On September 1, 1998, the gathering of the Salt Lake City Council began as most municipal legislative meetings do. Officials recited the Pledge of Allegiance. They ticked through a litany of appointments and reappointments. They sorted through the business of little fiefdoms like the Golf Enterprise Fund Advisory Board.
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.
According to the meeting minutes, Ortega told the council that he had heard of 287(g), which was enacted as part of sweeping immigration restrictions signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, from Janet Reno, the attorney general at the time, at a law enforcement conference the year before. Arguing that the program would help Salt Lake combat crime, Ortega rattled off statistics in which the undocumented were perpetrators or victims. His testimony was followed by that of the U.S. attorney for Utah, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and an INS agent, all of whom laid out the same case: The MOU would help them target hardened criminal immigrants. On the opposing side, elected and appointed officials and representatives from advocacy groups argued that it would be impossible to run the program without violating the rights of immigrant communities.
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.”
Although Salt Lake City was the first city in the nation to consider such a program, it was not the last. Today, dozens of local law enforcement agencies across the country have implemented similar agreements, including at least 11—eight this year—in Utah alone. Salt Lake City and the surrounding county, however, never reversed their position.
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.
This unusual sequence of events—a hometown senator bringing forth an immigration enforcement provision that is defeated so roundly it kills the program for years—is emblematic of the contradictions of Salt Lake’s unique, even bizarre, political culture around immigration. 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 immigration. This attitude developed largely on its own, parallel to a mainstream conservative approach that has diverged toward a totalizing xenophobic revulsion, first focused on the undocumented and eventually spreading to foreign students, workers, and humanitarian 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?
Luz Escamilla, a Democratic state senator who represents bits of Salt Lake City and parts west, resisted the idea that Utah’s treatment of immigrants would fundamentally change. “It’s getting more difficult and it’s getting more painful,” she told me, “but I still believe people are going to do the right thing in Utah. I mean, I have to believe that.”
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.
Their presence in the city is palpable. More than 6,800 entrepreneurs with immigrant backgrounds live there, said Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake City’s Democratic mayor. “The spending power of immigrants and refugees in Salt Lake City contributed $3.4 billion to our local economy and paid $1.1 billion in taxes,” she said. “So they’re not only a key part of our identity and cultural core as a community, but incredible economic contributors as well.” Mendenhall touted initiatives like the Know Your Neighbor program, which pairs refugees with local volunteers to help them navigate job applications, public transit, and other aspects of daily life.
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.
Indeed, private refugee resettlement groups that fight tooth and nail in other conservative states have cordial, even friendly relationships with Utah’s GOP legislative supermajorities. “It’s like this little bubble where refugee resettlement is still viewed as a very positive thing,” said Danny Beus, executive director of the Utah office of the International Rescue Committee, or IRC. The bill to create that state resettlement office, for example, passed in the House with 67 votes in a 75-member chamber with a 61-seat Republican supermajority.
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.
During his time in the legislature, Johnson pushed through legislation like HCR 22, a resolution that celebrated “multilingual and multicultural families” and encouraged the state to expand engagement toward them. It overwhelmingly passed both houses.
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.
The Mormons have come far from their days as a ragtag group of religious exiles. The contemporary administrative offices of the LDS church, towering 28 stories, with carved globe motifs on its facades and a semicircle of international flags ringing its internal courtyard, look more like a department of the United Nations than a church office. Flags are visible throughout the grounds of the church’s sprawling downtown complex, and pinned to the clothing of the sister missionaries who roam Temple Square and the tabernacle in pairs, adjacent to their name tags and depicting their countries of origin.
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.”)
The awareness that its founders were refugees permeates the church and the broader culture, though nowadays the refugees look different. Beus, the resettlement executive, said that, in recent years, large numbers from Latin America had arrived in Salt Lake, many with some connection to the place. The group does a lot of family reunification, he explained, and works with many Congolese, Sudanese, and Afghan arrivals. The U.N. estimates that there are 65,000 refugees in the state, mostly around Salt Lake. These numbers don’t quite stack up to states like Texas or California, which received 20,000-plus in the last few years alone, but on a per-capita basis, Utah sits well above them.
