Private prison company suing state over bill to shut down Tacoma ICE detention center
May 18, 2021, 11:51 AM
High-security inmates at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. The red uniforms indicate that the detainee has been convicted of a violent crime. (Nicole Jennings/KIRO Radio)
(Nicole Jennings/KIRO Radio)
A private prison corporation has filed a lawsuit against the state of Washington over a recently passed bill mandating the closure of Washington’s only private detention facility.
State passes bill aimed at shutting down Tacoma ICE detention center
The facility, located in Tacoma, is run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with the GEO Group contracted to manage it. The bill passed by the Legislature this session makes it so the state can no longer contract with privately-run for-profit prisons and detention facilities, providing exceptions for counseling, quarantine, work release, substance use disorder treatment, and tribal facilities.
The Seattle Times reports that the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Western Washington last month, alleging that the state’s newly-passed bill banning private prisons conflicts with the federal government’s “detention efforts within Washington’s borders.”
While the bill’s language allows the Tacoma ICE facility to remain open through the duration of its contract — which expires in 2025 — the GEO Group’s lawsuit claims that it could be forced to close before then.
State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has since vowed to defend the bill in court on behalf of the state, telling the Times that he believes the lawsuit is part of a “scorched-earth effort to avoid any accountability from the state of Washington, even though GEO chose to do business here.”
ICE offers rare tour of Tacoma immigration detention center
Approximately 65% of the population at the Tacoma ICE facility has a “non-criminal” background, many of whom were detained at the southern border and transferred to Washington to await the outcome of their immigration cases. Roughly 30% of those detainees are from Mexico; the next largest group is from India, and then from the “northern triangle” of Central America.
The facility has been at the center of a number of controversies in recent years. That includes an incident in April 2020, where 50 inmates at the facility participated in a hunger strike, spelling out the letters “SOS” in the yard of the detention center with their bodies. That marked the third hunger strike in as many weeks that month, including 300 people who participated during the first week of April.
Ferguson is also currently suing GEO, alleging the company flouted minimum wage laws when it paid “thousands” of detainees $1 a day for labor.
