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By Marianne Dhenin
This article was originally published by Truthout
Activists say ending local and state cooperation with ICE is a key way to obstruct Trump’s mass deportation machine.
Grassroots coalitions in a growing number of states are working to pass legislation to cut municipal or state ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The efforts are gaining momentum as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda throws long-standing problems with the nation’s immigration regime into sharp relief.
“We see a tremendous upswelling of this type of legislation being proposed in different states across the country,” Rebecca Sheff, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, told Truthout. “I think it speaks to the moment that it’s really a time to make the most of the political willingness to take bold action in light of how aggressive ICE has become.”
Sheff helped draft New Mexico’s Immigrant Safety Act, which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law in February. The law prohibits state and local governments from entering into agreements to detain individuals for civil immigration violations, stops the use of public land for immigration detention, and bans agreements that turn local law enforcement into immigration agents. It will come into force in May.
Comparable laws to curb civil immigration detention are already on the books in at least half a dozen other states, including New Jersey, California, Washington, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland. Many have been passed under the banner “Dignity, Not Detention,” following a national campaign launched in 2010 by the Detention Watch Network and hundreds of supporting organizations nationwide. California was the first to pass its Dignity, Not Detention legislation seven years later. New Mexico’s is the most recent.
Elsewhere, organizers are still hard at work on similar bills. Tania Mattos, executive director of UnLocal, a legal services provider for immigrants in New York City, is one of those organizers. She began working with Abolish ICE New York–New Jersey in 2018 and was part of the coalition that succeeded in passing New Jersey’s law ending certain contracts with ICE three years later.
Mattos got involved after learning about conditions in immigration jails. “During my immigration advocacy work, I realized that people had a huge fear [of immigration detention], and people were dying in immigration detention,” she told Truthout. “It’s a black hole, and people go into these black holes not knowing whether they’re going to come out, how long they’re going to be in, not having legal representation — it’s literally kidnapping and disappearing folks into these systems.”
Now, Mattos is working to abolish immigration detention in New York with the state’s Dignity Not Detention Coalition. That coalition includes more than 150 public health and safety organizations, labor unions, and civil rights and faith groups that are pushing forward Senate Bill 316 and Assembly Bill 4181, sponsored by New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Karines Reyes, respectively.
The companion bills, together known as the Dignity Not Detention Act, would prohibit New York entities and persons from owning or operating immigration detention facilities, entering immigration detention contracts, or renewing existing contracts. The act would also require government entities to terminate existing immigration detention contracts. The coalition estimates there are more than 70 such agreements in place statewide. The number of people detained by ICE and booked into New York’s county jails skyrocketed last year since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Because New York already prohibits private prisons, if the Dignity Not Detention Act’s requirement that public facilities terminate their contracts with ICE is met, it should effectively mean the abolition of immigration detention in the state.
“It’s about thinking about folks’ survival,” Mattos told Truthout. “It’s about, ‘Let’s eliminate that system that is essentially killing people and making people suffer.’”
The nation’s immigration jails have always been bad. When the 2010 Dignity, Not Detention Campaign launched, the American Friends Service Committee wrote in an infosheet that 300,000 immigrants per year were being held in 350 private, federal, state, and local jails and prisons. It reported that, between 2003 and the campaign’s launch, 107 people had died due to the horrific conditions in immigration jails.
Those numbers have only climbed since. The second Trump administration arrested 300,000 migrants in its first six months in office alone. Currently, over 60,000 are jailed in 425 facilities nationwide. Meanwhile, the mortality rate in the nation’s immigration jails is now at its highest level in more than two decades, surpassing even the records set during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. At least 48 people have died in ICE custody since inauguration day last year.
“People are being tortured. People are suffering medical neglect, and now this year is the deadliest year on record for immigrants in detention,” Sophia Genovese, an attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown University, told Truthout. “That’s in part because the population is so high, but more substantively because the Trump administration is making these conditions such that it deters future migration and it punishes people for migrating.”
Genovese, who worked on both the New Jersey and New Mexico campaigns and now researches and teaches about immigration detention, said ending local and state cooperation with ICE is an important way of throwing sand in the gears of the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine.
“ICE almost always puts someone in detention prior to executing their deportation, and so going after detention contracts shrinks the number of beds that are made available to ICE for detention, and that has the net impact of affecting the mass deportation campaign,” she told Truthout. “There cannot be mass deportations without detention.”
States have taken different approaches to chipping away at ICE detention, but most have targeted intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs). Often, under those agreements, local jails or prisons rent bed space to ICE for immigrants in federal custody. But some private prisons are also used under IGSAs, with a local government serving as a middleman between the prison company and the federal government.
Those so-called “pass-through” contracting schemes are particularly problematic because they allow ICE and the prison company to sidestep standard federal procurement, open competition, and transparency requirements. Those requirements would usually include assessing the prison company’s health and safety records. More than 30 percent of the total population in ICE jails are held at facilities operated under pass-through agreements, according to Genovese’s research.
“These are ICE’s preferred contracting arrangements and have been for a very long time,” said Sheff of pass-through IGSAs. In New Mexico, both the Torrance County Detention Facility and the Cibola County Correctional Center are owned and operated by the private prison company CoreCivic under such agreements.
Those agreements will no longer be legal when the Immigrant Safety Act comes into force next month. The law requires public bodies to terminate such agreements at the earliest date permitted under their terms once the law goes into effect. “While we can’t tell ICE what to do directly, we are doing our part now to force ICE out of those corrupt sweetheart deals and to withhold our state involvement in ICE detention,” Sheff told Truthout.
The Immigrant Safety Act also bars 287(g) agreements, which delegate immigration enforcement powers, including the power to arrest individuals on behalf of ICE, to state and local law enforcement. Sheff told Truthout that the New Mexico coalition took aim at the agreements because “our law enforcement should not be co-opted by ICE, should not be out there in our communities distracted from their basic duties and instead acting as ICE officers and snatching people from our streets.”
Radical changes like these are achievable thanks to federalism principles and the 10th Amendment, which places significant power in the hands of states and the people. “There is so much that we have the authority to do at the state level to keep our communities safe, and this is one of those; we are not required to cooperate with ICE when it comes to civil immigration detention,” Sheff told Truthout.
Civil immigration detention is itself a policy choice, one that has only begun to be made in recent years and affects only a small proportion of migrants. Even with the number of people in immigration detention at a historic high of over 60,000, that number represents less than 2 percent of the 3.4 million people in removal proceedings.
Although Dignity Not Detention-inspired legislation differs somewhat from state to state, the campaigns that have succeeded in passing it have many things in common. For starters, “being dignity-focused is critical,” Genovese told Truthout. “It’s easy … to fall into the ‘good-versus-bad immigrant’ divide. [But] successful campaigns for abolition live up to their values and don’t shy away from hard, nuanced conversations.”
Jessica Inés Martínez told Truthout the Immigrant Safety Act’s success also hinged on its centering those most affected by the long shadow of immigration detention. Martínez is the director of policy and coalition building at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center and helped draft and organize around the Immigrant Safety Act. “When you’re truly listening to those most impacted, and you center them, and build the law around that — that’s how you really make a meaningful piece of legislation,” she said.
For organizers who might be feeling discouraged, Mattos told Truthout it is important to remember that efforts to end immigration detention are larger than any one state’s campaign. Plus, a bill often requires several iterations before it becomes law. New Mexico’s recent success came after a bill with similar aims was first introduced in 2019. A Dignity Not Detention Act was first introduced in New York in 2021.
“My advice is just to not give up,” Mattos told Truthout. “People are fighting all over the country in the movement towards ending the suffering of immigrants in detention.”
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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