governor of a cherry-red state in the immediate aftermath of that year’s Tea Party–inflected GOP wave election. Titled in full the “Utah Compact on Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” it pledges, among other things, to “invest our time and resources to create greater opportunity for people of color.”
While the Mormon church tries to keep some public distance between itself and the running of Utah’s government, its cultural influence inevitably translates to political influence. As of 2021, almost 90 percent of state legislators were members of the church, as were all Congress members and statewide elected officials. Escamilla is a member of the church; Herbert served a two-year mission before attending Brigham Young University. In one example of the church’s sway, legislative efforts to protect LGBTQ+ populations from discrimination failed until the Latter-day Saints suddenly threw its support behind it in 2015, dismaying some right-wing politicians.
Of course, the Utah Way is an ideal overlaid on the grubby confines of reality, one in which anti-immigration sadism has become unremarkable among large swaths of the political party that, despite its local distinctions, dominates Utah politics, emanating directly from its apex of Trump and viziers like Stephen Miller. As much as a certain gruff acceptance of immigrants has been a part of Utah’s historical self-image, that outside pressure seeps in. While many people were eager to talk to me about Salt Lake’s culture of immigration, others seemed uneasy hearing from me, and begged me not to mention their houses of worship or businesses in print.
Policymakers, activists, business leaders, and immigrants themselves are in a tense wait-and-see posture, eyeing the gathering storm. “I read about it every day in other cities, in Chicago, this week in particular, in Los Angeles, and I think every mayor of a city with diverse populations is wondering what’s on the horizon,” said Mendenhall, the Salt Lake mayor. “I think that most mayors try to keep their hand off the hot federal stove as much as possible, because our job is to provide the basic services.”
The raid was especially notable because it was rare. Although the norm in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, they have not really been happening in the immigrant-heavy Salt Lake metro area, and no one is sure why. Perhaps it’s just that, as the Reverend Brigette Weier of the St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in nearby Taylorsville speculated, “Salt Lake isn’t blue enough of a city…. It’s not worth the political pushback right now.” Yet no one, from legislators to the mayor to the activists, seemed to have a concrete sense why Utah has been spared, beyond speculations that Trump and his lieutenants are busy going after the more politically oppositional places first.
On a Saturday morning near the same spot, Mar, a twentysomething organizer who grew up near the Salt Lake metro area, offered the workers coffee and a reassuring presence, which several workers credited with reducing some of the police harassment they’d previously faced. Mar worried that the county lacked the longtime organizational and response mechanisms that had gone into overdrive in the cities where Trump had already aggressively deployed federal forces. “We haven’t had that long history of ICE presence that they’ve had in San Diego and L.A.,” they pointed out. “They have their rapid response lines and networks, and we don’t have that.” They worried that the relative calm might already be illusory, and that there were ICE preparations and operations that the community just wasn’t picking up on.
Some are using the lull to make dire decisions. Kim Pesqueira was born and raised in the Salt Lake area, where the 30-year-old now works as a medical assistant at a clinic that treats low-income Utahns. “A lot of our patients have left; they can’t be here anymore,” she said. “We don’t see them anymore in the clinic.” Earlier this year, the issue hit her own home, when Pesqueira’s mother, who had arrived decades prior from Mexico, opted to leave the country. “She didn’t want to get in a car accident or have something happen to her and get deported,” she said, her voice breaking.
This tension flows into a fundamental question: Can Utah’s immigration-friendly conservative blend—forged from the Mormon’s foundational journey, tempered by the state’s individualistic impulses and an increasing tension with national conservatism, and complicated by inconsistency and hypocrisy—survive the current moment? It has not yet faced a test at the level and magnitude of places like L.A. and Chicago, but if the full force of Stephen Miller’s gaze and Gregory Bovino’s Border Patrol shock troops comes to town, will Utah be able to keep its identity? Could it even, in some perfect blend of conditions, be exported as a partial antidote to countervailing trends taking hold in D.C. and faraway European capitals?
“When I stepped away from the legislature, it was at a time when I think there were, in both the House and the Senate, really, really good people, and they were good about listening to both sides of the story,” said Johnson, the former legislator and nonprofit executive. But that was before Trump took office again.
For now, the life that immigrants have carved out for themselves goes on in the valley. Eleven miles southwest of Temple Square sits the Azteca Indoor Bazaar, a monument of a different kind that dominates an entire cavernous warehouse in West Valley City. Inside are nearly 60 businesses, including salons, a supermarket stocked with hard-to-find Mexican spices, and a food court.
Nonetheless, bit by bit, year by year, they built up the bazaar, through word of mouth, events, and Spanish-language marketing. Sometimes they’d set up stands and businesses in the bazaar themselves and then find renters. “We didn’t always have many employees, and we’d be running the business end to end ourselves,” Medina said. It’s been successful enough that she has been thinking of launching another, in Memphis, but the specter of the immigration crackdown has frozen those plans and made the existing Salt Lake patronage skittish.
She talks about this with a characteristic kind of immigrant stoicism. “We have to survive this, we have to hold on,” she said. “If they’ve accepted us, if they haven’t accepted us, it doesn’t matter. We’ve made our way.”
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