A White House plan to buy up private immigrant detention centers nationwide could be used to bypass state laws geared at curbing abuses amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, insiders and experts tell the Lever.
Several of the detention centers reportedly short-listed for government takeover are located in the states that have been the most aggressive in their attempts to monitor and regulate private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.
In February, internal documents first made public by New Hampshire state officials laid out in detail the Trump administration’s ambitious plans for ICE’s “new detention model,” amid the agency’s ongoing immigration crackdown. The documents proposed purchasing vacant industrial warehouses and transforming them into “mega” detention centers, an effort that has sparked significant public backlash.
But a second proposal in the document has largely flown under the radar: ICE’s plan to purchase ten “turnkey facilities,” private detention centers where its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm already operates.
By buying facilities currently owned by private prison companies, ICE could help shield those detention centers from state oversight and some lawsuits tied to alleged abuse, including labor violations.
In response to public pressure, states like California have passed laws that empower state officials to inspect private immigration detention centers. And in both Washington state and Colorado, ICE detainees who were forced to work for as little as a dollar a day at facilities owned by private prison giant GEO Group have sued for alleged violations of state labor laws.
But if the federal government owned these facilities outright, the Department of Homeland Security could try to claim additional legal immunity from many of these state restrictions, thanks to the broad immunity shield the federal government enjoys from lawsuits. How broad that immunity could ultimately…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
