Detention Emergencies

Introducing a public dataset about emergencies in ICE Custody, and highlighting exceptionally well-executed use cases for the data.

Happy Saturday. Thank you to all of you who’ve subscribed—free and paid, new and not-so-new. You keep this work going, and I appreciate it.

If you’d like to register to join our upcoming free FOIA requestors circle call this Friday, May 23 at 3:00 p.m. eastern, the link is here. Our last event involved really generative discussions about records requests we can do around CECOT and Operation Lone Star, as well as a brief update about proposals percolating through Congress to fix foia. We’d welcome you there.

Waking Nightmares

I had a nightmare last night that Tom Homan was with an ICE agent I sued, raiding a house a former client. The level of pain, fear, anger, and trauma we’re seeing these folks spread digs deep, and channeled right into the part of my brain that dreams. Like most nightmares, there comes a point where I realize that’s what’s happening, and I seek to get out. Even if I do, the felt sense of terror, sadness, and shame remains with me even after I awake. And like most nightmares, digging into what’s actually going on and analyzing it has a calming effect—a way of replacing the power it has over me with the power I can exercise over it through reflection and agency.

I am grateful to my unconscious for helping me process all of the nightmares we see when we open our screen thingys and absorb the world. I am grateful to be connected each day with courageous people who quietly fight back the fear and try to wake us up.

The generative aspect of nightmares and trauma dreams for me is that they bring my body into a state of emergency. Absorbing and cataloguing the immediate needs of the moment can be a great teacher, and, I hope, increase survivability when actual emergencies happen.

Actual emergencies are what I’d like to share with you Today.

Detention 911: Tacoma

The University of Washington Human Rights Clinic recently released an amazing report about how emergencies inside GEO’s immigrant prison in the Tacoma Tideflats generates get covered up and ignored. Here is a link to the report.

This is excellent public records work, not least of which because it helps add something that both amplifies and corroborates the voices people inside, struggling to survive the emergency that is detention.

Their findings are stark: In 10 years and 150+ calls, only 2 prosecutions occurred.

The data breakdowns are also instructive:

As a complement to this report, if you’re interested, I cannot recommend highly enough the explosive, thorough, and beautifully documented story Rico Moore of independent media outlet The Margin recently published with The Nation about Tacoma, titled “In Toxic Detention” and the fight to shut it down. Weaving in the UWHRC data, Moore adroitly follows the lead of organizers to ground truth. And the truth is the SUPERFUND site GEO and Tacoma politicians decided to imprison migrants on for profit is very likely poisoning the folks inside with toxic water. The failure of authorities to respond to individual emergencies tracks the larger failure of the system to respond to the health emergency detention poses:

Offering New Detention 911 Records Sets, and an Invitation

Like Prof. Godoy, who supervises the UWHCR that put out this most recent report, I’ve long been interested in what 911 calls can tell us about conditions in a detention facility. I’ve been requesting, processing, and posting 911 logs records to DocumentCloud while I work to finish articles reporting on these records sets. But I’m a slow, self-conscious writer, and we don’t really have that kind of time. So, with the acknowledgement that I’ve got a bunch of additional analysis in spreadsheets still under construction, and will still be working to collaborate with anyone who wants to tell these stories, I feel like it’s the right thing to do to let these public records be public records, and to share them in this forum. Thank you, nightmare Tom Homan, for the motivation.

HERE is a link to the Detention911 Collection on DocumentCloud, where I post records upon receiving them. It’s a living document set, so feel free to check back regularly if this stuff interests you, or just reach out to me. Some records are not publicly posted because they have folks’ personally identifiable information. I’m working to redact them and post, but it’s a slog.

Below, I provide links to 16 different records sets I’ve obtained for facilities around the country. If you would like help or guidance in how to obtain records for a facility you care about, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If want to support the time and cost of obtaining, analyzing, and publishing this data, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The Records

Facilities represented in these records, grouped by state:

1. Washington

   1. Northwest ICE Processing Center, Tacoma, WA (GEO) - January 1, 2023 - April 25, 2025 (Link)

      1. Note: I’ve also got individual call CAD logs of the type UWHRC reviewed in their report, like this one, but need help redacting them before publishing.

