Utah News

Utah is suffering from such dry conditions that a group of kids with a lighter and a squirrel managed to start separate brush fires within hours, according to local media reports.

The ongoing severe drought in Utah has created the perfect conditions for destructive fires, prompting officials to warn that this year’s fire season could be particularly severe. Those concerns were highlighted Tuesday after firefighters battled two separate blazes in northern Utah.

A squirrel tangled in a power line managed to spark a half-acre brush fire Tuesday morning in Layton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, according to local outlet FOX 13. Later that day, a group of children reportedly started a brush fire that burned an acre in Saratoga Springs, a city on the northwestern shore of Utah Lake. Media reports indicated they were playing with matches, but the Saratoga Springs Fire Department later confirmed it was a lighter.

Both fires were extinguished, and it appears no one was injured, according to FOX 13. The Independent has requested more information from fire officials in Layton and Saratoga Springs.

This comes as firefighters battle multiple major blazes throughout the state.

The South Mountain Fire in northwestern Utah has burned through more than 1,800 acres and was at 40 percent containment as of Wednesday morning. The Tower Fire, which is burning near the small town of Scipio in central Utah, is currently 34 percent contained after spreading to more than 1,300 acres.

Utah fire officials have warned the ongoing drought, combined with warmer temperatures and low snowfall earlier this year, led to lots of dry vegetation that could serve as fuel for destructive fires.

“This year’s conditions, even more than recent years, are raising concern,” Salt Lake City Fire Chief Karl Lieb said at a press conference last month.

“If we all take this seriously now, our agencies and the public together, we can reduce the number of fires, limit how fast they spread, and better protect the communities we all care about,” Unified Fire Chief Dominic Burchett added.

Officials are asking residents to take steps to prevent wildfires, such as refraining from starting campfires on windy days and exercising caution when shooting outdoors.

“We identify target shooting as one of the behaviors that contribute to human-caused wildfires in the state,” a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and Estate Lands told ABC 4 this week.

Last year, fires burned more than 165,000 acres in Utah, which cost the state more than $191 million, according to KSL News. Still, firefighters managed to keep 92 percent of those fires under 10 acres.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity has promised a bloodbath for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. To head off that debacle, party leaders in red states have set off an arms race of political gerrymandering. They’ve made an unprecedented move to redistrict their states before the next census to create new, safe GOP districts that might allow the party to preserve its control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Blue states like California have responded in kind.

Amid that political tug-of-war, one red state will be holding its first non-gerrymandered congressional election of the 21^st century: Utah, which Donald Trump won in 2024 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

The change has been a long time in the making. Voters first approved Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative in 2018. But Republicans in the state legislature, with support from the governor, have gone to extreme lengths to prevent it from going into effect. After eight years of bitter legal battles, Utah courts finally forced the state to follow the law and adopt fair voting districts that will be in effect for the first time this year. As a result, a Democrat has a real shot at winning one of the state’s four congressional seats—an outcome that could help swing control of Congress in November.

The mere possibility of Utah voters sending a single Democrat to Congress has sparked a fierce and desperately devious backlash from state Republicans hell-bent on making sure such an outcome never happens again. Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, says, “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

Despite its reputation as a hard-core conservative state, Utah has sent several Democrats to Congress in the past. In 1992, the state even elected a Democratic woman, Karen Shepherd, who served a single term before she was ousted two years later by the scandal-plagued Enid Waldholtz.

Back then, the state had only three congressional districts, and one of them was mostly limited to Salt Lake City and its suburbs, the state’s largest population center. In 2000, that district elected Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog Democrat whose father, Scott Matheson, was the last Utah Democrat elected to serve as governor in 1980.

But as the GOP nationally grew more radical, Utah Republicans who couldn’t beat Matheson at the ballot box tried to redistrict him out of office. In 2002, they changed his district boundaries to break up Salt Lake City and staple it to rural areas like Vernal or the fast-growing conservative area in Southern Utah, eight hours away.

Much to their chagrin, Matheson continued to win elections, even after the legislature split Salt Lake County into four different districts in 2010. In 2014, he gave up and retired after 14 years. But his district remained somewhat competitive. The late Republican Mia Love won the seat that year but lost it in 2018 to former Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams, who served one term before losing to former NFL player and Fox News commentator Burgess Owens in 2020. In 2020, the state legislature redrew the maps again to ensure that no Democrat could ever be elected to Congress.

