Two decades after welcoming it, Tacoma fights to close the NW ICE Processing Center
More than 20 years ago, elected leaders in Tacoma gave their full support to a plan to build the privately operated facility that would become the Northwest ICE Processing Center.
This week, a legislative effort designed in part to correct that grave mistake took a significant step toward becoming a reality.
On Tuesday, the state House of Representatives passed House Bill 1090. Sponsored by Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, D-Mukilteo, the bill would ban private prisons and detention facilities, including the one operated by the Geo Group on the Tideflats. It passed the House with significant bipartisan support, and now moves on to the state Senate.
In Tacoma, what has transpired in the two decades since the former site of an industrial meat packing plant became one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country is nothing short of a complete 180-degree turn.
If the facility was welcomed with open arms by some leaders — and many residents were either oblivious or remained willfully unaware — the tide has firmly turned in the other direction.
On Thursday, current Tacoma City Council member Catherine Ushka — who represented the city in testimony supporting HB 1090 in Olympia earlier this year — described Tacoma’s privately operated immigration detention center as a vector of “human despair.”
What happens inside the facility — where more than 46,000 immigrants facing deportation proceedings have been detained since it opened — is simply “not OK,” Ushka said.
“It’s been heart-wrenching,” Ushka said when asked what it’s been like working to make Tacoma a more welcoming city for all while the Northwest ICE Processing Center has operated in our backyard.
It’s a stark contrast from where the conversation over immigrant detention began in Tacoma, and some of the points it has evolved to over the years in between. While many city leaders embraced the jobs the facility would supposedly bring when it was proposed, and plenty who came after them stayed mum or felt powerless, Ushka’s support of banning private prisons and detention centers in Washington now represents the prevailing view at City Hall.
Even Ushka’s views have changed over time, she said. While she’s long been critical of the facility and has supported city efforts to exert local control in hopes of improving conditions, in the past she has questioned whether closing it would do more harm than good for those inside if changes to federal policy didn’t come first.
Ushka said she now believes that the move to ban private prisons and detention centers in Washington — similar to efforts in California and elsewhere across the country — are part of a trend that will lead to fewer immigrants being detained while advancing the push for broader national reform.
Ushka said her evolution of thought is a result of working with immigrant groups and advocates over the years.
“I really leaned in and listened,” Ushka said.
In many ways, Ushka’s pivot mirrors the city’s. According to Anita Gallagher, assistant to Tacoma City Manager Elizabeth Pauli on policy development and government relations, supporting HB 1090 was a legislative priority in 2021.
As a city government, Tacoma wants to see Northwest ICE Processing Center shuttered, Gallagher said. In addition to harboring concerns about human safety and potential violations of rights, Gallagher noted that the city has been frustrated by the lack of information it’s been able to gather about the facility. Gallagher said she’s often been forced to rely on Freedom of Information Act requests to try to learn what goes on there.
Gallagher said she’s increasingly hopeful the HB 1090 will succeed.
She also acknowledged the work that would remain even if the effort passes and is signed into law.
“I think that a weight would be lifted from our shoulders as the city,” Gallagher said. “But if there is still an inhumane immigration enforcement system carrying on in this country, the nature of our work just kind of changes a little bit. ...This facility is one piece of a pretty big puzzle, and that puzzle is still there, and it still needs to be solved.”
Under Ortiz’s bill — which has the support of Tacoma’s local delegation in Olympia, including Jake Fey and Laurie Jinkins — the Northwest ICE Processing Center would be allowed to continue operation only until 2025 when the GEO Group’s contract with the federal government expires. Then, barring a successful court challenge or what Gallagher described as an unlikely scenario where the federal government took over operation of the facility, it would close.
For Maru Mora Villalpando — a Mexican native and activist who is still fighting her own deportation case — it’s an outcome long overdue.
A vocal community organizer with La Resistencia, Mora-Villalpando has been consistent in her demands the facility be closed and those detained inside without just cause released.
Mora-Villalpando noted that La Resistancia is a grassroots organization founded in 2014 to support hunger strikes inside the detention center.
By highlighting concerns about the facility, she said, activists have helped sway public opinion in favor of banning privately run detention centers, including a number of House Republicans who voted in support of the bill.
“We have not stopped. We believe in what we’re doing,” Mora-Villalpando said. “We’re serious community organizers — people who have been impacted and people that have the experience.”
Like Mora-Villalpando, Vanessa Reyes is adamant that the detention of immigrants facing deportation proceedings isn’t necessary.
As coordinator of the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network’s Fair Fight Bond Fund — which has provided no-interest bond payments for the release of 40 people at the detention center since it was created in 2018 — Reyes said it’s important for people to understand that detainment isn’t an inherent part of a deportation case.
Large-scale detainment is a fairly new trend, and, in most instances, there’s simply no need for an individual facing a civil deportation proceeding to be locked up, she said.
Immigrants facing deportation regularly show up for their court cases when they’re allowed to stay in their communities, Reyes said, and have far more access to resources to successfully make their cases on the outside.
Then there’s the potential physical and emotional toll of confinement, Reyes said.
“When people are in detention and they’re trying to fight their immigration case, they are more likely to lose because they don’t have access to an attorney a lot of the time … or resources to fight their case. So it’s a huge violation of people’s rights and due process,” Reyes said. “And they’re separated from their family.”
According to Tim Warden-Hertz, the directing attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, the argument that detention centers like the one in Tacoma aren’t necessary has been validated by recent history.
Partially in response to COVID-19, the number of individuals detained in detention centers across the country has decreased, Warden-Hertz noted, leading ICE to consider expanding alternatives like ankle-monitoring bracelets and more bonded releases.
The existence of these alternatives and their viability demonstrate there’s simply no need to have a detention facility like the one in Tacoma, which can hold roughly 1,500 people, he said.
“If you look in the 1980s, there were a couple thousand people detained across the country at any one time. And if you look a couple years before the pandemic, it was 50,000,” Warden-Hertz said. “We don’t need the Northwest detention center at all, or other detention centers.”
Watching the action in Olympia from afar, Ushka said she’s hopeful that HB 1090 will help to accomplish both objectives.
For Washington, banning private prisons and detention centers would be a powerful statement about right and wrong, she believes, while adding to the momentum of similar moves across the country.
For Tacoma, it would help to close a dark chapter in the city’s history, she said.
“It puts us in a place where we have to lead on it,” Ushka said of the fight to ban private prisons and detention centers, and what the last two decades have taught us.
This story was originally published February 28, 2021 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Two decades after welcoming it, Tacoma fights to close the NW ICE Processing Center."
