Common Language Project: Multimedia that Matters

Detention in the City of Destiny

By Alex Stonehill June 19, 2010

Transcript

From the fountained plaza on top of the Museum of Glass, Tacoma looks almost futuristic. Towering abstract sculptures adorn a steel pedestrian overpass. Sleek new trolley cars jangle along a clean, brick promenade. An old train station has been neatly restored to house a federal courthouse. But if you look closely amongst the warehouses, just across the Foss waterway, you might catch a glimpse of a wide, brownish building surrounded in barbed wire.

That's the Northwest Detention Center.

It's a building the federal government uses to house immigrants who are in the process of being deported. Some have been caught by the authorities for being in the country illegally. Others were legal, but now face deportation because of criminal convictions.

I wondered if Tacoma residents even knew the Detention Center was here, in the middle of their city. So I went down to the Museum District to find out.

ALEX STONEHILL: "Have you guys ever heard of the Northwest Detention Center?"

MAN 1: "No."

MAN 2: "No, I have not."

WOMAN 1: "Umm, yes and no. I mean I'm not sure if it's for adults or for children. "

WOMAN 2: "No. Or the one down by the water?"

STONEHILL: "It's actually right down here, you can actually see it right across the waterway there, you see the brown rimmed building."

MAN 3: "OK, now I'm not aware of that one, I'm not aware of that one. That must be a new detention facility they have down there."

If you do want to find out about the Northwest Detention Center, Tim Smith is the guy to talk to.

SMITH: "We're just, I mean, we're literally half a mile from downtown Tacoma."

Smith is a former army intelligence officer. He's been monitoring the detention center almost obsessively since he first found out that it was coming to Tacoma in early 2004.

SMITH: "And we get into February, and a small notice comes up in the South Sound Business Journal about the opening of this place. I was just, I was horrified. 'What, there's going to be a immigration detention facility in Tacoma?' "

The detention center isn't actually run by the government. The 150,000-square-foot building was built by the GEO group, a private prison contractor that runs three other detention centers and dozens of prisons around the country.

By the time Smith heard about it, GEO had already been awarded a contract by ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE is the department of the federal government responsible for catching and deporting people who are in the country illegally.

According to the contract, GEO would use its facility to house and care for immigrants arrested by ICE across Washington, Oregon and Alaska. The building holds about a thousand detainees at a time, while their cases are processed in the immigration courts and preparations are made to deport them.

From closer up, it just looks like a gigantic warehouse – but one with really good security. There are guard shacks at both ends of the long dead-end street, and 20-foot high gates with spirals of concertina wire along the top.

A variety of allegations have been leveled against the detention center: Guards have been hired without the proper background checks. Detainees released from the facility are creating an unfair burden on the city's social services.

SMITH: "We had an outbreak of food poisoning where over 300 people, that's the number that showed up for sick call, were sick for three or four days."

Smith has an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems inside the detention center and the negative impacts it's had on the outside the community.

He says the local government should have fought harder to keep GEO from building it here in the first place.

But to hear some people tell it, Tacoma never had a chance to stop the facility. Kevin Phelps, was on the Tacoma city council at the time.

His name comes up often from critics as someone who welcomed — even recruited — GEO, to build the detention center in Tacoma. But Phelps says he had no other option.

Phelps: "I tried to do my homework you know. Do they have a right to build it there? Once I determined, at least, in my opinion, that they had the right to build this, then what I tried to do was to make lemonade out of lemons."

The lemonade he's talking about was the promise of jobs and tax revenue for the city. Phelps says that the only approval the city gave was the building permit they granted GEO. Since immigration violations are civil, not criminal cases, the detention center didn't really count as a prison, so there was no requirement for any public consultation process. And besides, GEO was just building a really big building — it didn't become a detention center until the feds gave them the contract, after most of the construction was already complete.

Five years later, Phelps maintains that the detention center hasn't had any ill effects on the Tacoma community.

Phelps: "I know not of a single person that has been treated inhumanely, where there's been any kind of a charge against the operator of the facility. I know not of any incidence where somebody was released afterwards and went back out into the community and committed a crime. I would say I guess in reality it kind of set out and accomplished its goals."

The inside of the detention center is a lot like the outside. It's big, clean, utilitarian. Neil Clark took me on a tour. He's an ICE field office director who's worked for the federal government for 25 years.

Clark: "We're going to go into the intake, the medical, the courts are on this side, the law library."

Walking down a long cavernous hallway that's the central spine of the building we pass doorways to the kitchen, laundry, and medical ward.

Clark: "Food services and everything's on this side and then the pods are on this side. "

The pods — four gigantic rooms that contain the living, eating, sleeping and exercise areas for hundreds of detainees each. Massive, sliding security doors separate one part of the building from the next. The first slams closed before the second will open. Everything looks new and well organized. The term 'state of the art facility' comes to mind.

Clark: "This is GEO. You can see their uniforms and the color they're in."

On the tour, guards and other staff employed by GEO are everywhere, but none are allowed to talk to me. Clark says he's confident that the government is in control of conditions in the detention center, despite the fact that it's almost entirely managed and staffed by GEO.

Clark: "And that's part of the contract that they run it per our detention standards, and they care for the aliens the way that we want 'em to be cared for. If they don't, then we're gonna take the contract away from them and give it somebody that will do it."

In 2008, Law Students from Seattle University interviewed dozens of detainees about their experience at the detention center. The resulting report revealed a pattern of substandard conditions in the facility: lack of access to legal representation, insufficient medical and mental health care and problems with the quantity and quality of food.

Clark says it was unfair to publish the complaints of anonymous detainees without giving ICE a chance to respond. He insists that the facility is inspected regularly to ensure compliance with the standards set by the contract.

GEO's official spokesman did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Clark admits that the detention center is full of sad stories — of families that are separated by deportation, and non–citizens who have built lives in the US for years, but are forced to leave after minor criminal convictions. But while he supports Americans questioning our immigration policy, he says ICE and GEO are just doing their job enforcing policy that exists now.

Clark: "You know, it's a fact of the laws that have been issued by congress and we don't get to pick and choose those type of things — that's what they pay us to do is enforce the laws and that's what we're trying to do and we're trying to do it efficiently and as good heartedly as we possibly can."

Last October, the Obama Administration announced upcoming reforms to the detention system. They plan to expand what they call Alternatives to Detention — so detainees without criminal backgrounds can be held in separate, less prison–like facilities. And they promise to more aggressively monitor privately run detention centers to make sure that contractors like GEO are treating detainees properly.

Back outside the Detention Center in Tacoma, Tim Smith shares his hopes for the future.

Smith: "One day this will be the northwest immigration museum and you can look back and find what it was like twenty years ago when we were detaining people from other countries for something just as simple as violating administrative law, and that's what this place is, that its no longer a detention facility for anything. But then, we can all dream, can't we?"

In reality, it doesn't look like the detention center is going away anytime soon. In fact, just a few weeks after the national reforms to the detention system were announced, ICE awarded GEO a new contract to continue operating the detention center for the next five years - and to increase its capacity by more than fifty percent.

In Tacoma, I'm Alex Stonehill, for KUOW.