Jandos Rothstein
One man detained at an ICE detention center in Virginia described the dormitory-style sleeping area as like a church. “It’s the best example I can give,” he wrote in a recent court declaration. Aisles cut through rows of stacked bunk beds that, like pews, are mere feet apart. Seventy or 80 detained individuals sleep here, in a single, windowless room. “The guards tell us to keep our distance from other people,” the man wrote, “but it is not possible in the dorms.”
Almost 90 percent of detainees in this facility, ICA-Farmville, have tested positive for the coronavirus; 259 of its 298 residents. As of August, this is the worst virus outbreak at any ICE detention center in the country. Multiple ICA-Farmville detainees have been hospitalized. Those who have remained at the facility say they have not received adequate medical care. Protests by detainees have been met with pepper spray.
Alex, a man currently detained in Farmville, told me in a phone call from the facility that “all they give us is Tylenol.” (The Prospect is using a pseudonym for his safety.) He tested positive for coronavirus in June. “We’re afraid to be here. Afraid some of us are not going to make it.” Hours after I spoke with Alex, on August 5, a 72-year-old man detained at Farmville died at a nearby hospital. ICE has not confirmed the cause of death, but said he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Almost 90 percent of detainees in ICA-Farmville have tested positive for the coronavirus; 259 of its 298 residents.
The coronavirus arrived at ICA-Farmville two months ago. On June 2, ICE flew 74 people out from detention centers in Florida and Arizona, to be transferred to Virginia. Despite 51 of them testing positive for the virus upon arrival, they were taken into the facility anyway. “Once they brought those people in … it spread like wildfire,” Alex said. An ICA spokesperson wrote to me that the facility took “extensive measures” to prevent spread, and “follow[ed] CDC guidelines.” But by mid-July, there were 200 more cases of the virus.
These transfers, which ICE has continued through the pandemic with little explanation, have efficiently spread coronavirus to detained immigrants across the country. In Farmville, the result has been devastating. Alex’s infection was so severe that he was hospitalized for days. He has since returned to the facility, where he is continuing to battle symptoms armed only with an occasional handful of Tylenol pills.
For the corporations that run ICE’s detention centers, transfers are lucrative. Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the for-profit company that operates the Farmville facility, receives its funding from ICE on a per-resident, per-day basis. The more detained individuals ICA has in its custody, the more money the company makes. According to the rates in a 2019 contract, ICA likely raked in tens of thousands of dollars from the June 2 transfer alone, regardless of the health catastrophe it caused.
Over the last decade, Immigration Centers of America has made millions in the private detention business. It has also faced countless lawsuits, grievances, and allegations of abuse, from employees and detained immigrants alike. Public records show that at times, the company has crowded its facility beyond capacity and lobbied ICE to send it as many detainees as possible. As one former detention officer at ICA-Farmville told me, subjects in detention were “force[d] to be products and not humans.”
The outbreak at ICA-Farmville is the latest casualty of for-profit detention, an industry that has flourished for decades in the U.S., cultivating support on both sides of the political aisle. While we typically hear about for-profit detention in terms of state and federal prisons, immigration detention is the real growth market for these companies. Nationally, around 70 percent of detained immigrants are now held in for-profit facilities. In Farmville, Virginia, a tangled ecosystem of companies, lobbyists, and subcontractors has profited off the imprisonment of immigrants for a decade. It is a striking case study in the ways that private detention can take hold of a town, and exact a devastating toll on immigrant communities.
“WE HAD THIS industry or nothing,” a Farmville town council member told The Washington Post in 2008. At that time, the small Southern town was reckoning with plans for an ICE detention center on its outskirts. ICA was a new company then, established just a year prior by a Richmond real estate tycoon. It had no experience in detention to speak of, but it had a good pitch: The facility would bring jobs to Farmville, which was reeling from the recession and the slow death of the manufacturing industry. The town would get a cut of the company’s profits. “I’m tickled to death with it,” another council member said. Two years later, ICA-Farmville opened its doors.
From the beginning, ICA had the backing of Virginia’s most powerful. Ken Cuccinelli, then Virginia’s attorney general (now a DHS deputy cracking down on peaceful protesters), advocated fiercely on ICA’s behalf in 2008, against ICE’s own humanitarian concerns. In former town manager Gerald Spates’s telling, ICE initially planned to bring 500 detainees to Farmville, but ICA wanted to house 300 more, to maximize its early profits. Cuccinelli stepped in, ICE’s concerns about space swiftly dissolved, and ICA made its money.
The outbreak at ICA-Farmville is the latest casualty of for-profit detention, an industry that has flourished for decades, cultivating support on both sides of the political aisle.
Each year, budget documents show, the town of Farmville receives about a $200,000 cut of ICA’s profits, around 2 percent of its annual budget. Last year, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) published a series of documents, obtained through public-records requests, that revealed the kickback scheme in great detail, including emails between the town treasurer and ICA discussing the movement of individuals to Farmville in cold, flippant terms. “I’m feeling lucky today so I wanted to check in on our funds. Has anything shown up?” ICA’s CFO wrote to the town in 2019. She was awaiting a $1.8 million payment from ICE, to be facilitated by Farmville’s treasurer.
