The private owners of the immigrant detention center in Tacoma said they’ll soon be in talks with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to sell some of their detention facilities across the country to the feds.
It remains unclear whether those negotiations include the Northwest ICE Processing Center, which has been run by GEO Group since 2005. The company’s recent 10-year contract to manage the center expired in 2025. GEO Group’s founder told investors they aim to wrap up pricing negotiations of any sales as soon as late September.
FILE - A patch is shown on the uniform of a guard with the GEO Group Inc. during a media tour of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center Dec. 16, 2019, in Tacoma, Wash. The GEO Group is the private company that operates the center for the U.S. government.
Ted S. Warren / AP
“There’s a mutual interest by us and ICE that this process hopefully be completed by the end of this quarter,” said George Zoley, chairman, CEO, and founder of GEO Group, during an investor call.
Back in July ICE issued a “Request for Information” looking to purchase turn-key detention facilities in several states, including in Washington near Seattle. The three other sites where ICE is looking to buy a facility line up with the centers GEO Group owns and operates near those locations.
ICE bought a facility similar to the Tacoma ICE center in California owned by Core Civic for nearly $500 million earlier this month.
“The potential sale of multiple facilities to ICE could represent a significant liquidity and shareholder value-enhancing event for our company,” Zoley said.
U.S. Rep. Emily Randall (D-Washington), whose district includes the Tacoma facility, said this is part of a greater plan by President Donald Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make CEOs like Zoley richer. Zoley, and GEO Group, donated heavily to Trump’s reelection campaign.
“Nothing about this cruel immigration agenda makes us safer or makes our lives more affordable,” Randall said. “My neighbors… want a future where our immigrant neighbors aren’t terrorized in our streets, where they can safely raise their kids, and afford gas, groceries, and healthcare.”
ICE declined to say whether they intend to buy the Tacoma facility and GEO Group has not said they are looking to sell it.
FILE — A fence outside the Northwest ICE Processing Center on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2019, in Tacoma, Wash.
Megan Farmer / KUOW
But records show the Tacoma immigrant lockup fits the type of facility ICE is looking to buy. One of the stipulations is that the turn-key facility should be within 30 miles of ICE’s Seattle office in Tukwila, which the Tacoma facility is. The ICE request also requires that the detention center near Seattle have at least 1,500 beds. The Tacoma center has 1,575 beds.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Time magazine that local government intervention is getting in the way of keeping these privately run immigrant detention facilities financially operational. Zoley has said federal ownership would be a way to avoid oversight from state governments.
Critics and immigrant advocates call that a strategy to sidestep attempts by local and state governments to shore up already weak federal accountability and transparency practices. A report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights calls the current accountability process managed by the feds “Compliance Theater.”
“As we watch the federal government use the billions of dollars they received from Congress to buy these facilities, we’re seeing both a decrease in accountability and oversight,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “It allows them to sidestep efforts that states have been leading to push back, and it can mean increased enforcement in the areas where they’ve purchased facilities if they’re expanding them to include space for immigration detention.”
Gupta said Congress needs to pass a bill that makes getting legal status in the U.S. clearer and more accessible to avoid the human and constitutional rights violations created by the president’s mass detention and deportation efforts.
While GEO Group maintains that it would continue running day-to-day operations under potential federal ownership, documents detailing ICE’s purchase of a Seattle-area facility say “federal supremacy” rules would shield them from local or state government oversight.
“Applicable or more stringent state or local laws or regulations shall not apply to the performance under this contract when they would directly or indirectly regulate, dictate, or control the contractor’s performance under these standards,” one of the documents states.
The Washington Department of Health is one of the state agencies pressing for accountability and oversight. Health officials have been blocked repeatedly from inspecting the GEO Group-run Tacoma ICE center, despite their wins in federal court after suing to inspect it.
Health officials said state law allows them to conduct inspections, regardless of whether the feds buy the facility.
“The Tacoma facility does not sit on a federal enclave, so state laws still apply,” said the health department’s Kara Kostanich. “Even if GEO sold the property to ICE, it would maintain its contract as the operator of the facility, so it would still be subject to the duties of [state laws].”
Father Bryan Pham, a senior lecturer at Gonzaga Law School and an advocate investor with GEO Group, agreed with Kostanich’s assessment.
“We teach our students this,” said Pham, who invests in GEO Group as the USA West Jesuit Province liaison for Responsible Investment. “When it comes to health issues, that falls under the state mandate.”
Pham said he, like many others, is concerned about human rights violations at the Tacoma facility and post deportation — and has struggled to bring in a third party to inspect conditions at the facility.
The concerns are twofold. One involves GEO Group allegedly aiding and abetting the federal government in violating federal court orders, due process rights, and sending deportees to a prison outside of U.S. jurisdiction where they could face torture. The other concern is the reportedly poor and small portioning of food, sanitation, coercive behavior by ICE officials, and poor dental and medical care in the Tacoma facility. Much of the latter has been the subject of multiple hunger strikes at the facility.
After a recent rejection for an investor motion, Pham said he’s now beginning talks with GEO Group to address those concerns.
In the earnings call to investors, GEO Chairman Zoley detailed the Trump administration’s future blueprint to implement mass detention and deportation across the U.S.
“They wanna be in fewer, larger facilities with a normal detention capacity of about 100,000, not including maybe a lot of these little jails, which are just feeder locations to the main facilities that they wanna have,” Zoley said.
ICE issued another Request for Proposals to build new secure housing units on pre-existing ICE properties like in Texas and Arizona last month, Gupta said.
“That is an example of ICE taking what’s really supposed to be a center where people get stamped for paperwork and move on to other facilities or to other kinds of monitoring, and turning those processing centers into actual carceral facilities, which really underscores their desperation to expand beds and space as quickly as possible,” she said.
Several cases show that federal immigration enforcement officials have been pushing the boundaries of their short-term processing facilities in Washington state.
Last year a family was held in a windowless federal immigration processing facility in Blaine for four weeks. U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Washington) has raised questions about ICE’s Ferndale office over its long-term detention practices. Both facilities typically are only meant to hold people for a short amount of time.
The family held in Blaine is now being represented by the Washington ACLU in a lawsuit.
“Federal law enforcement are committing civil rights violations at a scale without precedent in our nation’s recent history, and with the support of an administration that encourages violence and disregard for the law,” the ACLU wrote in a statement announcing dozens of lawsuits that span 17 states. Those suits include six claims on behalf of people who were held in ICE detention in Washington state.
Gustavo Sagrero Álvarez is a reporter with the KUOW newsroom. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.
