Campaign Action
Cities and leaders across the nation are steadily fighting back against the Trump administration’s mass deportation force. Local governments, from California to Virginia and “fueled largely by alarm” over the Trump administration’s brutal “zero tolerance” policy that has torn over 2,000 migrant children from the arms of parents at the U.S./Mexico border, have taken action to end contracts that have allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain immigrants in their facilities.
“Only about 11% of detainees were detained in facilities owned and operated by ICE,” Splinter’s Jorge Rivas reported, writing that “most immigrants are detained in for-profit facilities or county-run jails.” Local governments can’t stop federal immigration officials from conducting federal immigration enforcement in their localities, but they can decide to not aid this mass deportation force by not allowing federal immigration officials to hold immigrants in their facilities:
The City Council of Springfield in western Oregon voted unanimously to end yet another contract with ICE for housing immigrants in the municipal jail. And in Alexandria, Virginia, authorities put an end to a deal allowing ICE to house immigrant children in a juvenile detention center.
In Williamson County, Texas—where Donald Trump won by nine points in 2016—commissioners “voted 4 to 1 this week to end the county’s contract with ICE by 2019, an agreement under which nearly 40 mothers separated from their children have been held in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.” Following the vote, commissioner Terry Cook said that “dealing with ICE became distracting from the day-to-day operations of running our county. The federal government made their bed with its policies, so let them sleep in it. We did not need to be in the middle of this.”
NOT IN OUR NAME. Please attend an event near you on Saturday, June 30 to protest Trump's barbaric policy that has separated over 2,000 children from their parents & locked them in cages.
While the child separation crisis has no doubt escalated the pressure on local governments to end their “lucrative” contracts with ICE, unjust immigration policies stretching out over multiple administrations have been an economic boon for localities. “Many local sheriffs and city officials are forthcoming and say being able to lock up ICE detainees allow local governments to generate revenue,” Splinter reported. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Last year, activists successfully pushed ICE out of a Santa Ana facility, after their ongoing protests “pressured the city council not to renew the ICE contract set to expire in 2020; in the meantime, the city council agreed to limit the number of jail beds made available for immigrant detainees. ‘All of this created the conditions for ICE itself to cancel the contract,’” said activist Hairo Cortes of Orange County Immigrant Youth United.
More recently in the state, Sacramento County voted 3 to 2 to not renew its contract with ICE, one that was to make Sheriff Scott Jones’s department “$6.6 million in fed money to act as a kind of landlord to immigrants rounded up by ICE agents.” According to the Sacramento Bee, “that Sacramento had a deal with ICE at all was against the spirit of state law, which draws a clear line between what the feds do to enforce federal immigration laws, and what local law enforcement officials do to enforce state and local laws.”
But as the New York Times reports, not all localities are taking this approach, for their own reasons. In Yolo County, officials “voted this week to accept more than $2 million in additional federal money from the Office of Refugee Resettlement for holding immigrant children at a detention facility, overriding criticism.” David Lichtenhan of the Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network, “urged the county to go forward with the contract. ‘The kids are vulnerable and could end up being moved into a district that’s less favorable to immigrants than ours. That’s an outcome we sought to avoid.’” Or, we could just not detain children and their families, period.