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.
One of the IRC members, Maryam, gave me a tour of the farm, whose location has a straight-shot view toward the mountains, giving it an otherworldly feel. (Her name has been changed to respect the IRC’s protocols about cooperating with news organizations.) Refugees pushed a wheelbarrow laden with vegetables out through the wire gateway as Maryam showed me around. A refugee herself, she grew up in Ethiopia before arriving in Salt Lake about a decade ago. She marveled at how open-minded and welcoming she’d found people in the city, and its serenity, though that took a little more getting used to. “For me, quite used to mean danger. Now, quiet is safety.”
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.
Her group has worked on recredentialing of people with technical skills, offering English language instruction, and supporting new arrivals’ small businesses. Selling support for programs such as this to a supermajority of Republican state legislators requires, as Mayor Mendenhall put it, letting “the dollars speak for themselves.” The ski and mining industries, and research universities, among others, rely on a supply of international talent. Where other conservative political cultures are much more uncomfortable with recognizing the role of immigration in their own economic stability—see the unfolding economic calamity of Florida’s recent immigration enforcement measures—Utah’s seems a bit more pragmatic.
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.
That law, dubbed the “show me your papers” law, required police to demand immigration paperwork from anyone they detained if they suspected that person was in the country illegally; made it a state-level crime to not have proof of status and work without authorization; and allowed local police to arrest people for suspected immigration violations. It was the first time since the late nineteenth century that a state had moved to itself enforce immigration provisions, over a hundred years since the Supreme Court had declared this the exclusive power of the federal government. By the time SCOTUS once again struck down key parts of the law in 2012, SB 1070 had helped galvanize a new wave of immigration advocacy and Latino political involvement in the state and around the country.
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.
In the end, the bills ended up more as artifacts of that moment of political maneuvering than practical policy. Utah never received the federal waivers it needed to actually implement the guest worker program, and the enforcement law was blocked by a federal judge almost instantly. (A judge later upheld a much more limited version of the law’s provisions.) The public and political backlash was acute enough that Stephen Sandstrom, the state representative who’d sponsored and aggressively whipped up votes for the latter bill, had publicly disavowed it by March 2013. As he told The Salt Lake Tribune, “At this point I think it would be best for this country and the state to have [the judge] go ahead and overturn it.”
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.”
In recalling how the document came together, Herbert now frames it as just a basic statement of principles rooted at least partly in faith. “The compact that we worked on was a kind of a recognition of the humanity of these people,” he said. “They’re looking for a better life for themselves, for their family, and we’ve had people looking to come to America since its inception and, interestingly enough, they didn’t come for any kind of a guarantee. They still don’t come for guarantees.” Almost a decade after the compact, when Trump issued an executive order purporting to allow governors to refuse refugee resettlements in their states, Herbert made national headlines for asking Trump to resettle more in Utah.
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.
Former state Representative Carl Wimmer (who founded his own ministry) wrote in a Mormon-critical blog at the time that “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just passed a pro-LGBT piece of legislation in Utah.” He alleged that it was active in immigration issues as well; on the eve of the passage of the guest worker effort in 2011, a younger Mormon colleague had told him about “an intense, closed-door meeting with select members of House leadership and the LDS Church lobbyists who made it abundantly clear that when HB116 came up for a vote, he was to support the bill, period.” (The church did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)
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.
Some fretted that, like a closed ecosystem, Utah’s approach had mainly thrived in isolation, away from the eyes and wandering whims of the people now setting the agenda for the contemporary federal government—Fox News and the Laura Loomers of the world. It’s already attracted some attention from the more wonkish anti-immigrant types, with the extremist think tank Center for Immigration Studies mewling in 2023 that it was “the reddest (and stealthiest) sanctuary state” and advocating for asylum-seekers to be bused there, just as they were to states like New York (a subheading in that post: “the Utah Way exposed”).
