Immigration detention center project won’t die; just going further south

It seems the powers that be who want to build a jail-like facility for people awaiting hearings on immigration violations (and possible deportation from the United States) are not about to give up.

Will these types of activists express their objections ...

Their plans to build such a facility somewhere in the Chicago metropolitan area to accommodate immigration violators in the Midwestern U.S. are cropping up again.

ONLY NOW, THEY’VE moved not only across the state line to Indiana, but south to Newton County – a place so far south that I’m sure the locals who live there would seriously resent any claim that they’re part of the Chicago area (Wikipedia says they are).

It’s a fairly isolated place with lots of open space, which means it might be possible to build the desired facility in a place where it would have little interaction with the real world – just like more conventional prison facilities.

Perhaps this is what the project’s backers feel is necessary to get away from the objections that have constantly arisen all the other opportunities that this has come up for discussion.

Personally, I remember back when the powers-that-be wanted to build such a facility just outside of Joliet. When locals objected, talks shifted toward building it just south of Crete (which is roughly the southernmost suburb of Chicago) not far from the now-defunct Balmoral Racecourse.

ALL THE HOSTILITY toward the project caused Crete officials to back away, which caused the project’s supporters to shift over the state line into Indiana and there was some consideration to building it in Gary not far from the Gary/Chicago International Airport.

Concerns about the airport’s flight patterns being a potential security risk for a detention facility, along with the outspoken immigration activists who have followed this project everywhere it has gone, caused Gary municipal officials to give up their support for the idea.

... so far distant from Chicago?

Now, it seems the supporters of a detention center have found a place about 65 miles away from Chicago (about as far south as Kankakee) where they hope there will be a lack of opposition to the idea of locking up people who may only be caught up in the immigration bureaucracy because they got pulled over for a traffic violation – and some eager cop was willing to notify immigration to “take ‘em away.”

As the talks proceed toward whether to build such a facility in Newton County -- a place whose total population (just under 14,000) is less than most suburbs. I’ll be curious to see how many of the activist-types will continue to follow this project.

BECAUSE SOME OF the objectors are people with an interest in our nation’s immigration policy, and they have followed it from municipality to municipality.

From Joliet to Crete to Gary, Ind., will they now show up in Kentland (the county seat) to let their objections be known. Or will they figure they’ve pushed this proposed facility far out enough into the “middle of nowhere” that they can live with its existence “somewhere else.”

I’ve heard the arguments on all sides, with the objectors hating the idea of detaining people while the immigration violations are pending. While supporters either aren’t bothered with their incarceration, or they’ll argue that these facilities aren’t really prisons.

Some may even argue that the current status of these violators would improve if they weren’t held in traditional jail conditions (many are sent to the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, which has a contract with the federal government to detain such people).

PERSONALLY, I’M MOST concerned with the fact that these detention facilities are run by private companies, rather than by a government entity like the federal Bureau of Prisons. Meaning many of the regulations meant to protect the rights of inmates in the federal system do not apply. This particular facility would be built by GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla.

I don’t doubt that in this Age of Trump that we’re now in, there are some who aren’t bothered by that thought. But we should be. Our “rights” are only as safe as the most vulnerable in our society.

And it may well be that among the most vulnerable are those people whose immigration status is unclear – particularly since there are those who enjoy being able to harass such individuals to make up for the short-comings in their own lives.

So has this project moved far enough away from Chicago that the locals will be willing to tell its objections to “stuff it!” or will the objectors (a combination of religious folks and Latino activists) continue to push to where it eventually becomes an Indianapolis issue, rather than Chicago?

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Rauner’s “Turnaround Agenda” reinforcing Illinois’ urban/rural split?

Gov. Bruce Rauner has his “Turnaround Agenda,” a set of policies meant to reinforce the anti-organized labor attitude he has expressed ever since he became a candidate for governor some two years ago.

The agenda is meant to reinforce the idea that local people should be allowed to undermine the authority of labor unions, and it is with that goal in mind that Rauner’s staff has been working to try to get local governments across Illinois to pass a resolution saying they support the agenda.

I HAVE FOUND some amusement from reading the Capitol Fax newsletter’s website in recent days, as publisher Rich Miller is running tallies of which communities are feeling compelled to express their support for the governor’s desires to make Illinois a “right-to-work” state (implying that unions interfere with people getting jobs, rather than merely protecting their right to be compensated respectably for their work).

Day after day, it seems that every rural community across the southern third of Illinois, and even a few in central Illinois, adds to the list of Rauner supporters. Then again, the voters in those places were the bulk of Rauner supporters in the 2014 election cycle – so it’s no surprise!