The Utah state legislature has been able to do this because Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority, even though the state’s demographics have changed dramatically. The legislature is also more than 80 percent male, nearly 90 percent Mormon, and 98 percent white. Yet Utah is now about 16 percent Latino, only about 60 percent LDS, and increasingly liberal. Brigham Young University professor Jacob Rugh has calculated that since 2004, Utah has swung left more than any other state in the country—by about 24 points. Even Provo, home of BYU, where Mitt Romney won about 85 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential election, gave Trump only 56 percent of its vote in 2024.

Salt Lake City has become so liberal that democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the Democratic presidential primaries there in 2016 and again in 2020. Kamala Harris beat Trump in Salt Lake by 23 points even as she lost the rest of the state by more than 20. Yet none of those shifts are reflected in the state’s congressional delegation, which is currently made up entirely of white Republican men.

In 2018, Utah voters tried to change all that when they approved a ballot initiative to require an independent redistricting commission to draw nonpartisan maps. The measure also banned the state legislature from unfairly advantaging one party in redistricting. Almost as soon as Prop. 4 passed, the state legislature moved to repeal it, and in 2021, the legislature once again cracked Salt Lake into four GOP-dominant districts.

The next year, eight groups, including the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued the legislature, arguing that the repeal of Prop. 4 violated the state constitution. In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in their favor and sent the case back to the trial court for more litigation over the maps. In response, the legislature tried unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution to ban citizen-initiated ballot initiatives.

Finally, in August last year, Judge Diana Gibson ruled that the legislature had violated the state constitution and gave it a month to come up with new maps that complied with the law in time for the 2026 election. The ruling ignited a national firestorm on the right. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump said on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”

Instead of following the judge’s order, the legislature once again drew partisan district maps; Gibson once again threw them out. She ruled that the 2026 election would be governed by the nonpartisan maps created by the independent redistricting commission. Rather than accept the ruling, members of the state legislature immediately moved to impeach Gibson, who received death threats, along with many court employees. They also appealed her decision, with support from Republican Gov. Spencer Cox.

“The Utah Constitution clearly states that it is the responsibility of the Legislature to divide the state into congressional districts,” Cox wrote on social media. “While I respect the Court’s role in our system, no judge, and certainly no advocacy group, can usurp that constitutional authority. For this reason, I fully support the Legislature appealing the Court’s decision.”

The Washington County commission, in southern Utah, even voted in January to ignore Gibson’s order entirely, despite being advised by their own lawyer that they would be out of compliance with state law. “I think she’s guilty of criminal conspiracy for conspiring with democratic socialists, and with outside money to try to flip a district in a state and basically control Congress,” fumed Commissioner Victor Iverson, calling Gibson “that lady who shouldn’t even be on the bench.”

In February, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously rejected the legislature’s appeal, but it didn’t result in a ceasefire. In December, the head of the state GOP and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had started a group called Utahns for Representative Government to repeal Prop. 4 through a ballot initiative.

The enterprise was run by a dark money group aligned with Trump that, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, funneled more than $4 million into the campaign and helped bring in out-of-state workers to gather petitions needed to get the measure on the ballot. It generated a host of complaints from people who alleged that they’d been tricked into signing it, thinking they were actually opposing gerrymandering. Good-government groups launched a grassroots effort to encourage people to withdraw their signatures if they felt they’d signed in error.

The measure failed to get on the ballot, and the election has proceeded. And now, for the moment, at least, the prospect of actually winning an election has invigorated the state’s long-moribund Democratic Party. Four candidates are currently on the primary ballot for the new 1^st congressional district, and the state even saw a televised debate among them last month—an event that hasn’t happened since 2010. “It’s definitely a win for the people of Utah to finally have something they voted for working,” says Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the bipartisan organization that spearheaded Prop. 4.

Former Rep. Ben McAdams looks poised to return to Congress. But Republicans seem committed to ensuring that even if he does get elected, he won’t serve another term. As state judges have repeatedly blocked Republicans’ campaign to undo Prop. 4, GOP officials have focused on undermining the independence of Utah courts.

“The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah, and they do not want to be politically accountable,” says Teneille Brown, a University of Utah law professor who helped found Co-Equal Utah, a nonprofit focused on protecting the state courts from political pressure. “Their relentless tactics are really evidence of why we really need better boundaries.”

