Rep. Adelita Grijalva and Pima County Board Chair Jen Allen gathered with dozens of people in Marana to continue their opposition to a private immigration detention facility opening in the community.
Those outside the site of the former state prison in Marana on Wednesday could look out to the desert skies off in the distance and see the remnants of showers the day before. "You look at that cloudy sky we're standing under right now," Marana Town council member Patrick Cavanaugh told the Star. "There's going to be a dark cloud over Marana for many years if that ICE detention facility is here."
Those gathered in force Wednesday follows federal plans that show an immigration detention facility is coming to Marana. The notice posted on SAM.gov, the official website the U.S. government uses to publish federal documents, detail a contract supporting the "comprehensive detention services for two years." It would hold up to 775 detainees.
The facility would open at the site of the former Arizona State Prison-Marana, which was the state's first private prison until Arizona bought the facility in 2013 from Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, or MTC, which already runs five immigration detention facilities across the country — primarily in Texas and California. MTC bought the prison back from the state early last year for $15 million, before informing the town council that the facility "may be used" as a detention facility for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Fears of a possible immigration detention facility began heating up in Octobe , spurring some in the community to form PRICE, short for Pima Resists ICE, a coalition of community members hoping to stop the immigration facility's operations.
PRICE stepped in, Marana resident and coalition organizer Kristin Downing said, "to do the work that our elected town council members should have been doing: finding a way to stop Management and Training Corporation from opening an ICE detention center right here, in this spot."
Downing, and others at the news conference Wednesday, said the plans show MTC, the federal government and the Marana Town Council want the facility and the land its sitting on to be used "for the business of rounding up and warehousing people for profit."
"(The facility) is about 10 minutes from the local elementary school and the local high school, less than 15 minutes away from the new Saguaro Springs housing developments, and about 10 minutes from the Gladden Farm community, and perhaps the most scary fact, (it's) about five minutes from the Marana airport," Downing said. "This land we're standing on in the midst of all that community should be used for bringing everyone together to grow and thrive."
Downing said that when PRICE met with Marana Mayor Jon Post and Town Manager Terry Rozema about the facility, "they told us that MTC would be working in cooperation with the town council to run this facility, and that they would create a kinder, gentler, more humane way to warehouse people."
"They told us that MTC is a wonderful company, and they looked forward to working with them again. They told us that an ICE facility in Marana would not have a negative impact on the community, because things in Eloy and Florence are fine," she said. "We know that all of these things are false: Marana would have no oversight in a federal detention facility. MTC is not a wonderful company. They have a long record of broken equipment, understaff and underpaid workers, prisoner abuse and riots.
"When an ICE detention center opens in a town, the community is not safe. The economy suffers and tourism drops. Things are not decidedly fine in Eloy or Florence or any community with an ICE detention center in its midst," Downing said.
Cavanaugh, one of Marana's six council members, told the Star the town should take a formal stand on the detention facility, even a "feel-good" act, like a resolution. He said he's asked Post, the mayor, on several occasions for a resolution, but that Post "pushes back and says, 'you know, it's just a feel-good thing. It won't mean anything, it's symbolic."
"Well, it is symbolic, (but) it is something ... symbolic things are important to make a stand on something you believe in. I'm the only one on the council that made a stand against the ICE detention center. I think it's a bad thing for Marana," Cavanaugh said. "Just what do we think of when we think of Florence? What do we think of when we think of Eloy? These are prison towns."
"Marana is the town that likes to pride itself that, it's a family town full of lots of things, and a tourist town (with) beautiful natural resources," Cavanaugh said. "An ICE detention center really doesn't belong here ... a symbolic resolution goes a long way. At least the citizens would say, 'hey, Marana is listening, the town council, the government is listening to us.'"
The event Wednesday comes off the heels of 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker Emmanuel Damas dying while in ICE's custody. Damas had been held at the Florence Correctional Center for nearly five months before dying from complications of an untreated tooth infection.Â
"A toothache should not be a death sentence. We cannot allow policies that dramatically expand detention levels and lead to overcrowded facilities undermine the medical care and treatment that every human being deserves," said Grijalva. "Let's remember very clearly who is being detained in these federal detention facilities. These are not people who have committed a crime. They have committed a civil infraction."
Grijalva also spoke about 79-year-old Julia Benitez, known by Eloy detainees as "la abuela," who was released from the Eloy Detention Center earlier this month, 11 days after the Arizona Daily Star's Feb. 15 investigation into the growing number of elderly and disabled immigrants held in U.S. detention facilities, including Benitez, a Cuban asylum seeker who has dementia and uses a wheelchair.
"Our grandmothers want to be with their grandchildren and families, not in detention. This system is a system that treats human beings like animals, and we cannot accept it," Grijalva said. "We must dismantle ICE and instead pursue immigration policies grounded in humanity, fairness and due process."
Faith Ramon, of the Tohono O'odham Nation, is a community organizer with Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA). She said, under this plan, Marana would become part of the system of "concentration camps" cropping up across the country, a system that criminalizes people for looking like her, Ramon said.
Allen, the chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, said there are plenty of reasons an ICE facility is not in Marana's best interest, from deaths of U.S. citizens and detainees at the hands of ICE agents, to the "unconstitutional, inhumane and dangerous" conditions of detention facilities across the country.
"(President Donald) Trump has been very clear that his vision of America has no place for black and brown people. We know what unity looks like. We know that our country and our neighborhoods are stronger because of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers," Allen said. "We know that we are on the right side of history and that our numbers continue to grow. We will fight. We are strong and we will win."
Daniela Ugaz, an immigration attorney and head of PRICE's legal research team, said at present, "our legal options" to stop the facility "do not following a straight line," as the coalition and community are going up against "an extremely well-resourced and powerful corporation," being MTC.