Monday was the day they finally got a “big” city on board – the City Council in Rockford voted largely on partisan lines (The Register-Star newspaper reported that one Democrat flipped) to support the resolution.

I know some will remember the days when Rockford was the second-largest city in Illinois and will want to think that means something. Although considering that Aurora and Naperville are both now larger, and Joliet's growing population nips at the heels of Rockford, I'd say it means Rockford isn’t what it once was.

WHAT I HAVE noticed about this is that the trend doesn’t seem to be spreading into metro Chicago. If there are any communities among the roughly 260 municipalities that comprise the Chicago suburbs that have backed the idea, I’m not aware of them.

In fact, the only area community I have heard of that even considered the idea was Crete – a Will County town that realistically can be considered the southern tip of the Chicago area and the place where some would say downstate Illinois begins.

Even then, Michael Einhorn, the long-time village president tried rewriting Rauner’s agenda a bit to soften it up. But the trustees decided to postpone any kind of action.

Reading through the suburban press these days finds a lot of quotes from suburban mayors who just don’t want to touch the issue. Which when combined with the fact that Mayor Rahm Emanuel will likely be the leader of the effort to quash Rauner’s symbolic resolution from becoming reality (because it would interfere with many of the priorities Emanuel thinks the state should have) means this is turning into the two-thirds of Illinois’ population refusing to go along.

EVEN THOUGH I’M sure the masses in the remaining third will want to see themselves as representing the true sentiments of Illinois.

All the “Turnaround Agenda” (which includes such language as, “Voters in our community should be allowed to decide by referendum whether or not employees should be forced to join a union or pay dues as a condition of employment”) is doing is becoming more evidence of the “urban vs. rural” split that has become Illinois’ character.

If anything, Rauner by pushing this resolution (thinking that it will pressure legislators into giving in to the governor’s anti-union beliefs) is making that split bigger than usual.

I’d argue he’s becoming the source of the problem, rather than any attempt to become a solution.

HONESTLY, I WON’T be surprised if a lone suburban community or two wind up backing “Turnaround.” Naperville in onetime GOP bastion DuPage County took up the issue Tuesday night. There always are a few exceptions to the rule. But this isn’t a revolution sweeping its way across Illinois – the way Rauner backers would have us think.

If anything, I wonder if Makanda (the Southern Illinois municipality that was the long-time home of now-late Sen. Paul Simon) is the true way of how the Land of Lincoln thinks.

It seems their village officials voted to support the resolution earlier this month without realizing exactly what it meant. The Southern Illinoisan newspaper reported that village President Tina Shingleton said officials thought it was just a call for local control of local government.

Rather than part of an agenda to undermine organized labor and the people who work at such jobs – a desire that Makanda officials are now desperately trying to undo to avoid looking even more foolish than they already do!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Will “Turnaround” be the issue that breaks up the Emanuel/Rauner friendship? Or at least membership in that pricey wine club?

Different location; same objections

How much griping and grousing will it take before the powers-that-be who want to build special detention facilities to hold people facing immigration-related violations realize that the idea stinks?

Apparently, some people aren’t listening.

BECAUSE IN READING a Chicago Tribune report about the objections to a proposal to build such a facility near Joliet, I couldn’t help but notice there was nothing new in the debate.

The exact same arguments were made last year when officials were focusing their attention on building a facility near suburban Crete.

No matter where one wants to put this facility, the people are going to object. There’s no way to make this look pretty.

At stake is a series of facilities that Corrections Corp. of America want to build across the country. They envision five facilities – one each in various parts of the United States.

THE FACILITY BEING proposed for near Joliet would be the Chicago-area facility in their plan, and likely would be used to detain people suspected of immigration law violations in the Midwestern U.S.

Last year, the attention focused on a site near Crete – which is a Will County town that is about as far south as one can go and still claim to be in the Chicago-area. The actual site of farmland that would have been turned into the facility is pretty much the edge between urban and rural development in Illinois.

But the locals hated the idea of having any facility that even remotely resembled a jail near their community. When combined with the immigration rights activists who despise the idea of these privately-owned facilities being used to detain people, it was enough to get local officials to back away from the project.

Now, the supporters still want their Chicago-area facility for alleged immigration violators caught in the Midwest. So they’ve merely moved to the other end of Will County.

INSTEAD OF FAR south, it will be far southwest. Although that would put it near some brand-new residential development that is the very reason why Will County is the fastest-growing county in Illinois.

Which means even more people will be disgusted at the thought of a jail-like facility near their brand-new homes!

