U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to build a for-profit prison in Evanston, Wyo. A grassroots group, the Utah Coalition to #KeepFamiliesTogether, has been started to work in conjunction with WyoSayNo, a grassroots coalition in Wyoming, in an effort to stop it.

The effort is involving folks across Utah and Wyoming, from Latter-day Saint church members and Catholic priests to youth climate organizers and concerned parents.

Specifically, the UCKFT is demanding the Salt Lake City (Utah) ICE office withdraw its contract and cancel its plans to build a prison. In addition, WSN is mobilizing communities and putting pressure on elected officials to stop the immigration prison, which could increase by 200% deportations of immigrants who call Salt Lake home.

Rev. Monica Dobbins is an organizer for the Utah Coalition to #KeepFamiliesTogether, which is seeking with WyoSayNo to prevent a for-profit ICE prison in Evanston, Wyo. (photo credit: First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City)

“This isn’t a somewhere else problem — we’re talking about our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends and community members,” said Rev. Monica Dobbins, a UCKFT co-organizer. “I don’t want to live in a community where we turn our backs on our neighbors, no matter where they come from, how they worship, whom they love, or how they got here.”

In the fall, the Salt Lake City ICE field office put out a request for proposals to contract a for-profit prison company to build and run a 1000-bed immigration prison within a 90-mile radius of Salt Lake City. In November, CoreCivic became the front-runner to receive the contract and Evanston, Wyo. became the target site. Currently, immigrants detained by ICE are taken to a facility in Aurora, Colo. or Henderson, Nev. — six to eight hours away. With a closer facility, ICE raids and arrests in Salt Lake communities could dramatically increase.

UCKFT co-organizer Francisco Meza said the organization “pretty much came together as an amalgamation of non-profits” through The Solidarity Network.

UCKFT has been going for four to five months as of Feb. 29, Meza said.

Meza said “of course” when asked if UCKFT is involving attorneys.

“The Utah ACLU came into contact with the Wyoming ACLU,” Meza said.

Besides Meza and Dobbins, other UCKFT organizers include Eliza Van Dyke, Esther Merono, Brooke Larsen, Ryan Beam, Marc and Marilee Coles-Ritchie, Kristin Knippenberg and Dobbins. A WSN organizer at a Feb. 29 event, which raised awareness of the campaign to stop the new prison, was Lupita Palma.

The event “Creating Beloved Community: An Evening of Stories & Reflection” was put on by the Utah Coalition to #KeepFamiliesTogether as part of a grassroots initiative with WyoSayNo to oppose a for-profit ICE prison being built in Wyoming. (photo credit: Utah Coalition to #KeepFamiliesTogether)

The event, “Creating Beloved Community: An Evening of Stories & Reflection,” also built community through song, interfaith prayer, personal story, collective action, and imaginative thinking about alternative futures for justice and liberation. Speakers from impacted communities who made connections between migrant justice and other local struggles for justice and liberation, such as education, poverty, environmental justice, and missing and murdered indigenous women.

Margarita Santini shared her family’s immigration story at the UCKFT-organized event. “My mom and dad immigrated to this country back in 1969, and I can’t imagine what it was like to leave everything that you knew and move to a foreign country in search of a better life,” she said. “The proposed immigration prison has no place in the world we want for ourselves and should be stopped.”

“I came here today because as a former officer at CoreCivic-run prison in rural Tennessee, I don’t want to see what happened in that community happen in another community,” Ashley Dixon said. “While working as an officer, I oversaw 120 to 240 prisoners by myself on a daily basis while working 12 to 16-hour shifts. I witnessed two deaths of prisoners due to medical neglect and several of my co-workers attacked. Everyone who comes in contact with CoreCivic’s private prisons comes out worse, not better, as a result.”

Fiercer action from ICE came as a directive from Donald Trump, the United States’ president.