A draft US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo reviewed by Reuters demonstrates that although the Biden administration officials proposed closing or downsizing nine immigration detention centers last year as a result of high costs and staffing shortages, which could have saved $235 million, only two of the detention centers were flagged.

Six of the nine centers identified in the August 2022 memo were operated by private companies, one being the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico, where a government watchdog earlier urged relocating all detainees due to "critical staffing shortages that have led to safety risks and unsanitary living conditions."

A finalized version dated September 1, 2022, removed the recommendation to close Torrance and was shared with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas' office, according to current and former anonymous US officials.

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Although President Joe Biden promised during the 2020 elections to reform immigration detention and diminish for-profit companies, the record numbers of migrants trying to illegally cross the US-Mexico border reached highs in 2022.

"There's always perpetual fear about losing beds, that we'll look bad and get jammed," the current official told Reuters.

'A recipe for disaster'

An ICE official told Reuters that Torrance was a key detention center in which ICE keeps the population lower than capacity to avoid staff overburdening, but it did not comment on the authenticity of the documents.

ICE spokesperson Jenny Burke said, "The agency continuously reviews and enhances civil detention operations to ensure non-citizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled."

Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic which operates Torrance, described the allegations as "false and misleading" and claimed that the facility provides "a safe, humane and appropriate environment."

The two facilities with which contracts were ended were the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania, which held families until 2021, and Yuba County Jail in California. 

At Berks, each detainee costs about $1,200 daily according to the memo, far beyond the $142 average in fiscal year 2022, but the daily cost per detainee at Yuba was $8,000.

Following the death of Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian man who hanged himself in Torrance on August 17, 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico on Tuesday said it filed a wrongful death lawsuit in state court on his behalf citing ICE reports claiming staffing shortages impacted safety, security, and care.

The suit cites government watchdog inspections showing that Torrance failed to meet minimum medical staffing levels. The CoreCivic spokesperson, however, said that staffing or medical access was not identified by ICE as factors in his death.

Rebecca Sheff, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of New Mexico, expressed, "That's a recipe for disaster."

'State-of-the-art' prisons

Renegotiating contracts for two for-profit detention centers - Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California and the Farmville Detention Center in Virginia - were part of the memo where ICE paid large sums to house detainees.

Back then, court orders that were intended to control the spread of COVID-19 halted ICE from sending more detainees to both facilities, but ICE kept paying for a minimum of almost 1,500 beds at Adelanto (in which each detainee cost about $2,000 daily) and 500 at Farmville ($8,000 daily per detainee).

Adelanto was operated by the private prison company GEO Group and Farmville was run by another private firm, Immigration Centers of America (ICA).

According to ICE data in May 2023, the minimum beds it paid for were lessened at Adelanto but Farmville's minimum remains unchanged.

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An ICE official called Adelanto "a very well-run facility" useful for the future despite the fact that court order still blocks the transfer of new detainees. 

A separate US official argued that Farmville is needed as a result of limited East Coast detention space, and ICE data shows that it housed 70 people as of this week.

GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira called Adelanto "a modern, state-of-the art facility built to suit ICE's needs." ICA did not respond.