The Trump administration seems to be considering a plan to send immigrants who face the deportation to a recently closed federal prison so full of sexual abuse that it was known as the “Violation Club”, according to an email sent by federal officials of the Union of prison.
Approximately 20 miles east of Oakland, The federal correctional institution in Dublin closed last yearAfter more than half a dozen correctional officers and the former director were accused or convicted of sexually abusing inmates.
Currently, the Federal Prison Office website shows that there are no inmates in the installation, although the long -term destination of the complex has never been clear.
But on Thursday, the Council of Prison premises of the American Federation of Government employees No. 33, which represents federal prison workers, sent a request for information to the penitentiary system, requesting data related to the closures of the facilities. Some paragraphs in the request of four pages, the union leaders expressed concerns about the future of the installation.
“FCI Dublin had at least one evaluation completed on July 22, 2024, which we believe was considered a” structural evaluation “, the letter said. “The union has learned that this evaluation has been provided to ICE for what appears to be the potential for ICE to take over the installation.”
The measure occurs days after the Federal Prison Office confirmed that it houses the detainees of migrants in some facilities, an admission that caused concerns of union officials who say that it seems that the office is preparing to house migrants to Mass scale
“My fear is that the office will become an ice branch, but that is not what we do,” John Kostelnik, vice president of the western region for the correctional workers union, told The Times. “Our main approach must be and has always kept the community safe from the murderers and rapists condemned and our staff does a tremendous job in this regard, even when dealing with the personnel crisis.
“But now we have an additional mission thrown towards us,” he said, “that could paralyze our ability to do what we are supposed to do.”
Although the Prison Office confirmed in an email that is “helping the application of immigration and customs of the United States by housing detainees”, prison spokesmen refused to provide information about the state legal of the detainees or where they will be housed.
A prison spokesman cited “security reasons” to decide comments, while another sent all questions related to ice immigration.
In an email on Wednesday afternoon, ICE said that their “improved application operations” have noted enough arrests to “require greater detention capacity”, although the agency did not provide information about what that implied.
“While we cannot confirm individual predictions,” said the statement, “we can confirm that ICE is exploring all the options to meet its current and future detention requirements.”
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has begun to increase the application operations of the immigration law throughout the country, promising to deport “Millions and millions” of people back to their countries of origin. According to Associated Press, ICE has the budget to stop only 41,000 people.
In general, these detainees are in ice processing centers, private prison facilities and local prisons that hire federal immigration officials. But with the most ambitious deportation objectives of the new administration, officials have begun to entertain not proven alternatives.
This month, the United States Army began transporting migrant flights arrested to US Marine Base. Uu. In Guantanamo Bay, Cubaand the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, It has offered to US officials send migrants – as well as American citizens – in the notoriously hard prisons of their country.
The first signs that the White House planned to keep migrants arrested in federal prisons in the United States arrived at the end of last month.
On January 26, the leadership of the Union wrote to the office of Senator Alex Padilla, warning the main senator of the state that Trump's officials had begun to lead the prisons office to leave space for more inmates in the facilities of everything The country.
“Currently, the Trump administration causes the BOP to carry out an audit of the bed space and ask the facilities to consolidate the inmates who make space (they release complete units),” said the letter.
The last time it happened, Kostelnik said, was during Trump's first mandate. BOP officials were forced at that time to make room for 1,600 immigrants, including many asylum applicants, in federal prisons in Oregon, California, Arizona and Texas.
By August 2018, two months after federal officials publicly confirmed the controversial housing scheme – The American Union of Civil Libertads filed a lawsuitclaiming that it was a violation of the rights of due process of migrants under the 5th amendment. In October, News reports indicated administration He had returned his use of federal prisons to accommodate the detainees of migrants.
However, according to Kostelnik, those few months proved to be chaotic for the detainees and prison staff, who were poorly equipped to safeguard migrants, many of whom had different medical needs and cultural background of the typical office prisoners . Communication sometimes became a challenge, since many detainees did not speak English, or any other language spoken by prison staff.
“I'm afraid that this will come soon,” he wrote in the email of January to the Padilla office, “and all CA facilities are currently moving in this application, and they are even obtaining our bus crews and specialized teams prepared for similar missions “.
The first federal prison in California to the migrants detained from the House of Representatives seems to have been the Metropolitan Detention Center in the center of Los Angeles. According to two officials familiar with the situation, national security investigations appeared in a weekend with a group of about nine migrants from Africa. The officials requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Initially, prison staff were not sure whether to accept the detainees or how to keep them better separated from other prisoners. Finally, they put men in their own unit within the installation, creating additional work for the staff, who said an official “had no guidance” on how to manage migrants differently from typical federal prisoners.
The official also said that, although the number of migrants housed in the Los Angeles blockade has not increased, he hoped he would do it because the superiors had begun to discuss how to adjust the personnel schedules to handle more weekend intakes.
It is not clear how many other facilities have had the task of celebrating migrants, but last week Associated Press reported That a federal prison in Miami and a federal prison in Atlanta are also being used for that purpose, and BOP's internal emails is likely to show more facilities.
In recent days, federal prison officials have begun to ask workers to consider taking temporary tasks elsewhere to help administer the influx of ice detainees.
On Monday, a captain of FCI Sheridan, an average security installation in Oregon, sent an email to the staff there to bring together the volunteers willing to work throughout the country in FCI Berlin, an average safety installation in rural New Hampshire that Email is expected to be expected to receive at least 500 ice migrants.
“The staff will work correctional services in support of the BOP mission to temporarily house the ice detainees,” said Captain Joseph Cerone, according to a copy of the email obtained by The Times. “Since we anticipate more than 500 detainees that go to Berlin, in addition to the help of custody, they will probably need assistance in health and psychology services.”
The email did not specify when immigrants are expected to arrive.
The influx of detainees could tighten the federal prison system already with problems. Perhaps the most notable in FCI Dublin, which was one of several facilities, the office for closing or deactivation last year.
But it may not be the only one destined to use by ice. On Wednesday, Kostelnik told The Times that he had just learned that immigration officials are scheduled to visit a federal installation in Morgantown, which was also a closing objective, for an evaluation very similar to that of Dublin.
“For a staff already tense and stretched,” Kostelnik told The Times, “see the facilities in which they have worked for so long that they have taken and delivered to another agency is extremely demoralizing.”
