Torrance County Commission votes to extend ICE contract

Torrance County’s elected officials unanimously voted to extend the contract that allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to incarcerate asylum seekers at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia.

Commissioners Ryan Schwebach, Kevin McCall and Samuel Schropp on Wednesday morning voted in favor of allowing County Manager Janice Barela to sign an amendment extending the contract by four months.

The commissioners held the vote in a matter of about 30 seconds, without any discussion.

The agenda packet for Wednesday’s meeting did not include the amendment. Barela said afterwards that the county government has not yet received the amendment. That process will finalize the new terms in the contract, which is set to expire on May 14. 

Earlier in the meeting, the commissioners heard remarks from 16 members of the public about the contract. All but one — Schropp’s wife Ann — spoke against renewing or extending the contract.

Anna Trillo, a law student with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, asked the commissioners to neither extend nor renew the contract. Trillo grew up in Moriarty and said the prison does not reflect the community.

“This doesn’t represent who we are,” Trillo said. “The human rights violations happening there do not represent who we are as Torrance County. I know — and my family knows — that we are a very welcoming community to immigrants, that we like to provide opportunities, and that we want to see our future thrive in this county.”

Ian Philabaum, director of legal organizing at Innovation Law Lab, read from a Jan. 17 report based on clinical interviews with people held inside the prison and a review of their health care records.

The report, published by Humanitarian Outreach for Migrant Emotional Health (HOME), concluded the Torrance County Detention Facility has a “punitive and dehumanizing culture,” and its practices “are harmful and contribute to the emotional suffering and deteriorating mental health of persons in their custody.”

“The TCDF organizational culture poses substantial psychological risk for all persons detained there and also poses risk of perpetration induced traumatic stress for staff and officers,” wrote HOME Executive Director Jenifer Wolf-Williams. “Its failure to address abuses of the past decrease the likelihood it will do so in the future.”

Asylum seekers testify to inhumane conditions at Torrance County Detention Facility

Philabaum referred the commissioners to the contract’s rules around medical care and ICE’s own standards for medical care in detention “for further understanding of how CoreCivic is plainly operating TCDF in violation of the contract.”

Samuel Schropp was the only commissioner who addressed the prison during the meeting. Before the vote, he responded to public comment about it by questioning the credibility of testimony from asylum seekers being held inside the Torrance County Detention Facility.

He said almost all the accounts shared with commissioners on Wednesday and at their prior regular meeting “are not credible, and are contradictory, and are hearsay.”

“This commission will continue with random inspections of the facility, and makes its decisions on the current conditions in the facility and credible facts — not hearsay,” Schropp said.

Advocates also pressuring ICE

Also this week, advocates twice asked ICE to not renew the contract, citing the death of Kesley Vial, a Brazilian asylum seeker who died in 2022 after a fatal suicide attempt while he was being held inside Torrance.

Brazilian asylum-seeker who died by suicide held in ‘horrific conditions,’ attorneys say

On Monday, 64 organizations sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and acting ICE director Patrick Lechleitner calling on them to allow the contract to expire.

“ICE and CoreCivic have repeatedly failed to meet the most basic standards they are contractually obligated to meet at TCDF since the moment it began operations in 2019,” they wrote. “The failure to intervene at Torrance will inevitably lead to more loss of life.”

Then on Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to Lechleitner asking him not to renew the contract in light of newly discovered information about the ICE’s treatment of Vial.

ACLU National Director of Policy & Government Affairs Mike Zamore and Deputy Director of Government Affairs for Equality Naureen Shah obtained a document showing “ICE’s own medical investigators concluded that Mr. Vial was not provided ‘health care within the safe limits of practice’ — yet this ICE report was never made public.”

Zamore and Shah wrote now is a critical time for ICE to investigate the new information about Vial’s death and review whether the $24.5 million contract is appropriate.

“The public and members of Congress deserve this full accounting,” Zamore and Shah wrote. “While this review continues, ICE should let the contract for Torrance expire. From a good governance perspective, it makes no sense to renew a contract for operations that have repeatedly resulted in dangerous conditions and chronic violation of federal standards.”

In a phone interview Wednesday, Shah said if ICE renews the contract after everything that has happened, “it really undermines the credibility of their commitment to ensuring detention facilities actually meet health and safety standards.”

“It’s galling to think that ICE’s own investigators could make such damning findings and yet this contract would be renewed,” Shah said. “We have to think about how many more people will suffer horrific conditions under this administration and, even more, under the Trump administration in a second term, considering their promise to massively increase deportations.”

Schropp said during Wednesday’s meeting he received the letter.

Colorado College researchers document abuses at NM immigration detention centers

“Once again, the events described in the letter took place nearly two years ago and do not reflect the conditions in the prison, which I have witnessed in my random and unannounced inspections of the facility,” he said.

Natalia Ocampo, a student researcher at Colorado College, read from an interview she conducted with a Venezuelan asylum seeker being held in Torrance, in which he referred to Vial’s death and contemplated what would happen if he were to die in the prison.

“They do with us whatever they want to, because they can,” the asylum seeker said. “If someone dies no one will know or find out. It already has happened; someone died here last year. He was put in solitary confinement and he took his own life there.”