Brown says Utah’s judges have historically been considered some of the best in the nation, largely because they have been selected on merit. A bipartisan judicial nominating commission was charged with identifying candidates for the governor to select from. But in 2023, the legislature removed the requirements for the commission to include Democrats and members recommended by the state bar. Now, the panel that selects appellate judges is entirely Republican, and includes members like Sen. Mike Lee’s nephew, who graduated from BYU law school in 2020, as well as the board chairman of the right-wing Sutherland Institute, a Utah think tank.

With that new system in place, Republicans have launched an attack on the judges who had decided the gerrymandering case. Utah holds retention elections for judges, and the GOP has actively urged voters to reject the Supreme Court judges who upheld the maps. They also instigated a particularly nasty smear campaign against Justice Diana Hagan.

Last year, Hagan had been involved in an ugly divorce, and her ex-husband had alleged to a friend that she had been having an affair with one of the lawyers who worked on the anti-gerrymandering litigation. Hagan was friends with the lawyer, but she had recused herself from any case in which he was involved. Nonetheless, her ex-husband’s friend, who has worked in the Trump administration, filed a complaint against Hagan with the Judicial Conduct Commission.

Hagan vehemently denied the affair allegations. After investigating, the commission found “very little credibility to this complaint” and dismissed it. The commission’s investigative report was supposed to be confidential, but the state legislature leaked it to a local news outlet, prompting Cox and the state legislature to demand an “independent” investigation.

The ensuing publicity, and a host of death threats, made Hagan’s life so miserable that in early May, she decided to resign. “[M]y family and friends did not choose public life,” she wrote to Cox in her resignation letter. “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, in January, the legislature voted to expand the state supreme court by two additional judges, even though the existing court said it didn’t need more help. This month, Cox appointed two men with no judicial experience to fill the seats, including a senior counsel for the LDS church. Once the new judges are in place, it seems inevitable that the state legislature will go back to court to challenge the district maps to ensure that the 2026 midterm election will be the last time Utah Democrats have a shot at sending someone to Congress.

Taking advice and inspiration from opponents of a planned immigration detention center near Hagerstown, a newly formed advocacy group in Utah is preparing a lawsuit in hopes of stopping a similar project in Salt Lake City.

The group, Uproar Utah, announced its plans Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the city and Salt Lake County sued to block the proposed detention mega-center that could hold up to 10,000 people.

The city and county’s lawsuit mostly centers on allegations that the federal government, seeking to carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, blew past requirements for planning and conducting environmental reviews.

The advocacy group, an arm of the Utah Refugee Justice League, is focusing on those themes, too. But it’s also homing in on issues of fairness and due process for those who may someday be held at the Salt Lake City facility of more than 830,000 square feet.

“There is no way to respect the dignity, the human dignity, of 10,000 men, women, and children crammed into a warehouse jail,” said Brent Ward, a former U.S. attorney for Utah. “By definition, it’s insane. It’s inhumane. It’s contrary to Utah’s values. It is not who we are.”

The group shared with reporters on Tuesday a notice of its intent to sue the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying it’s still seeking additional plaintiffs that could include Utahns already detained by ICE. Ward said they want to support and supplement the city and county’s case, and they’ve been in touch with the attorneys behind it.

In Maryland’s Washington County, construction of a detention center was placed on hold in April by a federal judge who cited environmental considerations. U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson ruled that ICE could continue with more limited work, including on offices within the warehouse and changes to the HVAC system and roof, Maryland Matters reported. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) had sued to put the project on hold.

Uproar Utah contends in both Maryland and in Salt Lake City, Homeland Security and ICE showed “complete disregard” for requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act. The group’s also raising concerns about the spread of disease and the quality of medical care in ICE facilities.

ICE bought the Salt Lake City property for $145.4 million in March, one of its most expensive purchases, just days after the firing of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, paused new warehouse deals as the agency reviews contracts from Noem’s time in the job.

In response to a request for comment on Monday’s lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security sent an unsigned, prepared statement to Utah News Dispatch Tuesday, reiterating its recent remarks to multiple news outlets. The department did not weigh in on Uproar Utah’s Tuesday announcement.

“As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals,” the department said in the statement. “As Secretary Mullin said in his confirmation hearing: ‘I will work with the community leaders and make sure that we are delivering for the American people what the President set out … We want to work with community leaders. We want to be good partners.’”

