With ICE 'going after the farmworkers,' county jails make money

Oregonians take pride in the state’s “sanctuary” posture, but immigrant detainees from ICE are being held in county jails on a daily basis – for money. A movement in Oregon and elsewhere is pushing to get them out.

by Joanne Zuhl | 17 May 2017

On a sunny Saturday in early May, Ramon Ramirez stands outside The Dalles’ Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Center, or NORCOR, protesting in solidarity with the immigrant detainees incarcerated inside.

But for a moment, his eyes are on the sunlit hills that frame this breezy agricultural community.

“You see all those trees? Those are cherry trees,” Ramirez said. “Right now those growers don’t have anybody to pick those trees, and they’re going to need picking soon.”

Ramirez is the president of the farmworkers union PCUN – Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. The anti-immigrant policies emanating from the Trump administration, followed by aggressive tactics taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is keeping workers away from Oregon’s lucrative fields, he said.

“ICE is not going after the criminals,” Ramirez said. “They’re going after the farmworkers.”

The contrast between the immigrant role in the local community and what’s happening at NORCOR weighs heavy on Ramirez.


        Ramon Ramirez is the president of the farmworkers union PCUN – Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste.   

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

A few hundred yards away, inside the windowless NORCOR facility, five detainees of ICE recently staged a hunger strike protesting their conditions. They had been transferred to NORCOR from the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., and there is speculation at least one was moved to break up the hunger strike in Tacoma. There, for several weeks in April, an estimated 750 detainees held a hunger strike to raise awareness of the treatment of ICE prisoners. The strike has since been suspended, there and at NORCOR, but the community outrage at the facility’s cozy relationship with ICE and the incarceration of immigrants continues.

At NORCOR, Ramirez is part of a coordinated opposition to the jail’s relationship with ICE. The opposition is led by Gorge ICE Resistance, a coalition of organizations in the Columbia River Gorge that has formed to support the NORCOR hunger strikers, including Gorge Ecumenical Ministries, Somos Uno, Hood River Latino Network, Mid-Columbia Community Action Network, Gorge ReSisters, Community Action Network, Grassroots IMPACT and Protect Oregon’s Progress.

On May 6, they held a rally to protest the jail. They’ve held a presence there every evening since the start of May.

They are joined by the Rural Organizing Project, which works with a network of grassroots organization across the state. The ACLU of Oregon is also involved, coming to the jail and talking with the detainees about their conditions and their rights.

The protesters say they aren’t going to stop their daily demonstrations until ICE is out of NORCOR. Opponents to the jail say the relationship – in which ICE contracts with NORCOR to incarcerate immigration violators in the deportation process – violates state statute prohibiting comingling of local and federal resources. Nor should the detainees be treated as criminals – most immigration-only violations are either misdemeanors or civil violations.

“There are other ways you can make money, not on the backs of immigrant workers, who, by the way, put food on the table, day in and day out, for Oregonians,” Ramirez said. “And we should be proud that we have a workforce that’s working for cheap to put food on the table, and yet this is what we afford them? This is how we recognize their contributions to our livelihood, by imprisoning them in a place like this at taxpayers’ expense? That’s not right.

“What kind of message are you sending to the state of Oregon and these farmers who employ thousands and thousands of farmworkers and then you have a jail here that houses them?” Ramirez said. “What worker in their right mind is going to want to work these fields. The state has got to come out and say, ‘NORCOR, you’ve got to end your contracts.’”

The ACLU of Oregon is looking into the legal side of the relationship.

“In Oregon, we think that it is a clear violation of state law for local facilities to house ICE detainees and we are currently deeply investigating the various ways in which we could take action,” said Mat dos Santos, legal director of the ACLU of Oregon. “They built a facility they cannot afford to run so they’re trying to use the federal government funding to correct for their bad financial planning.”


        The Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Center, or NORCOR, is a multi-county jail in The Dalles.  

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

•••

NORCOR opened in 1999, a four-county collaborative of Wasco, Hood River, Gilliam and Sherman counties, which all pay set percentages to cover the jail’s costs. The jail is overseen by a board of directors and a rotating sheriff representative, and is run by an administrator. By its own account, NORCOR is one of only a handful of facilities in the country that apply a multi-county approach to the management of inmates.

