The Department of Homeland Security has modified its plans for a sprawling warehouse facility in Socorro that it purchased for use as an immigration detention facility for up to 8,500 people, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said Friday after meeting with the interim director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The Department of Homeland Security is going to proceed with using those warehouses, but there will not be 8,500 people held there,” she said during a news conference at her Downtown El Paso office. “They said that they’ve changed the plans a little bit. It will be a training facility. It will be a campus, essentially, for ICE, with offices and conference rooms, but yes, there will be privately run detention.”
Escobar received the information Friday in a meeting with , who became ICE’s acting director June 1, and other officials from throughout El Paso County. Venturella couldn’t provide an estimate on how many detainees might be held at the facility, she said.
DHS officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from El Paso Matters about Venturella’s meeting in El Paso.
The project’s water demands have become one of the most contentious issues surrounding the proposed facility. An 8,500-bed detention center could require hundreds of thousands of gallons of water each day. Officials with the Lower Valley Water District, which serves the area, said the existing system was not designed to support a facility of that size and that significant infrastructure improvements could be necessary before adequate service could be provided.
Escobar and other officials at Friday’s news conference said even a training facility and office complex alongside a smaller detention facility would place enormous strain on water and other infrastructure needs in the Socorro area, which already struggles with traffic and water pressure issues.
The warehouse complex was designed to hold pecans harvested from nearby fields. But DHS spent $122 million earlier this year to buy it to hold thousands of detained immigrants and a massive staff.
“Those buildings, when we looked at them as the fire department for their pre-construction, were supposed to be factories that we’re going to hold pecans or some type of product … with (200) to 300 employees scattered throughout the whole facility,” said Roger Esparza, chief of El Paso County Emergency Services District 2. “Now we’re looking at concentrated humans, several thousand.”
The existing water infrastructure can’t support the needs of such a facility, and his department doesn’t have the resources to protect a massive office and detention complex, he said.
Venturella said the facility wouldn’t open until a year or 18 months from today, Esparza said, but that doesn’t help the emergency services district.
The new ICE facility would require a ladder truck for fighting fires that costs $2 million and has a three-year waiting period, Esparza said, as well as additional staffing.
“We don’t have the funding. Nobody there was able to say how that’s going to happen, but that’s our major concern,” he said.
Venturella became acting director of ICE on June 1, succeeding Todd Lyons. He worked in federal immigration enforcement for 26 years, then spent more than a decade at GEO Group, one of the largest operators of private prisons and immigration detention facilities.
The original plans for the immigration detention center in Socorro would have made it one of the largest detention facilities in the United States. The project centers on three warehouses on 63 acres near Interstate 10.
The three Catholic parishes in Socorro have recently begun organizing efforts to challenge the proposed detention facility, citing humanitarian concerns and the impact on existing residents who already face significant water challenges.
DHS has retreated from or paused several other large-scale detention projects proposed under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
In April, the Associated Press reported that DHS halted the purchase of additional warehouses slated for conversion into immigration detention facilities while new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reviewed contracts and property acquisitions made during the agency’s rapid detention expansion.
The post Trump administration scales back plans for massive Socorro immigration detention center, Escobar says appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More