Washington is on its way to banning its last private prison and its final ICE facility

(The Center Square) – Washington’s last for-profit prison in Tacoma and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s largest holding facility in the Pacific Northwest is on its way out.

The 1,575-bed Northwest Detention Center first opened in 2004 and is run by the GEO Group which contracts with ICE to imprison 800 people per night. It is the last private prison in Washington where mass incarceration and prisoner voting rights have emerged as top priorities for the state legislature.

Last year, an ACLU of Washington report found 41.5% of the state’s prisoners were serving a sentence of 10 years or more while another 17% were serving life sentences. One in five people imprisoned in the state are over the age of 50. Under state law, prisoners are exempt from minimum wage rules which are left up to the discretion of prison administration.

State Attorney General Bob Ferguson took the GEO Group to federal court in 2017 demanding it pay working detainees the state’s then minimum wage of $12. In 2019, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan gave several nods to some of the items on Ferguson’s arguments, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.

“It follows that the record does not support a finding that application of the Minimum Wage Act impermissibly discriminates against the Defendant, The GEO Group, Inc., and through it, the United States,” Bryan wrote.

Months later, Bryan reversed that stance in favor of the GEO Group and the U.S. Justice Department under then U.S. Attorney General William Barr, which argued Ferguson’s lawsuit infringed on the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause and federal oversight.

“Judges don’t like to reverse themselves,” Bryan wrote. “Sometimes, however, it is necessary — when the law changes or becomes more clear, or when additional facts come to light, or old facts have new impact as the law becomes more clear. So it is here.”

The Northwest Detention Center was also the site of the largest hunger strike in state history in 2014 when 750 prisoners starved themselves to bring attention to the prison’s living conditions.

With the swing of a gavel in the Washington Senate on Tuesday, state lawmakers sent House Bill 1090 on its way to Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk by a vote of 28-21, effectively closing the ICE facility for good upon the expiration of its contract in 2025. The bill, introduced by state Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, D-Mukilteo, passed the House by a vote of 76-21 along largely party lines in February. One amendment to the bill expanded medical, mental health, and counseling services to juvenile prisoners whose cases remain in court.

GEO Group lobbyists fought another bill aimed at ending private prisons in 2020 on the grounds it would end free medical care for imprisoned immigrants despite criticisms of unsanitary living conditions that have plagued ICE for years.

ICE facilities have reported 10,669 COVID-19 cases among inmates and staff to date since the onset of the pandemic with active 665 cases, but Harvard studies suggest those numbers could be far higher. A University of Washington report from December found ICE facilities maintained little social distancing and did not often keep enough soap or personal protection equipment on hand.

There are no case numbers publicly available with regards to the Tacoma ICE facility. The Center Square has submitted a public records request for those numbers and is waiting for a response.

Members of La Resistencia NW, an immigration advocacy group, said they were overjoyed with HB 1090’s passage on Tuesday.

“The importance of this bill is that this has to do with all private profit prisons,” La Resistencia NW activist Maru Mora Villalpando said. “This is not about the detention center. This is about all business that wants to profit off of people who are imprisoned. This is a win of the people.”

The passage of HB 1090 in Washington joins nationwide efforts to ban private prisons. Last summer, Illinois banned private contractors from partnering with municipalities to detain immigrants, expanding the state’s existing 1990 ban on private prisons. The legislation was in response to a proposed 1,300 bed facility near Chicago from a private prison contractor, Immigration Centers of America. It has seen two proposals die in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats have led the charge to ban private prisons statewide.

Inslee is expected to sign HB 1090 into law within the coming days before the state legislature wraps up on April 25.

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