Feds end pact for California’s last immigrant lockup
The last California jail to make money from the detention of immigrants is losing its contract with the federal government after nearly 30 years.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, notified the Yuba County Sheriff ’s Office this week that it would stop holding noncitizen detainees at its county jail in Marysville effective Feb. 8.
The move comes as a bit of a surprise, given that the federal government and Yuba County are only four years into a 99-year contract extension reached in 2018.
The contract yields $8.7 million a year to the county for as many as 150 detainees a day.
The Yuba County Sheriff ’s Office has had a federal agreement to hold immigrant detainees since 1994, when the agreement was with U.S. Border Patrol.
For years, detainees and their advocates have lobbied local officials — and organized multiple hunger strikes — to end a financial arrangement that they say is lucrative for the county but exploitative of them.
It was only in May 2020 that the Sheriff ’s Office, under pressure from detainees, began housing the noncitizens separately from jail occupants facing criminal charges.
Detainees also frequently complained about poor treatment and squalid conditions inside the 60-yearold facility.
While detainees say their continued activism improved some of the conditions in Yuba County Jail, it was the COVID-19 pandemic — and a 2020 classaction lawsuit about ICE’s response to it at Yuba County Jail and two private detention facilities — that catalyzed the largest and swiftest change at the jail.
Court orders caused Yuba’s detainee population to drop from 127 people in May 2020 to zero on Oct. 27, 2021, when the last detainee was released.
While the jail began reaccepting detainees earlier this year, there are only four detainees being held there now.
“The decision to end our contract came from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Yuba County Sheriff Wendell Anderson said in a statement. “I stand by our jail, the staff, and the conditions, as we have always passed every inspection. Before COVID restrictions, our jail averaged close to 175 detainees. That number has gradually decreased and it’s understandable that it no longer fiscally makes sense for ICE to continue the contract.”
Between 2010 and 2021, ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight documented 171 violations of national detention standards, often for minor infractions, over the course of at least eight inspections.
When the California Department of Justice conducted an on-site inspection in November 2021, there were no detainees at the jail.
Inspectors noted that the Yuba County Jail was the only detention facility they visited where visitors were not required to show proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test results to enter the secure area.
Two dozen Democratic members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, openly called on the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, to sever ties with the Yuba County Jail in a letter last year.
ICE said it provided Yuba County with a 60-day notice that the contract would be coming to an end, and will determine whether to release, transfer or deport the remaining detainees.
Three deaths have been linked to the jail this year, including two last month, according to Sheriff ’s Office releases.
One former detainee who participated in hunger strikes said he’s glad no other people like him will have to stay at Yuba County Jail.
“A part of me can finally be at peace knowing that the place where I spent the worst two years of my life is finally closing,” Carlos Sauceda, who was at the jail between 2017 and 2019, said in a statement released Friday by the advocacy group Yuba Liberation Coalition. “Today is a day of victory for those of us who were detained at Yuba County Jail, for our families and for the advocates who have fought to make this possible.”
“I stand by our jail, the staff, and the conditions, as we have always passed every inspection.”
Wendell Anderson, Yuba County sheriff