Bill that would shut down Tacoma ICE detention facility passes state House

A bill that would ban private prisons and detention centers in Washington hit a key milestone this week, after passing in the state House on Tuesday.

ICE offers rare tour of Tacoma immigration detention center

HB 1090 would ensure the state could 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.

This marks the second year in a row that the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, has attempted to pass this measure. Her effort last year stalled out, after the 2020 iteration of her bill saw the proposed ban watered to eventually pass as a study on the existing authority of state agencies to inspect private prison facilities.

Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is Washington’s only private detention facility. If this bill passes, it would be allowed to continuing operating through 2025, when its current contract with the state expires.

Approximately 65% of the population in the Northwest Detention Center has a “non-criminal” background; they 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 the “northern triangle” of Central America.

Rep. Ortiz-Self cited concerns over the moral implications of for-profit prisons, but also singled out the Tacoma facility specifically, which has been the center of more than one controversy over the last year.

Man sent manifesto before he was killed at detention center: ‘i am antifa’

“I can’t tell you the number of complaints I have heard,” she said during testimony in the House over her bill. “This facility has abused the practice of solitary confinement more than any other immigration custom enforcement facility in our country.”

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.

Opponents of Ortiz-Self’s bill, though, argue that those issues aren’t unique to the Tacoma ICE processing center, and exist in state-run facilities as well.

“It’s not limited to private detention centers,” Republican Rep. Robert Sutherland argued.

The bill will next go before the state Senate for further consideration by the Legislature.

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