Perhaps because of this dependency, Farmville politicians continued to praise ICA, even as the company began to face waves of abuse allegations. “We just want to thank you very much for everything you’ve done,” Spates told ICA in a glowing public address in 2015. By that time, former detainees had alleged in various lawsuits that the facility lacked proper hygiene, did not provide adequate religious accommodations, and served trays of maggot-infested food. One ICA employee had died in a forced violent training exercise, and his family had filed a wrongful-death suit. An oversight inspection had found that the facility routinely conducted strip searches without reasonable suspicion. DHS even launched its own oversight investigation.
ICA has continually pushed its detention to the limits, creating conditions ripe for disease outbreaks and guard violence. While the facility has self-reported that its bed capacity is 722, in May 2019, the number of residents at the facility reached nearly 800. A former detention officer described to me frequent overcrowding in the years he worked there. “Detainees in a dorm [were] using cots and mattresses in the living quarters,” he said. In addition, officers were forced to work continual 12-hour shifts with mandatory overtime, leaving them dangerously exhausted. “Morale is horrible,” he told me. (An ICA spokesperson wrote in response that the facility has “one of the lowest [employee] turnover rates in the country,” though they did not provide figures.)
Last June, a mumps outbreak struck the facility, infecting 26 in an eerie foreshadowing of things to come. After the facility failed to contain the initial outbreak, the entire population was put under a harsh quarantine, court documents show. When coronavirus arrived a year later, ICA fared no better.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Screenshot from video footage capturing life inside ICE’s Farmville detention center, December 2019
ON JULY 25, Brenda Pereira Vargas marched under the afternoon sun to the grounds of ICA-Farmville, demanding the release of ICE detainees. She led a small group of demonstrators. The modest turnout of 20 people, she told me, had pleasantly surprised her, after years of organizing in Farmville. “There’s a lot of disconnect when it comes to the detention center,” she explained. Many Farmville residents she has spoken to hardly know of the facility, which is located a mile out of town down a gated road. Local organizers, she says, have struggled to mobilize the town against ICA, even during moments of crisis. Rumors fly that “ICA has Farmville in their back pocket.”
On the day of the protest, demonstrators stood at the entrance to the complex, some banging drums, others chanting. “We really wanted the people inside to hear us,” Pereira Vargas said, but they were quickly blocked by police. “We couldn’t even get past the front gate.”
Jesse Franzblau, an analyst with NIJC who worked on its Farmville investigation, takes issue with the notion that ICA has brought the economic prosperity to Farmville that the company claims. “It’s a pretty minimal part of the town budget,” he said, “and any town that relies on this is pretty bad at budgeting anyway.” Its political success—that untarnished reputation among town officials—is rather buoyed by lobbying, and a web of elite connections.
Across the country, private detention firms have burned up millions on political lobbying, in an endless attempt to win favorability among legislators, even as public opinion turns increasingly against for-profit detention. The industry is larger than just corporations like ICA, which operate detention facilities; it also includes the myriad subcontractor service providers that leech off privatized detention’s profits. ICA, for example, contracts out its medical services to a company called Armor Correctional Health Services, which has its own storied history of abuses. A local communications company charges detained residents at ICA-Farmville who want to contact their families. Another firm provides the facility’s food.
More than 4,000 individuals in ICE custody have contracted the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.
All of these companies have lavished staggering amounts of money on candidates and consultants nationwide. According to federal lobbying reports, ICA hired a consulting company in 2011 for $50,000 to “assist [ICA] to reach maximum inmate capacity.” Armor has donated nearly $70,000 to Virginia politicians since 2013, including $25,000 to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the state’s former governor. Armor has spent more than $1.2 million on other lobbying.
Over the last two years, ICA has hired 28 lobbyists in Michigan, according to data from the National Institute on Money in Politics. The company has set its sights on an acreage of farmland in Ionia, a small city west of Detroit, and has taken initial steps to build a new detention center there. In 2018, ICA sent Ionia a proposal for such a facility, full of the same kind of coaxing it used on Farmville a decade earlier. From 2013 to 2018, the proposal warns, “Ionia experienced a loss of 1,132 jobs.” ICA, it promises, will get the city its jobs back.
Meanwhile, more than 4,000 individuals in ICE custody have contracted the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic. The seven ICE facilities that have reported more than 150 cases of the virus are all privately operated.
As ICA looks to expand in the Midwest (it’s recently taken steps to do so outside Chicago, as well), Alex and the hundreds of sick people inside ICA-Farmville remain trapped. Adina Appelbaum, an attorney with CAIR Coalition, a group that provides legal services to ICE detainees in Virginia and Maryland, told me that ICE is “digging their heels in the ground” when it comes to relief. The group has submitted numerous requests for release for medically vulnerable people in Farmville to the agency, on grounds of humanitarian parole. “Every single one has been denied,” she said.
Inside the facility, people are terrified. “We’re calling and screaming, hey, somebody help us in here,” Alex told me. “I don’t think anybody is hearing us.”
