By Alex Ross, New Mexico Political Report

A potential ban on federal immigrant detention facilities in New Mexico would have a devastating impact on Torrance County, according to a local official.

Jordan Barela, the Torrance County manager, told a bipartisan group of state legislators at an Aug. 26 meeting of the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, in Las Cruces, that one such facility, the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, is a primary source of economic activity for his county.

“The facility employs about 100 county residents and expends about $8 million annually in salaries and benefits, “ he said. 

In Estancia, the facility and CoreCivic, the company that owns and operates it, comprise about two-thirds of the town’s Gross Receipts Tax revenue.

Barela later told New Mexico Political Report that in Torrance County, which according to the U.S. Census, has a population of 15,045 and a poverty rate of 20.4%, CoreCivic is the biggest company in the area, and the detention center it operates is one of the few employers within those communities.

“It’s a very economically depressed area, and there aren’t other jobs readily available for people to transition to should that facility close,” Barela said.

How the agreements work 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts with CoreCivic to house people in immigration custody at the Torrance County Detention Facility, with the county acting as a fiscal agent or a pass-through entity.

“The way I would explain the contractual relationship is like a triangle. We manage the ICE contract, ICE money comes into us (the county), that money is passed through to Corecivic,” he said. The Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral and the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan also house immigrants under similar arrangements.

However, the future of such agreements in New Mexico appears uncertain, after an aide to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., recently told the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee earlier this month that the governor would consider adding a ban on such agreements to her agenda for a potential upcoming special legislative session this month.

Alleged inhumane conditions 

The issue of immigrant detention has been in the spotlight as the Trump administration has sought to implement its mass deportation agenda, an effort to round up and ultimately remove the estimated 14 million immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal status.

For years, a bill that would prevent local bodies, including counties, the state, and other entities from entering into such agreements, and to terminate any existing agreements, has been debated in the Legislature, but Lujan Grisham has not weighed in on the issue.

During the regular legislative session earlier this year, one such proposal,  House Bill 9, passed out of the New Mexico House of Representatives, but was not taken up by the Senate Judiciary Committee before the session ended.

Critics of the agreements say they function as a loophole for private companies to avoid disclosure requirements of past activity that are part of the bidding process for federal contracts. Immigrant and civil rights groups have also cited the Torrance County facility and other similar detention centers for alleged inhumane living conditions, abuse of detainees, understaffing and a lack of transparency related to immigrant detention.

State Sen. Antionette Sedillo Lopez, a Democrat from Albuquerque, told the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee meeting last week about her experience volunteering at the Torrance County Detention Facility with a legal services organization.

Sedillo Lopez said the first day of her stint volunteering, the internet was down at the facility for the entire day, and CoreCivic did not have a backup plan to deal with the situation.

“That day, all detainees were deprived of counsel and other visits they may have had,” Sedillo Lopez said. She also alleged that some restrooms smelled like sewage, while a men’s room was also alleged to have had feces on the floor.

In her testimony, Sedillo Lopez claimed to have met individuals held on immigration violations who had committed no other crimes. Some of those people, she said, included individuals with work permits, others who had been in the country for decades, many brought as children and some with health conditions who were unable to receive medical treatment within the facility.

Sedillo Lopez said that during her time at the center, she encountered people who had been detained for long periods, many of whom would have done anything to get out, even if that meant not being allowed to remain in the U.S.

In her presentation, Sedillio Lopez recalled meeting a 21-year-old man who she said appeared to have developmental issues, who did not understand why he was there and wanted to be with his mother, who was in Florida. She noted that under the Trump administration, already minimal oversight of these facilities has been reduced further, with the administration eliminating the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.

“We should not be profiting from immigration detention, and we should not be enabling out-of-state for-profit companies to make millions of dollars from immigration detention,” she said.

State Rep. Christine Chandler, D-Los Alamos, said that while advancing legislation such as House Bill 9 would not stop the federal government’s actions across the country, it could make enforcement actions by ICE less likely in New Mexico, because studies show they are less likely to conduct enforcement actions where detention facilities are not available.

County responds 

Barela, for his part, acknowledged that because CoreCivic owns the facility, the oversight the county has is limited, but that he and county commissioners have toured the facility on multiple occasions, and have not seen poor treatment of detainees.

“I have never had somebody who is directly involved, employed, or worked at the detention facility that has told me anything negative about the detainees in that facility or how they were treated, and even people that don’t necessarily agree with the current administration or previous administrations at the facility,” Barela said.

Barela did acknowledge there have been some maintenance issues, but that CoreCivic has been responsive in addressing them, and that some of those issues, such as a lack of running water earlier this year, were not solely related to the Detention Facility, but are more about the aging infrastructure of Torrance County and rural communities in general.

Maintenance issues 

In addition to being an immigration detention facility, the Torrance County Detention Center also holds some individuals being held on criminal charges unrelated to immigration. However, Barela said that of the roughly 850 inmates at the facility, all but 150 are held on immigration violations.

If CoreCivic were unable to contract with ICE for immigrant detention, Barela said the number of detainees and the revenue coming into CoreCivic for operating the facility would fall substantially.

“So you would decrease your population from 850 to about 150 overnight, which really would not provide the financial means to keep that facility supported in the long run,” Barela said.

Economic impacts

Torrance County has had the experience of having the Detention Facility close. In 2017, CoreCivic ceased operation of the facility, but reopened it two years later. Barela said that he believes that it reopened largely because of CoreCivics’ contract with ICE.

However, he said that the economy of Estencia has still not fully recovered. When it closed, Barela said many restaurants, coffee shops and other businesses did as well.

“If you drive down Highway 41, which we would consider Main Street in Estancia, a lot of those small businesses have been boarded up. And without the workload of staff working at the facility, there really wasn’t the demand to keep their doors open, and they closed,” he said. 

Estancia Mayor Nathan Dial told nm.news in February, after HB9 passed the state House, that the town may never recover if the prison closes. 

“If the state does not continue this contract, the town could lose a significant portion of its revenue,” Dial said. 

Otero County would also face fallout if its contract with Management Training Corporation for managing the Otero County Processing Center were to be terminated. R.B. Nichols, the county attorney, told the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee last week that ending the contract would result in the loss of 284 jobs and $3.9 million in lost revenue to the state.

The county also has $22 million in outstanding revenue bonds on the facility, something that could lead the county to default on those payments, leading to higher borrowing costs for future county projects.

Proponents of banning immigration detention contracts claim the predicted economic fallout is overstated and that the facilities could be repurposed for another use. However, given that CoreCivic owns the Detention Facility’s land and buildings, doing so would be more complicated in Torrance County.

“It would be a determination from CoreCivic in terms of what happens with the facility,” he said.

Beyond the economy, the cancellation of contracts would pose other challenges for Torrance County, given that the facility is the only detention center operating within the county. When the facility closed in 2017, Barela said the county had to send its inmates to Santa Fe, something that cost the county far more than it did when they were housed at the Torrance County Detention Facility.

The county, Barela said, ended up having to hire more deputies, had higher fuel costs related to transporting those inmates.

“A little bit of an economic analysis was done at least in that first year to estimate that the overall impact of fuel, excess capital, new people was about $2 million, and so if the facility closed, likely we would have to go through that again,” Barela said.

Barela said that the county is aware of the emotion of the immigration issue, and those passions often end up driving the debate.

“It is very hard to have a discussion on the factual merits of this, because it is such an emotionally charged issue, and that’s us, and that’s a very difficult hurdle to overcome,” Barrela said.