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Marie Cornwall, executive director of the newly formed group and a retired sociology professor, said at a news conference in Salt Lake City Tuesday that opponents of the center in Maryland have been “very helpful” in guiding the group’s response in Utah.

During the news conference, Liliana Bolaños with Mormon Women for Ethical Government joined in condemning the warehouses as inhumane. She moved to the U.S. with her family at 2 years old, she said, and for more than 25 years, “our application sat in a backlog so deep that my entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood passed without any protection from deportation or legal status.”

She said the stories of “countless Utah families all point to the same truth: the system is broken, not the people living inside it.”

The attorneys did not detail a timeframe for when they anticipate filing their planned lawsuit.

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— This story first appeared in Utah News Dispatch, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.

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Utah is suffering from such dry conditions that a group of kids with matches and a squirrel managed to start separate brush fires within hours, according to local media reports.

The ongoing severe drought in Utah has created the perfect conditions for destructive fires, prompting officials to warn that this year’s fire season could be particularly severe. Those concerns were highlighted Tuesday after firefighters battled two separate blazes in northern Utah.

A squirrel tangled in a power line managed to spark a half-acre brush fire Tuesday morning in Layton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, according to local outlet FOX 13. Later that day, children playing with matches reportedly started a brush fire that burned an acre in Saratoga Springs, a city on the northwestern shore of Utah Lake.

Both fires were extinguished, and it appears no one was injured, according to FOX 13. The Independent has requested more information from fire officials in Layton and Saratoga Springs.

This comes as firefighters battle multiple major blazes throughout the state.

The South Mountain Fire in northwestern Utah has burned through more than 1,800 acres and was at 40 percent containment as of Wednesday morning. The Tower Fire, which is burning near the small town of Scipio in central Utah, is currently 34 percent contained after spreading to more than 1,300 acres.

Utah fire officials have warned the ongoing drought, combined with warmer temperatures and low snowfall earlier this year, led to lots of dry vegetation that could serve as fuel for destructive fires.

“This year’s conditions, even more than recent years, are raising concern,” Salt Lake City Fire Chief Karl Lieb said at a press conference last month.

“If we all take this seriously now, our agencies and the public together, we can reduce the number of fires, limit how fast they spread, and better protect the communities we all care about,” Unified Fire Chief Dominic Burchett added.

Officials are asking residents to take steps to prevent wildfires, such as refraining from starting campfires on windy days and exercising caution when shooting outdoors.

“We identify target shooting as one of the behaviors that contribute to human-caused wildfires in the state,” a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and Estate Lands told ABC 4 this week.

Last year, fires burned more than 165,000 acres in Utah, which cost the state more than $191 million, according to KSL News. Still, firefighters managed to keep 92 percent of those fires under 10 acres.

(NewsNation) — “Shark Tank” star and celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary is defending the massive data center project he’s backing after Utah residents and a progressive nonprofit sued last week.

He joined “Morning in America” Wednesday to debunk what he says is misinformation about the project.

“As an industry, as developers of these projects, the demand is insatiable because we’re in a global competition for AI and for cloud compute,” O’Leary said. “But in every single location, I don’t care whether it’s Michigan, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, if you announce you’re doing a data center, all of a sudden you get a plethora of misinformation.”

Americans opt for nuclear plant over AI data center in backyard: Poll

The Alliance for a Better Utah and a group of five anonymous residents filed the lawsuit in Utah’s 3rd District Court June 3 against government officials and the Military Installation Development Authority, a special entity overseeing the project.

The planned Stratos Project data center in Box Elder County, Utah, would span tens of thousands of acres and would be built on mostly private, unincorporated land.

The plaintiffs in the suit are challenging the constitutionality of the special entity and its approval of the project.

Kevin O’Leary: Misinformation about data centers stoking agitation

“The Stratos Project Area Plan, and actions taken by MIDA and the Commission to enact the same, puts lawmaking power respecting questions of public health, safety, welfare, morals, taxation, zoning, land use, and the like, in relation to a significant swath of county territory in a non-elected MIDA Board,” the complaint said.

Communities and state lawmakers have begun pushing back against the massive data centers needed to power AI, citing electricity use, water demands and higher costs for residents.

But O’Leary says the technology of today’s data centers is “more efficient.”

