ICE to withdraw immigrant detainees from jails in two states
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer send immigrant detainees to jails in Alabama and Florida that have been the subject of complaints, and the agency will limit its use of two other facilities in North Carolina and Louisiana, agency officials said.
ICE will discontinue use of the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala., “as soon as possible,” citing “a long history of serious deficiencies identified during facility inspections and is of limited operational significance to the agency,” according to a notification obtained by The Washington Post.
The agency will also halt detentions at Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Fla., amid concerns about medical care at the facility and stop paying for a “guaranteed minimum” of 300 beds this month. Officials said they are open to using the jail again someday if the county addresses the issues they raised.
“These actions should be seen as part of a larger and ongoing review to ensure our detention facilities are not only safe and secure but represent an appropriate use of government funds,” ICE acting director Tae Johnson wrote in an internal email obtained by The Post. ICE will also limit the number of detainees held at Alamance County Detention Facility in Graham, N.C., and at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, La.
The closures come at a time when President Biden is facing conflicting pressures on immigration enforcement after promising to create a more humane immigration system. Advocacy groups are urging him to close far more facilities, but Republicans say his more relaxed enforcement standards are to blame for an influx of new migrants crossing the southern border illegally from Mexico.
The Department of Homeland Security directed immigration officials last year to prioritize the arrests of recent border crossers and violent offenders. As a result, immigration arrests and deportations in the interior of the United States fell to their lowest levels in decades last fiscal year. Since the start of the pandemic, authorities have relied heavily on emergency public health authorities to rapidly return or “expel” more than 1.7 million migrants.
The moves announced Friday fall short of Biden’s campaign promise to end for-profit ICE detention, which accounts for the bulk of the nearly 22,000 detainees in federal custody this week. Winn is operated by a private company, Lasalle Corrections, officials said, but the others are owned and operated by the counties.
“ICE will continue to review other immigration detention centers and monitor the quality of treatment of detained individuals, the conditions of detention, and other factors relevant to the continued operation of each facility,” said the notice, which added that the agency “will continue to monitor its operational needs for detention and adjust as needed.”
At the Glades County Detention Center, ICE officials cited “persistent and ongoing concerns related to the provision of detainee medical care,” and a desire to save costs, describing the facility as “lacking operational significance.”
ICE officials faulted the Alamance County Detention Facility for lacking outdoor recreation opportunities and said detainees will only be sent there for short periods under 72 hours once conditions improve.
At the Winn Correctional Center, ICE will scale back the number of beds its pays for to keep in reserve, citing staffing constraints, and will evaluate “ongoing construction and remediation work at the facility” to see if conditions improve.
Authorities in the four counties did not respond to calls seeking comment. A spokesman for La Salle Corrections did not respond.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations had called for the shutdown of these and other facilities on the list but on Friday said the Biden administration still had not gone far enough.
“This is an important victory,” Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, said on Twitter. “But with a sprawling, growing detention system, this is a drop in the bucket.”