2. California

   1. Golden State Annex, McFarland, CA (GEO) - January 1, 2023 - April 30, 2025 (Link)

      1. Here are some individual call records for this facility.

   2. Otay Mesa Detention Center, San Diego, CA (CoreCivic) - January 1, 2023 - March 25, 2025 (Link)

      1. Note: I’ve got individual 911 call records for Cristian Dumitrascu’s death here on March 5, 2023, as well as some additional analysis, if you’re looking to collaborate.

      2. Note: I’m almost finished process the codes 911 used to designate what type of call each one is, and plan to fire off another round of requests after deciphering this.

   3. Imperial Regional Detention Center, Calexico, CA (MTC)

      1. January 1, 2021 - December 31, 2021 (sheriff only) (Link)

      2. January 1, 2022 - January 22, 2024 (Link)

      3. January 1, 2024 - February 1, 2025 (sheriff only) (Link)

   4. COMING SOON: Adelanto ICE Processing Center & Desert View Annex (if the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department comes to their senses. If not, please let me know if you’re a California lawyer who’d like to earn attorney’s fees suing for these records.

3. New Mexico

   1. Otero County ICE Processing Center, Chaparral, NM (MTC) - January 1, 2023 - March 21, 2025 (Link)

      1. Note: I’ve got some individual call recordings for this facility, too, regarding the death of Jhon Benavides Quintana on June 15, 2024, if you’re interested.

   2. Torrance County Detention Facility, Estancia, NM (CoreCivic) - January 1, 2023 - March 15, 2025 (Link)

      1. Note: I have some audio records of selected calls for this facility if you’d like them and want to collaborate.

      2. Note: I have this data coded in a spreadsheet if that would be useful to you.

   3. Cibola County Correctional Center, Milan, NM (CoreCivic)

      1. January 1, 2023 - September 29, 2023 (Link)

      2. September 30, 2023 - May 31, 2024 (Link)

      3. June 1, 2024 - March 15, 2025 (Link)

4. Pennsylvania

   1. Moshannon Valley ICE Processing Center, Phillipsburg, PA (GEO)

      1. March 24, 2024 - April 24, 2025 (Link)

      2. January 1, 2022 - March 6, 2024 (Link)

      3. Note: Separate from 911 Calls are visits by state police agencies. Here are the Pennsylvania State Police logs for Moshannon from January 1, 2022 - April 2024. (Link)

      4. Note: I’ve got this coded and blended into a Google sheet with analysis for a story I’m working on publishing, but if it would be useful to you before my piece is published, please reach out.

5. Georgia

   1. Stewart Detention Center, Lumpkin, GA (CoreCivic) January 1, 2023 - March 27, 2025 (Link)

      1. Note: I have this in a google sheet with a ton of analysis I’m putting together for a larger investigative piece. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would find this data useful before I publish.

   2. COMING SOON: Folkston ICE Processing Center (big thanks to Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta for underwriting the costs of obtaining these records. There’s no fee waiver in GA.)

Use Cases/Work in Progress

1. Researchers could model, scale, or replicate the work at UWHRC using these records sets.

2. Medical professionals could seek to replicate and expand on this groundbreaking work by Dr. Dekker and her colleagues on emergency medical responses at California ICE detention centers.

3. I’m working on multiple stories that show how the absence of investigations in certain facilities have resulted in even greater harms to people inside, and surrounding communities. Others could do the same at other facilities.

4. Death investigators have shown delays in calling 911 at facilities were part of a disorganized response to medical emergencies.

5. Local, state, and federal oversight bodies could track patterns of calls — like overdoses, rapes, and riots — to show contract fraud and coverup by the billionaire private prison profiteers.

6. Organizers can follow La Resistencia’s lead and use 911 calls and records to document, verify, and amplify the demands of people inside while demystifying the detention process to the uninitiated.

7. PREA shadow reporters could show patterns of impunity within local and federal reporting structures contribute to a culture of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, much like the one that pervaded at the Dublin BOP rape prison which is now reportedly becoming an ICE jail.

8. Communities burdened by ICE detention, or those considering burdening themselves with it (looking at you: City of Dublin, CA, Leavenworth, KS, and Newark, NJ!) can analyze the use of 911 emergency resources by this profiteers to more accurately assess the burden ICE detention places on the overall health system, whether in taking EMS units out of commission or in spreading communicable diseases through poor practices inside.

I don’t know if any of this is useful to anyone, so if you find that it is, drop me a line?