The construction bond for the jail was paid off in 2016, but now the facility is seeking a levy on the four counties to help cover future expenses, which will approach $9 million, according to the 2017-18 budget.

NORCOR took in more than a half million dollars last year locking up ICE detainees. This year, the jail is anticipating twice as much activity, and has budgeted more than $1 million in ICE revenue to cover 40 inmates per day. Altogether, the facility has up to 212 adult beds. The jail also has juvenile facilities for youths as young as 12, and reports holding juvenile ICE detainees in addition to adults.

Jails commonly contract with multiple government agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and tribal organizations. Locally, NORCOR has also contracted with Wheeler, Skamania, Klickitat and Jefferson counties. Down the road, Umatilla County Jail takes in ICE detainees on a short-term basis, receiving $50 per person for the night. In perennially cash-strapped Josephine County, ICE has temporarily housed numerous detainees in the local jail as part of an intergovernmental agreement.

In fact, there are 211 immigration detention facilities across the country, said Christina Fialho, an attorney and the co-founder and executive director of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement, or CIVIC. Of those, 147 of them are county or city jails that contract with ICE. The vast majority of detainees, however, are held in privately run facilities, such as the Tacoma detention center.

CIVIC is a national immigration detention visitation network with the mission of ending U.S. immigration detention. The organization visits people in 43 of the largest immigration detention facilities and operates a national hotline that allows detainees to call in for free and report human and civil rights violations.

“ICE has already begun to renegotiate some contracts to expand the number of people that can be detained at various county jails,” Fialho said. “The federal government usually pays the private prison or the county a set dollar amount per person per day. So, if the number of people in detention in a county increases, then the county stands to benefit financially.”

According to the April meeting minutes of NORCOR’s Board of Directors, the fees charged for additional contract beds exceed the cost of housing the contract detainees, which runs about $18 to $22 per person per day. The contract money fully covers that cost, with the rest going to offset the cost to the four counties for housing local inmates – which runs about $150 per person per day, NORCOR Administrator Bryan Brandenburg told the directors. The minutes are available in draft form on NORCOR’s website.

Fialho said local jails can also make additional money off detainees through immigrant labor, lucrative private prison phone contracts, and commissary revenue, among other charges. For example, video visitation services cost $7.50 for a half hour. Aside from attorney visits, there are no face-to-face meetings allowed between the detainees and visitors. Telephone calls cost 25 cents per minute at NORCOR.

And the Trump administration’s order expanding deportation actions is expected to exacerbate the length of detentions, which are already protracted by a nationwide backlog of cases in the immigration courts. The longer a detainee is incarcerated, the more revenue he or she will generate.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, reported in February that there were 534,000 cases pending on immigration court dockets nationwide – a record high.

“Trump’s obsession with imprisoning people for profit is both fiscally irresponsible and morally bankrupt,” Fialho said. “There are community-based alternatives to detention that are more humane and less costly than detention. However, as long as counties stand to profit from imprisoning immigrants, Congress seems to have little incentive to curtail immigration detention expansion.”


        A sign is displayed at the May 6, 2017, rally outside NORCOR in solidarity with detained hunger strikers and in protest of allowing ICE detainees to be incarcerated there.    

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

•••

Oregon statute states that no Oregon law enforcement agency shall use agency moneys, equipment or personnel for the purpose of detecting or apprehending people whose only violation is against federal immigration laws. Nonetheless, in years past, ICE encouraged cooperation through its Secure Communities and related programs that authorized local officers to perform immigration enforcement, including holding detainees.

In 2014, a lawsuit against Clackamas County helped dismantle the practice of these so-called ICE holds in Oregon. In Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas County, a district judge ruled that the practice violates Fourth Amendment rights, that the detention in that case was unlawful, and that the jail had legal standing to refuse ICE’s request to hold someone beyond their legal authority. Counties that said they had been cooperating with ICE on immigration holds soon said they were ceasing to do so in accordance with state law.

By 2015, the federal Secure Communities program was officially discontinued, and replaced with the Priority Enforcement Program. Trump’s executive order reinstates Secure Communities. The Department of Homeland Security says it will require local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration cases and even have local officers deputized as immigration agents to make arrests.