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.”
At a Home Depot parking lot in West Valley, a group of laborers from El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico were chipper as they waited between jobs, but there was also nervous chatter about a federal raid that had taken place days earlier at another nearby Home Depot, a raid some of them had witnessed. Like raids elsewhere, it appeared to pull in agents from multiple federal agencies in a sudden show of force against a group that seemed to have been picked at random.
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.
Standing in the Home Depot lot, Alonso saw his situation as something of a full circle. He’s from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, where just about 150 years ago a group of Mormons escaping U.S. restrictions on polygamous marriage established colonies. Now he’s here on their turf, trying to make a living. He said he’s been in the United States 21 years, the last two in Salt Lake, where he’s found welcome among the contemporary Mormons, though he is not interested in joining the church himself. Lately, however, times have gotten tougher, not just with news of the raid but with a clientele that’s grown more comfortable stiffing them. “We’re seeing hostility from the bosses,” especially once jobs are completed, he said in Spanish. “They’ll say, ‘There’s no money for that, and don’t complain or we’ll call la migra.’”
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.
Mar, raised Mormon themself, is skeptical of the church’s fundamental commitment to immigration if it ever came to really facing off against the militarized vanguard of Trump’s enforcement regime, and they’re not the only one. Weier, the Lutheran pastor and progressive organizer, views her Mormon counterparts and the broader Salt Lake power centers as on board mainly insofar as people can be fully assimilated. “While they may not make anti-immigrant laws, per se, they do everything they can to make sure nobody gets helped that shouldn’t be,” she said. Indeed, Herbert, the former governor, had during our conversation repeatedly stressed the distinction between refugees and other immigrants who hadn’t come the “right way,” and who should be treated with humanity but not the same helping hand.
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.
Pesqueira distilled something I heard from more than one person: “A lot of people are really nice here in Salt Lake,” but there’s something roiling under the smile. “They don’t accept you.” In April, the Mormon church’s First Presidency issued a letter to leadership reminding them not to ask members about their immigration status and reiterating tenets of loving “all God’s children” and keeping families together. But that message was tempered by another precept that Mar, the activist, had also mentioned: to “obey and honor the law.”
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?
It’s difficult now to even conceptualize the national Republican Party cleansing itself of its decades-old fixation on demographic replacement that Trump, like a potent solvent, has wiped clean of pretense and left in its pure, racist essence. That pressure is clearly already coming down to bear in Salt Lake and Utah, a state that last voted for a Democratic president over 60 years ago.
“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.
Yet the Utahns also seem stubborn and reflexively suspicious of an overbearing White House. Nationally, as the sheer breadth of Trump and Miller’s designs have come into focus, immigration has been enjoying a resurgence of public support. In 2034, just as they were in 2002, the eyes of the world will once again fall on Salt Lake, when it again hosts the Olympics. Maybe, just maybe, the barbarous vision of the Great Replacement fanatics will peter out, suffocated by its own economic and cultural rot. Something has to come next. Not everywhere is going to come around to a New York vision—the proudly distinct cultures celebrated by a series of parades for national and ethnic groups, expansive government, and explicit sanctuary protections—but could they come around to the Utah Way?
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.
The swap meet was launched around 2001 by María Cruz Medina Luna and her then-husband, who had first come to Salt Lake to help his cousin run a storefront restaurant. The couple, originally from Mexico, had spent about two decades in San Diego before deciding to relocate to Salt Lake to launch the business, a model that had been a staple in Mexico and San Diego but they believed to be sorely missing in their new home. It was not easy, especially at first, when Medina said there was a much less developed Latino diaspora in the area, and they suffered from discrimination and racism. “They’d send the cops here, they would violate our rights,” she recalled, adding that the police would come with dogs and insinuate that they were engaged in drugs or money laundering. “They just couldn’t believe that us as Hispanics had a business that was so big.”
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.”
