On October 11, the Farmville Town Council in Virginia held a public hearing and heard testimony from people expressing opposition to the privately operated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center located in the town. NIJC supports efforts to shut down immigration detention centers and prevent ICE expansion in the Washington, D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro area. NIJC Senior Policy Analyst Jesse Franzblau delivered the following testimony to the Farmville mayor and town council members.
On behalf of my colleagues and the thousands of individuals NIJC serves every year, I would like to express our strong support for people who have experienced ICE detention and the Virginia communities calling on the Farmville Town Council to end its complicity in the inhumane immigration detention system. Farmville must stop negotiating in secret and should take steps to end its part of the Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) with ICE and the private company Immigration Centers of America (ICA).
For over three decades, NIJC has dedicated itself to ensuring human rights protections and access to justice for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. NIJC provides direct legal services to more than 10,000 low-income individuals each year and advocates for these populations through policy reform, impact litigation, and public education. NIJC monitors and documents abuses in the federal immigration detention system.
ICA-Farmville is a tragic illustration of the inhumanity, impunity, and cover-up for systemic abuses that permeate the immigration detention system. Senior federal immigration officials recommended ICA-Farmville be closed or scaled back just last year. Rather than scale back, however, ICE and ICA are pushing for the facility contract to continue. Documents obtained through public records requests reveal that in September the town of Farmville secretly extended the facility’s contract, without a public meeting or notice.
This short-term renewal of the contract exposes the secret dealings that keep the detention facility in operation. Just last month, after hearing impassioned testimonies from local students and immigrant rights advocates, the council passed a unanimous motion to look into ramifications of not signing the contract on the table with ICE. The council members themselves expressed frustration that they were kept in the dark about the contract and did not even receive a copy until the afternoon of September 13th, the day of the public meeting. The council members agreed that they could not sign a contract without proper review.
Internal emails obtained through public records requests also show that the town manager told the company ICA on September 13th that they could not sign the extension without approval by the entire town council and that it was too late to add to the agenda that same evening.
“I am confused a little,” Farmville’s town manager wrote in an email to ICA on September 13th. “How does ICA negotiate the IGSA when it is between the Town and DHS? I can’t sign contracts without Town Council approval…I have been asked to sign documents without having any knowledge of what all these forms mean and no time for legal to review on behalf of the Town. I am not signing forms without due diligence of understanding these agreements and the Town Council approving them.”
However, instead of following through on the unanimous motion to look into the ramifications of not signing the IGSA contract, the town manager and mayor signed a two-week extension on September 15th. After meeting with ICA officials and communicating with ICE contracting officers in secret, the town manager signed the extension without any public discussion. Then on September 21st, again in secret without any public approval from the town council members, the town manager signed an agreement, this time to extend the contract for six months.
This secretive process raises a number of questions that should be answered in public, such as: what happened to the council’s commitment to look into ramifications of not signing the contract renewal? And, why are the town mayor and manager signing contract extensions in secret, without any public discussion or apparent approval from the town council? The town mayor and council should hold a public meeting to allow for public input and a public vote, and move forward with greater transparency.
The town’s secret dealings with ICE and ICA are part of a larger apparatus that serves to cover-up abuse and stifle accountability, allowing for lucrative contracts to continue to flow. The immigration detention system permits local governments to pad their budgets, and private prison companies and a range of contractors to reap enormous profits in a revolving door detention industry. ICA’s profit margin is based on inhumane incarceration and transport of immigrants. The town of Farmville should end its complicity in trading human lives for profit.
Advocates continue to demand the closure of ICA-Farmville and release of all people currently detained at the facility. It is up to the town council to ensure that Farmville conducts public business with transparency, and take real measures to end its complicity in the abusive immigration detention system.
Jesse Franzblau is a senior policy analyst at NIJC. Contact Jesse by email.