Haitian detainees start arriving at Milan prison

Immigrants spare site from shutdown

The first of about 1,400 Haitian refugees who will be detained at the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan began arriving this week, giving new life to the prison, which was scheduled for closure last year.

The federal Bureau of Prisons announced unexpectedly last August that it was closing the facility and sending its 1,200 low-security male inmates, detained mostly for immigrating to the United States without proper documentation, to other prisons across the nation.

The threatened closure of the prison and its potential loss of 300 jobs shocked the Milan and Grants area, as both rely heavily on the center and two other state-owned prisons.

“I didn’t really want to lose them,” said Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup.

When the federal Bureau of Prisons announced, one month after the August closure announcement, that it would consider using the facility for a different purpose, local leaders cheered.

“So now we will have more jobs,” Muñoz told the Journal on Thursday.

And indeed the facility, run by CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, which operated it before — is hiring.

This time, the prison will house Haitian immigrants, with the first of them arriving this week, Muñoz said. “The real problem was we lost 200 jobs,” he said. “So it was a trickle-down, not just the jobs, but what it was going to cost in the community.”

The facility held a job fair this week.

The new mission at the Milan prison may be replicated at other facilities around the country.

Despite a report from the federal Department of Justice that found private prisons cost more and perform worse than their federally run counterparts, stocks of private prison corporations, including that of the corporation operating in Milan, have increased 53 to 78 percent since the election of Donald Trump as president, according to Bloomberg News.