Saying ‘No’ to Immigrant Detention

Private companies want to build new immigrant detention facilities, but communities around Chicago are stopping them in their tracks.

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When the Village Board of Dwight, located some eighty miles southwest from Chicago, approved the annexation and rezoning of land for an immigrant detention center in March, immigrant rights’ activists were already organizing to stop it.

The facility would be owned and operated by a private company, Immigration Centers of America. But opponents rallied behind Illinois legislation that would extend an existing ban on privately owned prisons to include immigrant detention centers. On April 10, a month after the Dwight Village Board’s vote, the extension was approved by the Illinois House of Representatives. The full senate is expected to vote on it by the end of May.

(Editor's update: On May 16, the bill was approved by the state senate and now goes to Governor J.B. Pritzker for final approval.)

Under the Trump Administration, the daily average of undocumented immigrants in detention centers in the United States has jumped from 38,106 in fiscal 2017 to about 50,000 last month.

Interest in locating a detention center within a 180-mile radius of Chicago got a boost in October 2017, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted a notice that the region was one of four being considered for immigrant detention centers.

“A facility there would be no different than mass incarceration for people who have not committed a crime.”

But resistance to immigration detention in the Chicago area has deep roots. Dwight is the eighth site proposed for such a facility in the area since 2011, and all have been met with strong opposition, be it in rural Hopkins Park, Illinois or urban Gary, Indiana.

That resistance has only become more focused in the face of the Trump Administration’s increasing criminalization of immigrants.

“What they are trying to do is get rid of immigrant communities and particularly communities that come from my neck of the woods,” says state Democratic Representative Celina Villanueva, chief co-sponsor of the Illinois legislation.

Villanueva’s parents are Mexican immigrants who met in the United States after leaving their homeland to escape poverty. The thirty-three-year-old was an organizer for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights before being appointed last year to a vacant House seat in the General Assembly.

But the key player in mobilizing opposition has been Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel for the Illinois Coalition.

“We very often get the question, ‘Aren’t these things going to be built in some place anyway?’ Our response to that is ‘No,’ ” Tsao tells me, noting that even in places such as Elkhart County, Indiana, which Trump easily carried in 2016, a proposed detention center met stiff resistance in 2018.

Tsao, who has been with the Illinois Coalition for two decades, won’t let Trump officials define the terms of the detention debate.

“They are trying to perpetuate the image of asylum seekers as dangerous criminals. In fact, these are people just seeking better lives. They are not a threat to the community and can be safely released,” says Tsao, who is the son of Chinese immigrants.

Tsao frequently addresses local communities in the Chicago area targeted for possible detention facilities.

“The strongest message that he left us is that this is a terrible form of economic development because you profit on the suffering and misery of human beings,” says the Reverend Charles Strietelmeier, pastor of the Augustana Lutheran Church in Hobart, Indiana.This city is one of four Indiana communities—all near Chicago—recently considered for a detention center.

Currently, ICE relies on a network of county jails that, according to Tsao, house between 1,000 and 1,200 detainees. Private companies hope to cash in on ICE’s growing reliance on for-profit immigration detention facilities. But they’ve been met by community opposition.

“They do everything behind closed doors. When they see the community is organized, they back off,” says Father Raymond Lescher, who in 2012 began organizing opposition to a detention center proposed by Corrections Corporation of America (now renamed CoreCivic) in Joliet, Illinois, where Lescher was pastor of a Catholic church.

A year later, after protests, and even Joliet City Council members complaining that few details about the center were available, City Manager Tom Thanas announced that the company would not seek a site in Joliet, which is about forty-five miles southwest of Chicago.

In 2016, Lescher moved to Hopkins Park, Illinois, and learned that Utah-based Management & Training Corporation was considering a 700-person detention facility in this community of about 500 residents, located seventy miles southeast of Chicago.

Lescher helped organize protests and were joined by Raul “CoCo” Hernandez, a sixty-three-year-old truck driver who fears that a detention center would put the Hispanic population in the area at risk. “I believe they’ll be picking on Hispanics,” says Hernandez.

Mobilizing opposition in a sparsely populated rural area proved to be a challenge.

“It was David versus Goliath,” says Lescher.

But, he says, working with a network of churches in the region, about 3,000 names were collected on a petition opposing the detention center. Twenty names a day from the petition were then sent to MTC as a constant reminder of the opposition.

Protest organizers do not see indications that MTC is moving ahead with its proposal, but as recently as May 2018, Hopkins Park Mayor Mark Hodge, who is a former administrator in the California prison system, reportedly said that a detention center would help the village’s economy.

Hodge, in an interview, told me that he has not heard from MTC, but that the proposed Illinois law might have an effect. “I don’t believe they are moving forward because of the ban.”

Although the proposed law would prohibit state and local government from contracting with private companies for immigration detention, it couldn’t stop ICE from striking a deal directly with these companies on land they or ICE obtain that is zoned for detention.

But the Illinois proposal would discourage such an end run around local control. It would do so by prohibiting state or local government from entering into financial agreements with privately run detention facilities. The village, for example, could not be paid for providing infrastructure, such as sewer costs to the facility.

With Trump carrying 64 percent of the county in 2016, Elkhart might seem like fertile ground for an immigrant detention facility. But that did not prove to be the case.

The recent vote clearing the way for a detention center in Dwight, a village with a population estimated at 4,260, occurred just five weeks after Village Board President Jared Anderson announced that the Planning Commission would consider the issue.

Anderson reportedly said he had been negotiating with the Virginia-based Immigration Centers of America for two years.

In Gary, Indiana, groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Northwest Indiana Federation of Interfaith Organizations rallied against a detention facility proposed by The GEO Group and planned for land across from the Gary/Chicago International Airport.

“A facility there would be no different than mass incarceration for people who have not committed a crime,” says Ruth Needleman, a longtime activist who helped organize local opposition.

Another theme that reverberated, notes Needleman, who taught labor studies at Indiana University in Gary, is the inhumanity of making money from detaining people who have not committed a crime.

The opponents to the detention center began organizing in 2015, and continued to apply pressure until May 2016, when the Gary Common Council voted 9 to 0 against rezoning land to allow its use for a detention facility.

Organizing began at weekly meetings of the Interfaith Organizations and gained steam on Needleman’s weekly radio show, with Tsao and Detention Watch Network activists calling in.

Protesters—with “no GEO” signs—held vigils at City Hall and spoke at Common Council and Board of Zoning Appeals meetings.

In Elkhart County, Indiana, Richard Aguirre, an administrator with Goshen College active in immigrant rights, began organizing the opposition as soon as he learned in November 2017 that Elkhart officials were considering a proposal from CoreCivic for an immigrant detention facility.

With Trump carrying 64 percent of the county in 2016, Elkhart might seem like fertile ground for an immigrant detention facility. But that did not prove to be the case.

Members of the Latinx community make up about 15 percent of the county’s population, and are an important part of the local workforce in a county that has a thriving recreational vehicle industry.

“It’s one thing to say you don’t want them to cross the border,” says Aguirre, who is of Mexican heritage. “But once they are living in your community and contributing, there’s a different attitude.”

On January 18, 2018, Goshen Mayor Jeremy Stutsman released an “Open letter to Elkhart County leaders and residents,” which was signed by him, along with various community and business leaders, including the Goshen and Greater Elkhart Chambers of Commerce. Goshen is the county seat.

“Any tax dollars generated by the project wouldn’t be enough to offset the long-lasting damage such a facility would do to our county—both in terms of perception and in terms of creating an unwanted unwelcoming reputation,” says the letter.

CoreCivic withdrew its proposal four days later.