Salt Lake County’s top prosecutor worries that a jammed jail could face an unpopular choice: Let an assault suspect go free in order to keep an accused shoplifter locked up.
District Attorney Sim Gill warns that could be the result under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and Utah lawmakers’ criminal justice proposals.
Since the Republican president took office, state lawmakers have introduced bills that aim to force the detention of more immigrants lacking permanent legal status in Utah’s jails and limit Salt Lake County’s ability to make its own decisions about whom to release and when.
Neither of these new measures from the GOP-dominated Legislature, Gill noted, provides additional resources to house the influx of inmates they are likely to create.
“So we will either have to release them,” the Democratic district attorney said, “or we’ll have to send them to other county jails.”
The Salt Lake County jail is already nearly full. According to data as of Friday, the facility was operating at 93% of its operating capacity of 2,101 beds.
The lockup has grappled with overcrowding well before Trump’s return to office. In 2024, Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Matt Dumont reported last month, 4,000 inmates were freed early to make room in the facility.
Officials have long been concerned about capacity issues within the jail system. The county jail was last expanded in 2001, but since then, the county has experienced a 30% surge in population.
County leaders set out to increase bed space with a bond measure last year that would have shuttered the Oxbow Jail while expanding the main jail. Voters rejected the $507 million proposal at the ballot box.
Federal immigration policies shifting
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake County jail on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025.
When he kicked off his second term in the White House last month, Trump issued several executive orders that intensified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations throughout the country.
The GOP-led Congress then quickly passed the Laken Riley Act, requiring officials to detain immigrants arrested for crimes like shoplifting or assault.
These new measures mean more immigrants lacking permanent legal status will go to Salt Lake County’s main jail. As of Friday, the facility housed 24 federal immigration detainees.
Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera, who is a Democrat, said officials “just don’t know what the impact’s going to be” on jail space due to the new enforcement efforts.
“We talked to ICE and let them know that we are overcrowded at our jail,” Rivera added, “and there’s some real impacts to the jail if they were to bring lots of people.”
The county sets aside 10 beds for ICE detainees, but the number of undocumented immigrants in the jail system can be higher. If the number of detainees brought in by ICE rises significantly, Gill said, something would need to happen to make room for them.
“My charge to my prosecutors constantly is violent offenders, people who are a risk to our community, those are the people we want to hold,” he said. “When we run out of bed space for all these other desires, something’s going to have to give.”
Pressure from Capitol Hill
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Friday, Jan. 31, 2025.
This session, Utah lawmakers introduced bills that would funnel more inmates into Salt Lake County’s system.
One of them, HB226, would force courts to consider immigrants lacking permanent status a flight risk when determining if they should be let go on pretrial release when charged with a crime. This means undocumented immigrants accused of lower-level crimes would almost certainly be forced to stay in jail before their trials.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Riverton, would also change Utah law to allow the state to hold people who have been convicted of certain misdemeanors just long enough to meet the ICE requirement for deportation.
Gill characterized the measure as creating a goal to hold lower-level offenders, rather than determining pretrial releases based on the risk someone may pose to the community.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “I’m a prosecutor who’s trying to actually hold the most violent offenders here.”
Another jail-related bill has the district attorney’s attention: HB312, sponsored by Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield. The Salt Lake County Council has already come out against the bill because it limits the sheriff’s ability to administer overcrowding releases.
“My concern is that we are not being mindful of the cost,” Gill said, “what systemic impact this is going to make for limited resources.”
Lisonbee has argued that the county’s current approach to overcrowding already puts violent offenders back on the streets. At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, she presented Salt Lake County jail data that showed about 4,000 inmates were released in 2023 due to overcrowding, including 279 who were charged with violent misdemeanors such as assault and 73 who were charged for violent felonies.
Gill said an influx of immigration detainees might take beds away from inmates his prosecutors think are too dangerous for release. Of the nearly 2,000 individuals currently in the county’s jail system, Gill’s office has determined nearly 60% of them pose a risk to the community and should not be released before trial. Another roughly 25% of the inmates are serving sentences in jail instead of prison.
“How do I keep my community safe when I have all these different pieces of legislation, from the national level to the local level, which is demonizing just illegal status and then trying to come up with — and I get it — with enforcement mechanisms to hold them, detain them, punish them, et cetera,” Gill said. “But nobody’s paying attention to where we’re going to do this. What is going to be the cost?”
County could raise sales tax
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Oxbow Jail on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025.
To ease jail overcrowding, the County Council is weighing a 0.2-percentage-point sales tax increase that would, in part, funnel about $19 million a year into the jail system.
If the tax gets the final nod, about $6.4 million would be allocated toward adding 248 beds to the county’s jail system, including 184 at Oxbow and 64 at the main jail. Other money would be used for upgrades and other criminal justice programs.
“Our communities are saying, ‘You need to do something to keep these folks in jail,’ but when you don’t have enough space to keep individuals — even the violent offenders, we’re struggling in that sense,” Rivera, the sheriff, said during last week’s council meeting. “... We need to do something now.”
The proposed tax hike passed 7-2 during its first reading last week.
Before casting their initial votes, council members expressed frustration with lawmakers for putting the county in a position to raise taxes.
“The pressure put on us from the state Legislature and leadership there to fix this this minute and not giving us a chance, or a couple years, to figure this out, and even time to meet on it, it’s not very fair, to be honest,” Republican council member Laurie Stringham said. “So we’re going to fix it. But this is the only mechanism, really, we have to fix it at this moment, and they’ve not given us time to fix it otherwise.”
The council plans to cast a final vote Tuesday. Residents can weigh in on the proposed tax during the meeting’s public comment period, which begins at 3 p.m.
