Senate bill tries to rehabilitate jail conditions for immigrants
Trash-strewn cells, moldy showers, broken telephones, excessive use of solitary confinement, and “slimy, foulsmelling lunch meat.”
These are the conditions that detainees face inside a major immigration jail in California, according to a report last month by federal inspectors who visited the Theo Lacy Facility, run by the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department.
For the past seven years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been renting bed space there. The Sheriff ’s Department collects $30 million annually for leasing out the highsecurity real estate, and in exchange, ICE gets bunk space for roughly 480 of the more than 40,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide that the agency has been keeping behind bars on any given day.
The county disputes the critical
inspection report from the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General. Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said that although “some legitimate issues were identified ... and were quickly addressed,” many of the inspection’s findings were inaccurate.
Regardless, the news came at a bad time for defenders of the patchwork of county jails, city lockups and privately owned facilities across California that make up the state’s immigration detention system.
For state Sen. Ricardo Lara, the report provided a welltimed “I told you so.” The Los Angeles County Democrat, whose immigration detention reform bill was vetoed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown, is back again this session with SB29. It would set new rules for immigration detention facilities and would ban local governments from contracting with private prison companies to detain immigrants. On Tuesday it cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee.
While the state already regulates all detention facilities in California, Lara argues that the national standards articulated in every ICE detention contract are not being followed. His bill would not require the Board of State and Community Corrections, the agency that regulates California prisons and jails, to conduct additional inspections or adopt new rules. Instead, the bill is intended to keep immigration facilities in line by allowing current and former detainees and the state attorney general to sue any facilities that violate these standards.
But the bill also has detractors among law enforcement agencies and many Republicans, who believe that claims of mismanaged detention facilities are overblown. They also argue that the state shouldn’t interfere with local law enforcement decisions, and that Lara’s bill could have harmful consequences for local budgets — and even for the detainees themselves.
“Sacramento thinks it’s so smart and has to mandate things to everybody,” said GOP state Sen. John M.W. Moorlach, who represents Orange County and used to chair its Board of Supervisors. “I don’t think that’s good policy in this case, and I think being uncooperative with a federal agency is arrogance at its highest.”
The ultimate fate of Lara’s bill may rest again with the governor. When he vetoed last year’s measure, Jerry Brown wrote that although he was troubled by reports of conditions at privately run facilities, he wanted to wait for a “more permanent solution” from the federal government.
Although the U.S. immigration detention program is the largest single incarceration system in the country, its facilities are often leased. Of the 10 long-term immigration jails in California, none is federally owned. Five are county jails, one is a city facility, and the remaining four are owned and operated by for-profit companies.
Using data from public records requests and publicly available documents, interviews and site visits, the immigration rights group Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement estimates that privately run jails make up 75 percent of all the bed space across California’s long-term immigration detention system. Some of those incarcerated have criminal records, but immigration violations themselves are civil rather than criminal matters — and so detainees in immigration court are not entitled to court-appointed legal counsel.
Awaiting their hearings or deportation, detainees may spend months in custody. With President Trump making aggressive immigration enforcement a cornerstone of his presidency, ICE will probably need all the beds it can get.
Since his election, the stock prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic, the country’s two largest private prison and immigration jail operators, have increased by 87 percent and 125 percent, respectively.
“If there’s going to be a spike in detention in a relatively short period of time, recent history shows that the only way the government can actually detain those people is if private prisons provide the beds,” said Anita Sinha, an assistant professor of immigration and civil rights law at American University.