Federal lawyers have finally put a number on the immigration facility rising on farmland east of Gilroy — about 10 detainees at a time. In the same court filing, they decline to say how many it could ultimately hold, arguing the ceiling gets set later, once the remodel is done.

The estimate is the government's first detailed official account of the site, and it carries two messages at once: a small, reassuring headcount, and a pointed refusal to cap it. As a hearing nears on whether to freeze construction for the life of the case, the filing resets the terms of a fight the state and Santa Clara County opened in June — and hands opponents the very ambiguity they say they distrust.

The number surfaced in the federal government's legal answer to the lawsuit filed to stop the project at 7240 Holsclaw Road, and it is the fullest official account of the site to date. The facility has drawn a state and county lawsuit since June — over buried farm chemicals, an undersized septic system, and a decades-old law meant to keep the land in agriculture. The filing resets the terms of that fight as a hearing nears on whether to freeze construction for the life of the case.

Ten is the figure federal attorneys gave the U.S. District Court in San Jose when they described how many people the Gilroy-area site would typically hold, NBC Bay Area reported from the new documents↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). The government put the number forward to knock down a far larger estimate — a facility able to hold as many as 150 — that Santa Clara County and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have pressed in court. That leaves the two sides fifteen-fold apart on the same low-slung building.

What the government would not do is lock the smaller figure in. Its lawyers wrote that maximum occupancy will be settled only after the property owner finishes remodeling. A typical headcount of 10, in other words, sits beside a ceiling left deliberately blank — and the blank is the part opponents distrust. A small number now, they warn, is not a promise about later.

That distrust is grounded in the record the county laid out when it sued in June. Federal officials signed a two-decade lease worth roughly $26 million in the Biden administration's final January, and an entity connected to the Beverly Hills firm Elmwood Capital Group took title to the roughly 25-acre parcel only weeks afterward. Yet the land has carried an agriculture-only designation — and the property-tax breaks of California's Williamson Act — since 1967, a status the county contends a detention center cannot lawfully override.

The county's alarm rests on more than zoning. The blueprints it obtained describe a building with rooms to store weapons and ammunition, holding and visitation space, even areas set aside for mothers with infants — not, officials argue, the makeup of a routine field office. And the site's past is its own liability: county lawyers point to three decades of chemical leaks and spills logged at the property. At the press conference announcing the suit, County Counsel Tony LoPresti warned the design matches "the type of facility" sued nationwide "for warehousing people," and said the parcel's septic system was built for "modest daytime use" — not a center running around the clock with scores of staff and detainees.

That is the terrain the government's "10" is meant to cross. A facility it can frame as small and office-like is far easier to defend against the county's claims that the project needed environmental review, local consultation, and public notice it never received — the heart of a complaint that invokes the National Environmental Policy Act and the Williamson Act alike. Minimize the scale, and the legal burden shrinks with it. Decline to cap the scale, and the reassurance starts to wobble.

Bonta, whose office has filed dozens of cases against the Trump administration, cast the project in June as a facility being forced on a community that had already rejected it. Nothing in the new filing has changed that posture; it has only sharpened the arithmetic. By agreement, no work resumes until the injunction is argued in San Jose's federal courthouse. The most consequential number that day may be neither 10 nor 150, but the one Washington has, so far, refused to put on paper.