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ICE
An ICE officer in an udated photo
The airport, a jail, and a prison in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley have emerged as a major part of the network the Trump administration is using to conduct mass deportations. As it has, residents and advocates are raising concerns.
For his part, the county sheriff said he doesn’t have strong opinions in the deportation debate. He said he’s taking immigration detainees to supplement a thin budget.
The debate illustrates how moral and practical concerns can clash in the second Trump administration. The clash is particularly poignant in the Mahoning Valley, a place settled by immigrants who built an industrial powerhouse. That powerhouse has seen decades of decline in the wake of globalization and competition from overseas.
President Donald Trump ran last year on claims that the United States was overrun with violent criminals he would deport. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been rounding up undocumented immigrants — and some who are legally seeking asylum. He’s also seeking to deport hundreds of thousands of others who are legally here under temporary protected status.
Despite Trump’s claim that he would focus deportation efforts on violent criminals, just 40% of the 112,000 arrested by ICE between Jan. 20 and late June had any criminal conviction. Only 7% had been convicted of violent crimes and just 5% of drug crimes, Stateline reported.
Even so, arrests have continued to surge. Nearly 60,000 people were in ICE custody as of Aug. 10, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
As they are, Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley are playing a big role.
From February through July, 202 ICE planes carrying detainees traveled through the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport — the seventh most of any in the United States, according to Witness at the Border, which compiles the statistics. At the same time, the county jail and a private prison in Youngstown are housing about 500 ICE detainees, many of whom are shuttled to and from the airport.
Chris Harris, a local resident, said it’s wrong for local institutions to participate in what she sees as Trump’s needless persecution of a powerless minority.
“I’m fundamentally, morally, and spiritually opposed to our government rounding up immigrants, people of color, people who have or don’t have documentation, putting them into detainment, a lot of times with no due process,” she said in an interview last week. “Folks are just sitting in jail. A lot of times they have no way to contact an attorney, no way to contact family. People can’t find their loved ones in detainment. And then they’re getting shuttled from one detention center to another across the country. Fundamentally, I’m against that. I’m opposed to that. It’s a faith thing for me.”
Harris and a small group of others had been tracking and photographing ICE flights through the airport, which she said had usually taken place every morning and every night. But she said the flights now appear to have been moved out of public view.
As ICE planes have shuttled detainees around the country and overseas, they’ve prompted accusations that it’s a gambit to keep detainees out of touch with their attorneys and to deny participation in their legal proceedings.
Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said it’s a system of injustice.
“I think it’s incredibly disturbing that we have set up this network of jails and charter flights,” she said. “We’re spending billions of dollars. We’re establishing prisons in foreign countries to house people who, up until the time of their arrest, were working and taking care of their families and following a legal process.”
Andrew Resnick is a spokesman for the Western Reserve Port Authority, which operates the Youngstown airport. He said his agency was aware of the Boeing 737 planes passing through the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, but said they were there as a consequence of a federal lease with a fixed-base operator.
“It is important to note that the Port Authority serves as the commercial sponsor of the federally owned Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport (an FAA asset),” Resnick said in an email. “Our primary job is to ensure the ongoing operations of the facility through the safety and maintenance of airport facilities and grounds.”
While the port authority appears to have no say in the ICE presence at the airport, two jails in Youngstown are voluntarily housing around 500 ICE detainees daily.
Every Thursday, Harris leads a prayer vigil at one or the other. She said nuns from a Catholic convent nearby and a few others regularly join her. But she said bigger numbers have been slow to materialize.
“People are scared. They don’t want to admit what’s happening. They don’t want to think about it,” Harris said. “We’ve got to stand up. If you’re not doing something, you’re part of the problem. I refuse to be part of this problem.”
The larger of the two facilities is the Northeast Ohio Corrections Center. It’s owned by a private company, Nashville-based CoreCivic, which contracts with the federal and state governments.
A spokesman was asked to confirm whether it housed 400 detainees in the Youngstown facility, as a source reported to the Capital Journal. The spokesman, Brian Todd, referred the question to ICE “out of respect.”
“Out of respect for our government partners at ICE, we kindly ask that you contact them directly regarding contractual/capacity questions,” he said in an email.
ICE didn’t respond to questions about the movement of detainees through the Mahoning Valley. Todd sent a February press release by CoreCivic indicating that the private prison company would take a major stake in Trump’s mass-deportation project.
Five weeks after Trump took office, the company announced “that it has entered into contract modifications to add capacity for up to a total of 784 detainees from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) at its 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, its 1,072-bed Nevada Southern Detention Center, and its 1,600-bed Cimarron Correctional Facility in Oklahoma. In addition, CoreCivic has obtained a contract modification to specify that ICE may use up to 252 beds at its 2,672-bed Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi.”
Tramonte of the Immigrant Alliance said the money flowing to such private companies could be better used.
“That’s billions of taxpayer dollars that we could be spending on public education, health care, nutrition, priorities for American people instead of implementing a mass-deportation system,” she said. “It’s absolutely disturbing.”
The other Youngstown facility housing detainees, the Mahoning County Jail, typically houses about 100 a day. Sheriff Jerry Greene makes no bones about his motives for taking them — it’s for the money.
At $125 per-inmate, per-day, the department stands to take in an additional $4.5 million a year with most expenses other than food being covered by the feds, Greene said in an interview last week.
“I knew I had bed space,” he said. “The moment Trump won, I got on the phone with ICE in Cleveland and told them if they needed bed space, we’d like to put in for that. They jumped at that.”
Greene said his jail already housed prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service, so all it took was a contract modification to take in the ICE detainees. He acknowledged that some members of the community objected to their presence in the jail, but he said they harbor some misconceptions.
“They’re accusing us of going out and kicking in doors and ripping people away from families, but really we’re just a number here,” Greene said. “Mahoning County has 100 beds. We get inmates from everywhere — from Maryland, Detroit, California, Florida you name it. We have a number we can take and they keep us full.”
Greene, formerly a Democrat who last year switched his affiliation to Republican, said he doesn’t have an opinion about Trump’s deportation policies “other than I believe that if people are in this country illegally, they shouldn’t be. Would I call myself a fanatic about it? Absolutely not. But I agree with that part of it. If you’re not supposed to be here, you shouldn’t be here.”
It was pointed out that some of those being deported are in the country legally. Some are in the midst of asylum proceedings, and Trump is working to deport hundreds of thousands more with temporary-protected status.
“When you peel this onion back, there’s probably going to be layers of good and bad to it,” Greene said. “But at the end of the day, I’m here to support the federal government, and this also benefits us.”
During the first Trump administration, some Ohio counties were sued on claims that detainees were mistreated in their jails. Greene said mistreatment is not going to happen in his jail. In fact, he said, among his staff, ICE detainees are known to be good to work with.
“When you talk about mistreatment, it’s funny, because the comments that come from our medical staff and our deputies is that… the ICE inmates are great,” he said. “They don’t give the deputies problems like other inmates do.”
To Greene, the matter is simple: Somebody is going to house the detainees, so it might as well be Mahoning County where he says they’ll be well-cared for and the county’s depressed economy can benefit.
“If we didn’t house these hundred inmates, they’d be housed somewhere else,” he said. “They might be in a tent in the Everglades.”
But to Harris, the activist, it’s part of an anti-immigrant scheme that flies in the face of the region’s heritage.
“It’s so frustrating because we’re all immigrants over here in Youngstown. My dad came from East Germany,” she said. “He was a refugee seeking asylum. Folks, you’re Italian, you’re Irish, you’re Serbian, Ukrainian. This is your heritage.”
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.
