AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The federal government is increasingly looking to states for help detaining immigrants. It's a partnership that's growing at an unprecedented pace, and legal experts warn it's pushing boundaries of immigration law. Shannon Heffernan is reporting on this for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom that covers criminal justice, and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
SHANNON HEFFERNAN: Thank you so much.
RASCOE: The detention center in the Florida Everglades, you know, it's dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. It's probably the best-known example of this state-federal partnership. It's been ordered closed by the courts over environmental concerns. What are some other partnerships that are on your radar?
HEFFERNAN: That's right. Alligator Alcatraz - we've seen news reports recently that they're expecting it to be emptied out. But right before the court made that order, you saw DeSantis, the governor in Florida, make an announcement that they would be opening a different facility that they're dubbing Deportation Depot, and that would be state-run, similar to Alligator Alcatraz. You also have announcements in Indiana for the so-called Speedway Slammer that's going to be opened in a prison facility, a state-run prison facility in Indiana. And you're also hearing rumblings in other states. States across the country are saying they're in conversations or the federal government says they're talking to people in states all around.
RASCOE: And, you know, I mean, they have these - I don't want to say they're cutesy names, but there's this whole branding thing behind them.
HEFFERNAN: You're exactly right. They use these names, which a lot of the experts I talked to talked about how that can be really dehumanizing. You know, the one in Nebraska, they're talking about calling it the Cornhusker Clink. And that has an effect. That's not just silly. I think that that's a purposeful decision. The immigration lawyers I spoke to really emphasized that legally, immigration detention is not supposed to be punishment. It's a civil matter. And you do hear federal officials raising the specter of being detained in one of these places as something that you don't want to encounter, that you don't want to have to do, and they're using that as a deterrent. And I do think that's part of the reason they're using these splashy names to describe the facilities.
RASCOE: Is it really uncommon for states to work with the federal government to provide detention services in this way?
HEFFERNAN: States have helped with immigration, deportation and enforcement in the past, but it's been much more narrow. There's these things called 287(g) agreements that the federal government can make an agreement with a local government, whether that be a county or a state, and essentially say, you can act on behalf of ICE in these various ways. Those have previously been fairly narrow, but these agreements are for huge detention facilities. The Speedway Slammer, Alligator Alcatraz, they're holding large numbers of people and not just for, like, little short-term holds that you might see in a jail before they hand somebody over to ICE.
So the way it's being used is unprecedented. You've also seen them argue in court that these are not just states helping out the federal government. They're actually arguing that these are run by the states. This was really key in Alligator Alcatraz because they were able to say, hey, this is state-run. So we don't have to follow all those federal environmental rules. Now, a judge eventually disagreed with them on that fact, but you can imagine a world in which similar arguments are made in these other state facilities.
And those other state facilities are less likely to come up against environmental concerns because some of them are in these already existing facilities. But you could see challenges about, like, what detention rules they have to follow or who is exactly in charge and has to be responsible for any humanitarian rules that are broken.
RASCOE: Well, how big is the current push for these partnerships, and why would the federal government need the states in this way?
HEFFERNAN: We know that the government has set aside $45 billion specifically for immigration detention. That is a lot of money, and we know that they want to move fast. It is not quick to build a detention center. If you have states who already have prisons or jails that are already built, that offers them a way to act much more quickly and efficiently.
RASCOE: So how is being detained by a state different than being held by ICE?
HEFFERNAN: So I don't know if there's really this expectation that conditions themselves will be worse. I think it's more this legal black hole that they can enter into. For example, at Alligator Alcatraz, you saw that people were not showing up in the ICE detention search when you can search for if a loved one is detained in the federal system. But they also weren't showing in the Florida state correction system. And there were legal consequences of that, too. Lawyers were left scrambling, trying to figure out, where do we go to ask for bail? Like, who is actually in charge here? And that can be really difficult when you're trying to navigate being detained someplace.
RASCOE: You talked to immigration attorneys and legal experts on detention for your reporting. What was the government's response to your reporting?
HEFFERNAN: So we did not hear back from ICE itself directly on this. But there was this press release that was really interesting, where they were saying they were debunking stuff that - reports out of Alligator Alcatraz, saying the conditions weren't what the press was reporting. And one line in there that I found really interesting is they said, these are efforts by the media and activists - I'm paraphrasing here - these are efforts by the media and the activists to stop Trump's efforts to use state-run facilities for deportation and detention. So that just really hints to me that this is a strategy that they're invested in and that could become a major pillar of how immigration deportation detention works in the United States.
RASCOE: That's Shannon Heffernan, staff writer at the Marshall Project. Thank you so much for joining us.
HEFFERNAN: Thank you.
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