“What happened 20 years ago when they built them in Virginia, they got a bad rap there because it was really early technology,” O’Leary said. “Yes, it used a lot of water. Yes, it was noisy. Yes, it created heat. That tech is gone. The new-era data center is far more efficient, much smaller footprint, doesn’t use as much water, if any… I think as we get the real facts out, we’ll turn this around.”

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to NewsNation.

The U.S. cyber defense agency said on Wednesday that government officials now have three ‌days to deal with the most serious categories of digital ‌vulnerabilities in their networks, a compressed timeline that is due in part to hackers’ ​use of artificial intelligence. The deadline, which was set in a new directive issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, obligates civilian federal agencies with vulnerable software or equipment to fix, disable, or remove it ‌from the internet within ⁠three calendar days, depending on the severity of the threat. Many cyber experts worry that new, more capable AI ⁠models along the lines of Anthropic’s Mythos are supercharging hackers’ abilities to take advantage of digital vulnerabilities across the internet, forcing defenders to plug ​security holes ​almost as soon as they are ​discovered.

Utah prosecutors are asking the judge overseeing the case against Charlie Kirk’s accused assassin to reject a defense effort to further postpone a preliminary hearing nearly nine months after the suspect’s arrest.

Lawyers for 22-year-old Tyler Robinson have asked Judge Tony Graf Jr. to push back the routine hearing as they appeal his denial of their motion to ban news cameras from the high-profile case.

“Defendant cannot show that a stay is necessary to prevent additional prejudice from media coverage of his preliminary hearing, when this Court has already found that he failed to show that a public preliminary hearing would prejudice him at all,” Deputy Utah County Attorney Christopher Ballard wrote in a court filing Saturday.

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Tyler Robinson appears during a hearing in Fourth District Court in Provo, Utah, on Dec. 11, 2025. He is accused of the murder of Charlie Kirk. (Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune via Pool)

Robinson’s attorneys filed an appeal with the Utah Supreme Court and then asked Graf to push back the hearing while they await a response.

“Nor can Defendant show that he is likely to prevail on appeal (assuming one is granted), or that a stay is not adverse to the public interest in the prompt disposition of criminal trials,” Ballard added. “Moreover, there is no need for this Court to stay the proceedings pending disposition of the petition for interlocutory appeal. If the Utah Supreme Court concludes that such a stay is warranted, that court can stay the proceedings.”

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Charlie Kirk spoke at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10, 2025, during his “American Comeback Tour.” (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images)

Robinson was arrested in September 2025 in connection with the assassination of Charlie Kirk during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University.

Much of the evidence prosecutors plan to use has already been revealed publicly, according to Ballard, and Robinson’s defense hasn’t proven a “realistic likelihood of prejudice” if the hearing is open to the public, he added.

The preliminary hearing, an early step in many criminal cases, has not yet been held, and as a result, Robinson has not yet entered a plea.

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Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed during his “American Comeback Tour” appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10, 2025. People ran after shots were fired at the campus event. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images)

The hearing requires prosecutors to show they had probable cause to arrest the defendant, thereby allowing the case to proceed toward trial.

The hearing was most recently delayed from the week of May 16 to the week of July 6.

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Typically, to be granted a stay in a Utah criminal case, the defense must show a likelihood that their appeal will prevail, a likelihood of “irreparable harm” that outweighs any harm to any other party — and that the stay “is not adverse to the public interest,” according to Ballard’s filing.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during an event in Utah on Thursday. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Reuters)

CHARLIE KIRK’S WIDOW ERIKA KIRK DEMANDS SPEEDY TRIAL, ALLEGING ‘UNDUE DELAY’ FROM TYLER ROBINSON DEFENSE

He argued that Robinson’s lawyers haven’t met any of those criteria.

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“Defendant must satisfy all three elements,” he wrote. “He hasn’t satisfied even one. In fact, he ignores this rule.”

Not only do delays hurt the prosecution, Ballard argued, they also hurt Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and the designated victim’s advocate in the case. She has invoked the victim’s right to a speedy trial under Utah law.

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Attorneys for two groups of media outlets, one of which includes Fox News and Fox News Digital, are also expected to file a response to Robinson’s appeal this week.

In a separate, 51-page filing, Robinson’s defense also asked the judge to block hearsay testimony at the hearing, arguing that Utah laws that permit it are unconstitutional.