Did You Know?

Did you know there is a former prison in Marana that ICE intends to use for a “holding facility” to imprison immigrants while processing them for deportation? Evidently, these days it takes a much longer time to do that processing, and the private prison company, who will run the facility, stands to make a lot of money warehousing humans.

Typically, detention centers are expected to hold far more people in the same square footage than prisons. The Marana facility is no exception to that. The rules of care and cleanliness are more lax than prison facilities as well. Because the facility was a prison in its “last life,” it apparently has not had to undergo any significant scrutiny on the part of Marana’s government.

Marana is a growing community of workers raising families who may be impacted by the facility’s water and utility usage. There is also some question about safety for the community stemming from the planned overcrowding and constant transport in and out.

Marana is a canary in the mine that is southern Arizona. The Attorney General, Kris Mayes, has sued to stop the transition of a large warehouse in Surprise to an ICE detention facility. There are similar actions across our country, because people are becoming aware of the expense – both human and monetary – of this growing activity. They’ve seen their neighbors and coworkers, who are not criminals, hauled off and “disappeared” into these facilities.

They are asking questions about the need for these huge internment centers. The total planned capacity nationwide is the size of Salt Lake City and larger than the entire Federal Detention system. Totalitarian countries use them to lock up dissidents – anyone who disagrees with them. When we’ve run out of immigrants to lock up indefinitely while we “process” them, what will we have gained for our neighborhoods?

More information can be found at www.ProjectSaltbox.com and GetTheFacilitiesOutICE.org (GTFOICE.org), which tracks many ICE activities and gives action suggestions.

Marian Hill