Exclusive reporting from the Washington Post shows Trump administration plans to double U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention capacity nationwide this year — including in Arizona.
The reporting uses internal ICE documents obtained by the Post that outline national expansion plans to allow the agency to detain over 107,000 people at once. That’s up from a capacity of some 54,500 at the beginning of the year, and almost 66,000 as of July.
Arizona facilities slated to be newly included are the Maricopa County Jail and the Marana Correctional Facility outside Tucson. Neither facility is currently in use for immigration detention.
Jordan Garcia, Colorado program coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee, says the way local facilities are contracted for federal use varies from state to state. But, local authorities, like cities and counties, have little control over federally-contracted facilities.
“People tend to get really frustrated when they don’t have local control, so the county itself wouldn’t have as much control over the facility if it’s a federally contracted facility,” he said. “People are like ‘oh, I really thought that we would have some sort of say of how things will go in our community,’ and then they get this facility that’s federally-contracted, and then they don’t have that decision-making power.”
An existing facility called the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, south of Phoenix, will also expand to get more beds, according to the reporting. A spokesperson with CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates the facility, said the company works within ICE's established procurement processes and directed capacity questions to the agency.
Arizona is set to add more than 1,200 new detention beds all told, according to the Washington Post, giving it the fifth-largest capacity in the country.
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