Personally, I hate the idea of outsourcing this, so to speak, to private entities. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials really want to detain these facilities, they ought to operate the facilities themselves.

Contracting out to private companies is more about try to undermine any unions that would be involved in representing employees at a federal facility.

ALTHOUGH I WILL agree the current situation is unacceptable. Federal officials have been turning over the people awaiting deportation hearings to the McHenry County Sheriff’s department – which has been putting them in its county jail.

 

All mixed in with that far northwestern suburb's criminal element. That's abhorrent -- no matter how far to the "right" one is!

As some will say, we’re talking about some people being put in jail indefinitely (the feds have a backlog when it comes to deportation hearings) because they might have been caught running a red light and couldn’t immediately satisfy a local cop about what their immigration status was.

The immigration violations themselves aren’t “criminal” offenses (no matter how much the conservative ideologues want to believe they are!). Jail is a miserable fate for them.

THE REAL SOLUTION to the problem is to get the feds to start moving along at a quicker pace when it comes to addressing immigration cases. Maybe the money that would be paid to Corrections Corp. ought to be put into hiring more hearing officers to reduce the backlog.

Although there also are the occasional incidents where someone gets picked up by immigration, then finds themselves back in a foreign country within days. Our system can move along properly, when it feels properly motivated.

But more often than not, it doesn’t.

Which is why some people think it a smart thing to pay millions to a Nashville, Tenn.-based company to operate jail-like facilities for “foreigners.”

I THINK THOSE ideologues just like the concept so much they’re willing to waste federal dollars on construction, piled on to the millions that has been wasted in recent years to build up a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.

And there’s no place within metro Chicago that’s going to want to be associated with this stinker of an idea!

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If not Crete, will Immigration search for willing town to host detention center?

Activists with concerns about immigration  policy and the way in which our government handles such cases are pleased that officials in a suburb at the edge of the Chicago area has said it doesn’t want to be the site of a detention center.

Yet that really doesn’t matter much.

BECAUSE I HAVE no doubt that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, along with the Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America, will merely find another municipality – one whose officials will be so eager to have a significant construction project that they’ll overlook the ethical qualms inherent in the project.

The plan, insofar as federal Immigration officials are concerned, was always about having one of five detention centers located somewhere, anywhere, within the Chicago area.

I doubt that Corrections Corp. really cares which suburban community winds up getting their name put on the facility as part of its home address.

The concept of Crete, a Will County town that has a racetrack for horses, was really about the fact that there was lots of open land surrounding the community.

LAND COULD HAVE been purchased for a detention center site without having to worry about tearing something down. They would have encountered some farmers who would have decried the loss of rural life and potential to grow crops.

But I’m sure they would have been willing to put up with that rhetoric in order to get a large plot of land on the cheap in order to build the facility, which had been designed to hold 750 beds for people who have immigration violation cases pending in the system.

Now, they’ll be looking at other municipalities – many of which are feeling a sense of desperation in coping with today’s economic struggles.

Which means I’m sure that somewhere, out there, is another suburban community that will be willing to say “yes” where Crete municipal officials this week officially said “no.”

SO ANYBODY WHO thinks this issue is resolved is really missing the point!

All of the factors that were in play before are still in play now. Just the name of the community will change. The names of the people who will argue they don’t want a detention center built near their homes will change.

The immigration activists who view such privately-run detention centers as an abhorrent concept will continue to be appalled at the idea. They will just no longer be slandering the reputation of Crete when they argue against the issue.

Because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency still views there to be a need to have one of these facilities in the Chicago area, which does have a large number of cases pending and a demand for a place to put people until the cases are resolved.

PERSONALLY, I HAVE my own objection to these facilities, and it has nothing to do with location (locals will always object).

Just as I wouldn’t trust private companies to be involved in the operation of correctional centers (a.k.a., prisons) for people convicted of state or federal crimes, I don’t get into the idea of private companies being involved in the immigration business.

Although I do find it encouraging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials realize that their current way of coping with pending cases (paying local sheriffs to house them in their county jails) is ridiculously flawed, there has to be a better solution.

Even if that means having Immigration officials getting into the incarceration business. Although a better alternative would involve having Immigration find ways to more efficiently handle their cases so that people wouldn’t be stuck in the system for so long that they would need to be detained at all.

THEN, THERE’S THE real solution – although it seems to be the one that Republican ideologues are determined to fight to the death, and one that President Barack Obama hasn’t been willing to push for.

That is real reform of the immigration system, which would eliminate the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies that create immigration violators out of people who, by and large, are trying to live their lives in peace and quiet and who truly aren’t criminals to begin with.

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