Brandenburg, NORCOR’s administrator, told Street Roots they weren’t violating state statute. The relationship is a contractual one, with ICE covering all the costs of holding the detainees.

“They move people in and out of here fairly regularly,” Brandenburg said. “And it’s usually based on the fact that they’re overcrowded, and currently they’re not overcrowded, which is why we have so few folks at NORCOR.”

As of press time, Brandenburg confirmed there were four ICE detainees at NORCOR, but they have accommodated around 40 at a time in the past.


        Mat dos Santos is legal director of the ACLU of Oregon.  

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

The ACLU’s dos Santos said he still believes the statute applies, regardless of whether the jail is getting paid for the service.

“In fact the law says the exact opposite,” dos Santos said. “You’re not allowed to use money, but you’re also not allowed to use facilities or personnel. If it was just about money, why include facilities or personnel?”

NORCOR policy states that all detainees that are sent to NORCOR have final removal orders and are awaiting completion of the process. The NORCOR policy also states, however, that it does turn information on its arrestees over to ICE and that jail staff will detain a person if NORCOR receives a formal order from ICE to do so.

Last week, a spokeswoman for Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The Associated Press that because NORCOR isn’t using resources to detect or apprehend people, it does not appear to be violating state statute.

dos Santos disagreed with the attorney general’s position.

“It’s an unfortunate statement, and it’s also legally incorrect,” dos Santos said. “I think that the state has the prerogative for limiting agencies and what actions they can take. And this law has existed since 1987, and it’s absolutely within the state’s jurisdiction to prohibit agencies like law enforcement from enforcing federal immigration law. That’s really what the 10th Amendment is all about, right? The federal government cannot commandeer state resources. It’s different with the state saying we’re OK with it. If the state says we’re not OK with it, the 10th Amendment is a hard stop.”

If the Oregon statute appears to be in the way of federal policy, a repeal effort hopes to clear the path. A small group of Oregon lawmakers have put forward a bill to not only end the statute, but also require that local law enforcement cooperate with ICE and comply with immigration detainer requests. Without leadership support, the bill is unlikely to go anywhere, and Gov. Kate Brown has reaffirmed the state statute with an executive order.

In California, lawmakers are considering a bill intended to take out the financial incentive to overbuild for outside interests such as ICE by cutting off expansion and improvement funds to facilities that lease space to public and private entities. The “Dignity not Detention” bill doesn’t abolish those contracts with ICE, but those facilities that continue to contract with ICE after 2018 would not receive prison realignment funds. And it also puts a 10-year moratorium on any jail receiving the funds from renting out the space after an expansion. The bill would not affect jails that rent only to county or state entities.

The bill is of particular interest to the people in Contra Costa County, Calif., where the local jail leases 200 beds to ICE in exchange for $3 million a year. Meanwhile, the county is moving forward to seek a $70 million grant from the state to add a new wing with space for 400 beds.

Another proposal in California would adopt similar language to Oregon’s statute to “prohibit state and local law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from using resources to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect, or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes.”

The state of California is second only to Texas in the number of detainees in ICE custody.

This month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot signed into law a policy that bans sanctuary cities in that state, requiring local law officers there to work on federal immigration enforcement, regardless of local ordinances. In its crosshairs is Travis County, home of Austin, which currently restricts local officers from cooperating with immigration enforcement.

•••


        A close-up of a banner displayed at the May 6, 2017, rally outside NORCOR in solidarity with detained hunger strikers and in protest of allowing ICE detainees to be incarcerated there.    

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

The hunger strike at NORCOR lasted only a few days before concessions were made, including providing a microwave and a radio, access to group sessions, and to work, which is the only way an inmate can make money inside to cover common costs, such as charges to make phone calls. In the meantime, family and advocates in the community have been putting money into the detainees’ accounts.

Jessica Campbell with the Rural Organizing Project said that the detainees inside NORCOR have asked to remain anonymous to prevent any retaliation.

