WASHINGTON, D.C. – Seven senators, including two from California, wrote to the U.S. Attorney General objecting to a plan that would use federal prisons to detain immigrants “swept up in the Trump Administration’s mass deportation efforts,” and urged her to reconsider the move.
What we know:
Senate Judiciary Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Adam Schiff of California wrote the five-page letter Tuesday to AG Pam Bondi. The letter was also signed by Sens. Alex Padilla of California, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Peter Welch of Vermont and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.
A leaked memo obtained by KTVU, shows that the Bureau of Prisons entered into a contract with ICE this month to use five prisons in Atlanta, Kansas, Philadelphia, Miami and New Hampshire for immigration detention centers.
A union official also told KTVU that ICE officials visited the now-closed FCI Dublin in the San Francisco Bay Area on Feb. 14 and 15 to possibly turn that facility into an ICE detention center as well.
The senators’ letter came on the same day that two Bay Area Congressional leaders also voiced the same concerns over FCI Dublin specifically, citing the prison’s history of sexual abuse and its current hazardous state of being plagued by asbestos and mold.
Bondi’s office did not immediately respond Wednesday for comment.
Powerless in Prison: The fallout of FCI Dublin
In April, the Bureau of Prisons abruptly shut down the troubled FCI Dublin. KTVU interviews dozens of women and explains what led up to the closure, questioning whether this was retaliation for outside oversight over the prison, which has been riddled with sex abuse for decades.
Timeline:
The senators used Trump’s first administration in 2018 as the key reason why they say the plan to turn prisons into detention centers for immigrants is cruel and unconstitutional.
When immigrants, many of whom were seeking asylum and were not criminals, were held in prisons seven years ago, they were not given access to lawyers, religious rights, phone calls, educational programs or clean clothing.
Attorney Don Specter of the Prison Law Office in Berkeley represented these immigrants who sued the U.S. government in a class-action suit over what they described as harsh conditions at a medium-security prison in Victorville, California.
The senators emphasized that the Department of Homeland Security must uphold U.S. detention standards, which include providing access to medical and mental health care, language services, lawyers and limitations on solitary confinement.
“Despite this troubling history,” the senators wrote, “the current Trump Administration is apparently relying on the same poorly conceived detention scheme.”
Dig deeper:
The senators noted that despite an order that the Bureau of Prisons must access all Department of Homeland detainees, there was no “meaningful guidance or direction” as to how to balance having civil immigration detainees co-exist ina prison setting with a criminally incarcerated population.
The senators also noted that the BOP is chronically understaffed, has no money and a crumbling infrastructure – situations that long predate adding an influx of immigrants into the mix.
Former BOP Director Colette Peters testified last February that the prison system has a maintenance and repair backlog of about $3 billion.
It’s so dire, the senators wrote, that the safety of prison staff, 143,000 prisoners and immigrant detainees are at risk.
By the numbers:
Trump has vowed to deport millions of the estimated 11.7 million people in the U.S. illegally.
As of Feb. 5, the Associated Press reported that ICE has the budget to detain only about 41,000 people and the administration has not said how many detention beds it needs to achieve its goals.
ICE averaged 787 arrests a day from Jan. 23 to Jan. 31, compared to a daily average of 311 during a 12-month period that ended Sept. 30 during former President Joe Biden’s administration. ICE has stopped publishing daily arrest totals.
