Tacoma’s ICE detention center battle isn’t where you think it is | Opinion
Tacoma city council member Olgy Diaz has some “points of frustration” when it comes to recent calls from activists for Tacoma to get the ICE detention center out of the city. The first is that Tacoma has already gone to the mat several times on the issue.
She’s right. Nine years ago, Tacoma city council members started looking for ways to restrict what’s now called the Northwest ICE Processing Center. The city and state lawmakers encountered numerous hurdles and legal challenges, and a federal appeals court ruling blocked a path to completely eradicating the privately operated facility.
But Tacoma did win in ways that really matter now. Most importantly, a change in state zoning law let it stop the facility from getting any bigger, and block any more detention centers from opening in the city.
Still, activists from the Pierce County Immigration Alliance and other groups have protested at Tacoma City Council meetings and demanded during community forum periods that the city get the detention center out. They’ve suggested things like pulling the center’s business license and divesting from GEO Group, the private company that owns and operates the center under a contract with ICE.
Some inconvenient facts: cities need a legal reason to pull a business’s license, and Tacoma spokesperson Maria Lee said the city’s investment in GEO Group is about $33,000 of employee pension money. The money is in an index fund, Lee said, and the city can’t actively manage which businesses the fund invests in.
Diaz, who worked to get immigrant leaders into office with OneAmerica before her own election, realizes zoning law is not “sexy.” But she’s proud that Tacoma won those gains. And these days, she’s also relieved the zoning restrictions are already in place.
Here’s why: Tacoma is essentially off the list of places ICE can grow its detention capacity. And ICE is looking, buying giant warehouses around the country and fishing for communities in the Pacific Northwest to host enforcement agents and detention centers.
Just winning the ability to pass those limitations took Tacoma years, and then they had to be put in place. Other Washington localities are just now putting this approach in motion, Diaz said.
“Thank goodness we did that already,” she said, “It would be even more frustrating if we were actively doing that now.”
Diaz isn’t telling activists to let off the pressure. She welcomes them to keep demanding change from city council. She also wants them to diversify their efforts.
While the state legislature was in session, council members and the city government recommended concerned residents push for a slate of bills that would have affected immigration enforcement. They proposed a range of measures to regulate the existing detention center, add to immigrant worker protections and limit ICE enforcement agents’ ability to wear masks or engage with protesters.
Now the US Congress is debating funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and Diaz says residents can push lawmakers for changes to immigrant detention systems at that level.
“Do both,” she said. “I’m your Tuesday-night opportunity to address your government, but you need to tell the other guys who are actually holding the purse strings right now, and have an unprecedented moment to actually start taking away the funding or do more regulation.”
Diaz is nicer than I am, at least when talking to the press. I’d put this whole thing more starkly. It makes no sense for activists to pitch the fight to shut down the detention center as a battle between themselves and the city council. And it’s a bad strategy.
I talked with Gemini Gnull, co-founder and former chair of the Climate Alliance of the South Sound, which has joined in calls for the city to shut the detention center down and divest retirement funds from GEO Group. She made some compelling points, and others I see differently. First, she said her group doesn’t trust the city to enforce its ban on the detention center growing or another one coming into the city. After the city spent years lobbying the state and fighting in court for the right to put the zoning restrictions in place, I just don’t see that.
Second, she said the city council has grounds to pull the detention center’s business license based on its track record with health and safety. That’s promising, but the city can’t just gesture at these problems as its reason.
After the city and state spent years fighting for the right to restrict and regulate the detention center, officials know they need to have a legally airtight basis for pulling its business license. To do otherwise would waste time and money, getting no closer to the goal.
The ICE detention center was always a mistake. It’s built by a toxic sludge field on the Tideflats. The way it came to open in Tacoma in 2004 is politically dubious at best. Local activists were concerned from the very beginning, and rightly called on the city council to take action for years before anything happened.
Once the first Trump administration began in 2017 and more people mobilized against the facility, things got rolling. Even back then, it was late in the game, but change did happen.
You don’t have to be nice to your city leaders. Demand away. And it’s wise to push back when leaders say they’ve inherited a problem they can’t change. Pressure tells them to keep looking for solutions and not grow complacent.
“There’s a reason that every successful civil rights movement has had marches in the streets and protests and mass engagement,” Gnull told me, “and it’s because it works.”
I agree. But I don’t see how the Tacoma City Council has the power to vote the detention center out of existence, or to take a swipe at its operator by pulling less than $40,000 from an index fund.
That doesn’t mean the city or activists need to throw up their hands. But they need to find smart ways to fight.
