Roughly 50 people in glitter shut down traffic near the intersection of Madison Street and Third Avenue this morning, then left after two hours without arrest. They were immigrant rights advocates and activists associated with the Trans and/or Women’s Action Camp, and they chose an intersection close to Seattle’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office to protest the treatment of transgender detainees in private immigrant detention centers. They also wanted to draw attention to the economic incentives that keep those detention centers populated.
Three of the protesters were locked to one another, and two to a mattress. The significance of the mattress, as many of the protesters’ signs explained, had to do with bed quotas—the parts of ICE contracts signed with for-profit corporations that guarantee the government pays for a minimum number of beds, a requirement critics say puts pressure on ICE to get their money’s worth and fill those beds.
Earlier this year, the Detention Watch Network and the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report showing how widespread these “guaranteed minimums” shopped out to private detention operators have become. At the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma—one of the biggest private US facilities, with 1,575 beds—a 2014 contract with ICE shows payment for a guaranteed minimum of 800 beds a day. Immigrant advocates say these requirements stem from a national quota system that guarantees funding for no less than 34,000 beds in ICE’s budget nationwide.
Maru Mora Villalpando, founder of the Northwest Detention Center Resistance group, says that it’s common for trans people to receive poor treatment from these private detention centers, including being placed in solitary confinement “for their own security.” But federal guidelines on trans detainees recently shifted. In June, ICE released a new memo stating that ICE staff should house trans people with their preferred gender identities.
Villalpando says she’s afraid the new guidelines don’t go far enough, and, to her knowledge, they haven’t been implemented yet. “One thing we’ve noticed with the guidelines is that they’re more for ICE than the detention center itself,” she said. “So the detention centers are primarily run by private corporations, and they’ve been known to run detention centers as they please, with no oversight, with no accountability.”
Villalpando also has no idea how many people—including trans people—are in solitary or medical isolation at the Northwest Detention Center specifically. GEO Group, the second-largest prison company in the US, runs the the detention center in Tacoma. It hasn’t provided that information, Villalpando says. (We’ve asked GEO for comment and will update if we hear back.)
“If there are any [trans people] there, we want to know how they’re being treated right now,” Villalpando said.
UPDATE: Virginia Kice, regional ICE spokesperson, writes that there are currently eight people in the detention center’s protective custody unit. “Of the eight, one is there for disciplinary reasons,” she says. “The remainder are there at their own request. None of the individuals in the protective custody unit at this time are transgender.”
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