“We are not releasing any information that could identify the detainees, and retaliation is a huge part of the issue, and that’s actually one of the demands coming out of Tacoma: no retaliation for them hunger striking,” Campbell said. “There has been retaliation of putting people in solitary, of putting people into NORCOR, or transferring people away from their lawyers and their families. It’s a major, major concern.”

As an attorney, dos Santos has been speaking regularly with the detainees inside the jail. They described the conditions to him and their requests. The facility is windowless, and the outdoor space is surrounded by solid walls with a mesh covering an open roof. One said he had been in NORCOR for more than a year, dos Santos said.

“These are people who had at some point some interaction with the criminal justice system, but left me thinking they’re actually incredibly good people,” dos Santos said. “And to be clear – they’ve served their actual criminal time. They’re all being held in there for administrative immigration reasons – civil reasons.”

dos Santos also said that the process of transferring and deporting individuals is often beyond the reach of family members. People have been deported with their families only being notified once the person calls from the other country, he said.

“This is an opaque system that literally disappears people and you can’t find them,” dos Santos said. “It’s one thing to be an attorney to try to advocate on behalf of these people, but imagine if this was your son or your husband or your wife? Not being able to get a hold of your family, not knowing where they were – whether they’re in Oregon, Washington or North Carolina?”

Fialho calls ICE an untrustworthy partner for municipalities.

“ICE is an unaccountable agency that engages in deceptive and coercive practices, both in its dealings with immigrants and with the greater public,” Fialho said. “For example, there are frequent accounts of people being coerced into signing away their rights to see an immigration judge and fight their immigration case, without even realizing that these rights exist. Moreover, CIVIC’s investigations into sexual assault in immigration detention and medical care show that the immigration detention system itself is inhumane.”

In April, CIVIC filed a federal complaint with Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, calling for an investigation into the reports of sexual abuse, assaults and harassment inside immigration detention facilities.

And there’s a larger impact on the community, Fialho said.

“Contracting with ICE to detain people erodes public trust and credibility in local authorities,” Fialho said. “If local authorities are seen as agents of ICE, people are less likely to report crime or to serve as witnesses. This applies not only to people with immigration issues but also to U.S. citizens who may have undocumented family members or other reasons to fear becoming an ICE target.”

Sandra Hernandez is with Latinos Unidos Siempre, which works to educate and empower Latino youth for social change. She came up from Salem to join the protest. With Latinos Unidos Siempre, Hernandez works with youths – the vast majority of them immigrants – whose lives have been thrown into chaos by aggressive immigration policies.

“In my work with our youth, there’s a lot of trauma and toxic stress,” Hernandez said. “When there’s someone in your family going through the system just simply because they’re an immigrant, you have a family worried about what’s going on with that person. They’re not worried about their health, they’re not worried about their education, because there’s no time to worry about that. It affects people from their physical to their mental health,” she said.

“When we talk about ICE, it’s not just someone incarcerated,” Hernandez said. “It spreads to the whole family, and everyone worries about what’s going to happen. It’s like limbo – there is no moving forward; there is no going back. Sometimes they don’t know what’s going on with the person until months later.”

Hernandez said the children have seen their parents preparing for emergencies should they be deported, talking about who will get their home and where the children will stay.

“That process is really traumatizing for the youth,” she said. “I’ve had youth come to me and say they’re really scared because they see their parents signing all this paperwork and they don’t know what’s going to happen to them. They’re preparing for the worst. If you’ve never experienced that, it’s hard to understand what it’s like.”


        Rosanna Schneider with Gorge ICE Resistance speaks to the crowd outside the NORCOR jail in The Dalles. About 150 people rallied there on May 6, 2017.
  

        Photo by Joanne Zuhl

Rosanna Schneider with Gorge ICE Resistance said the ICE involvement in her community is deeply upsetting.

“It is definitely heartbreaking to know that my tax dollars as a property owner and as a general citizen in this city, in this county and this state, are going to these things,” Schneider said. “It is really vital that we inform people and have access to these decisions, and to remind them that there are people at the end of this. You may have opinions about immigration, about what you’re paying for, what you’re not paying for, what they deserve, what they don’t deserve. Whether they deserve to starve. But at the end of it, they’re just people.”

Email Managing Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org.

Tags:

Immigrants and Refugees, criminal justice reform, Rural Communities, Agriculture