New policies from the Trump Administration mean that more immigrants are being arrested and detained.
With the influx of inmates, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking at the Salt Lake City area for new detention centers.
In a request for information posted by ICE to a federal contracting website last week, ICE said it was attempting to identify “multiple possible detention sites to hold criminal aliens and other immigration violators,” who are priorities for detention and deportation under policies amended by Trump.
The request specifically sought information for possible new facilities in the Salt Lake City region, as well as Chicago, Detroit and St. Paul, Minn.
Any potential facilities in the Salt Lake region must be within a 180-mile radius of the local ICE field office, at 2975 S. Decker Lake Drive in West Valley City, and within 30 minutes of a hospital. That facility or facilities must have the capacity to house 200 to 600 inmates, ICE’s request said.
In addition to housing and detaining the inmates, the sites must be able to provide them with food, utilities, medical care, dental care, transportation services and meet other requirements outlined by ICE. Though “dedicated ICE facilities” are preferred, the request says, “facilities shared with other detained populations will be considered” if they separate the ICE detainees from other inmates.
In accordance with executive orders from President Donald Trump, an ICE official said Tuesday, Congress has been asked to consider an increase of more than $1.2 billion in funding for detention beds, which would support an average of 48,000 new adult inmates.
Responses will be accepted from both private companies and public entities, the official said, including county jails with extra space.
Several detention facilities currently contracted by ICE are run by private prison companies, including CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, as well as GEO Group.
In August 2016, the Obama Administration had announced plans to end the use of private prisons, but in February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo that reversed the decision.
The information request does not constitute a commitment to a site in the future, the request noted, and responses to the request will not be considered as offers. Any responses are due by noon (MST) Oct. 26.
ICE’s Office of Acquisition Management and the Enforcement and Removals Operations “regularly” conduct market research on acquiring new contracts or renewing current ones by soliciting feedback from potentially interested vendors, according to ICE.
The Utah County jail ended a housing contract with ICE at the end of last year, due to overcrowding. But other facilities around the state house immigrants detained by ICE.
In the 100 days following Trump’s executive order, which loosened restrictions on undocumented immigrants considered a “priority” for deportation, the arrest rate more than tripled for people suspected of “noncriminal” offenses, or immigration violations, in the Salt Lake City region, which includes Utah, Idaho, Nevada and Montana. When compared to the year before, the arrest rate for convicted criminal offenders remained stagnant.
On Wednesday, ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said the department will not give out more recent statistics on detention rates, noting that those released in the spring were “generated specifically for a first 100-days release.”