Cash-strapped Central Valley city weighs plan to convert prisons into immigration detention centers

MCFARLAND, Calif. — A small, cash-strapped city in California's agricultural Central Valley is considering a plan to convert two state prison facilities into for-profit immigration detention centers. The proposal is forcing local leaders to weigh the private prison company's promise to continue providing high-paying jobs, tax revenue and scholarships for the next 15 years against the outcry of the community's immigrant residents, who are concerned the facilities would lead to increased immigration enforcement, arrests and deportation.

The city of McFarland's Planning Commission is expected to hold a second hearing Tuesday evening on the GEO Group's request to convert its two 700-bed prisons — Central Valley and Golden State modified community correctional facilities — into annexes for its 400-bed immigration detention facility in Bakersfield, the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center. If approved, GEO would increase its immigration detention capacity in Kern County by 350%.

The proposal is the result of California's effort to phase out the use of for-profit prisons and detention centers. The state corrections department ended its contract with GEO for one of the McFarland prisons last fall and is expected to end its agreement with the other in April; that left open the possibility for the company to house federal detainees in the city. In late December, GEO inked a 15-year contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Mesa Verde and the two prisons in McFarland.

GEO already plays an outsized role in the city of less than 15,000 people, located about 30 miles north of Bakersfield. The two prisons, which are wrapped in concertina wire, are located in a residential neighborhood less than a mile from McFarland High School. GEO is the city’s second-largest employer, after the school district, and provides about $2 million annually in property taxes and utility fees, according to McFarland Mayor Manuel Cantu.

Yet the city is in dire financial straits and many residents — 95% of whom are Latino — work in the region’s grape vines and mega-dairies, earning a median household income of less than $34,000. Its police department is dramatically understaffed and underpaid, and leaders recently raised residents’ water rates, sparking community outrage.

“We need the revenues that this business provides, in order for us to provide adequate services for this community,” Cantu said. “The reality is, if this business leaves, then it’s going to be a very difficult reality for us to survive as a city and it’d be devastating financially.”

But some McFarland residents say the benefits the facilities would provide aren’t worth the risks.

Farmworkers, many of whom have limited education and minimal English language skills, say they wouldn’t qualify for jobs at the detention centers. Some — including indigenous families from the Mexican state of Oaxaca — have talked about leaving the city all together if prisons become detention centers, activists and residents say.

“I think it is a shame that the elected officials of a majority immigrant community are considering the expansion of these detention centers into McFarland,” said Alex Gonzalez, a community organizer for Faith in the Valley, a faith-based group supporting McFarland residents in their fight against GEO’s detention center proposal. “It’s a shame that GEO is exploiting McFarland’s economic shortcomings to prey on the city and prey on its people.”

'An opportunity to be solvent'

The quandary facing McFarland leaders is deeply rooted in the Central Valley’s reliance on the agricultural and prison industries, as well as its legacy of extreme poverty.

McFarland is located in northwest Kern County, the most agriculturally productive county in the most agriculturally productive state in the nation. The county’s dairies, as well as table grape, almond and pistachio crops, were valued at more than $7.2 million in 2017, according to the California Department of Food & Agriculture.

That wealth has not trickled down to the people working in the fields. Today, more than 35% of the city’s residents live below the poverty line.

The city earned fame from a 2015 movie — called McFarland, USA — that featured Kevin Costner as a cross-country coach who led the children of farmworkers to win a state championship. McFarland's pride for its award-winning runners is emblazoned on a bright mural on a water tower in the center of town.

Yet the city continues to struggle.

An analysis by the California State Auditor’s office determined the city was at high risk of being unable to pay its bills because its general fund liabilities outpaced its cash and investments at year-end. Interim City Manager David Tooley described the city’s financial position as “subject to unacceptable levels of risk” in the 2019-2020 budget.

After subsidizing water and sewer rates with funds from the city’s general fund, the council significantly increased rates during the 2018-19 fiscal year. The city, which offers one of California’s lowest starting salaries for full-time patrol officers, has developed a reputation for hiring cops who were previously fired, sued for misconduct or convicted of a crime, including two of its most recent police chiefs. It has just a handful of police officers patrolling its streets.

GEO’s two state prisons in McFarland — Central Valley and Golden State — were for many years a bright spot in the city’s budget. Along with providing about $2 million in property taxes and utility usage, GEO also pays the city about $511,000 in fiscal mitigation payments for the two facilities, according to the company.

So when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 32 — the state law phasing out private prisons and immigration detention centers — in October 2019, Mayor Cantu said he saw the legislation as another hit to McFarland’s coffers. The law would force the closure of the two prisons, since it prohibits the state from incarcerating people in private, for-profit prison facilities after Jan. 1, 2028.

In late December, however, when GEO and ICE signed a 15-year contract for the Mesa Verde facility that would convert the McFarland prisons into federal detention centers, Cantu breathed a sigh of relief.

The proposal would allow the city to keep earning revenue from GEO. It would increase the number of jobs at the facilities from 154 to 173, plus additional contracted health care positions, according to the company. It would also increase the annual salaries for entry-level officers, from about $34,000 to more than $96,000.

“I see it as an opportunity for us to stay afloat,” Cantu said of GEO’s proposal. “So now, if the community is looking at this opportunity — what I consider to be an opportunity to be solvent — as a negative impact to the city, well, one way or another, we’re going to be negatively impacted, and it’s going to be in the services that we provide.”

'This was a local business'

McFarland has collaborated with GEO on immigration detention before.

When Bakersfield city leaders declined to be a partner in a contract for GEO's Mesa Verde facility in Bakersfield, GEO turned to McFarland, Cantu said. GEO had already sited the two prisons in the city so at the time, Cantu said, it seemed like a "natural request."

"As a mayor, you want to support your local businesses, and this was a local business," Cantu said.

On Jan. 27, 2015, McFarland entered into a contract with ICE, known as an intergovernmental services agreement, to provide housing, safekeeping, medical care and other services to immigrant detainees, on behalf of the federal agency. The city subcontracted with GEO to run the detention center.

The city ended these agreements less than three years later. The decision came several months after state officials started seeking access to the facility, correspondence obtained through the California Public Records Act show. A state law approved in 2017, AB 103, requires the state attorney general to review immigrant detention facilities and provide the governor and legislature with a summary of findings.

As requests for site visits and documents piled up, the McFarland City Council met on Sept. 20, 2018, in closed session, and debated whether to continue contracting with ICE and GEO. The council eventually voted to inform GEO it would be ending the contractual agreement, unless the company provided the city additional compensation.

But, Cantu said, GEO didn't comply. Instead, he said, the company informed the city that it would contract directly with ICE.

"At that point in time, GEO came back and said they were just going to go at it alone," he said.

Three months later, in December of 2018, the city informed ICE and GEO it would be ending the agreements. ICE then contracted directly with GEO, signing a one-year contract worth $19.4 million.

Cantu said last Wednesday that he supported ending the contracts two years ago because the city was effectively in business with GEO, and he no longer thought that was a wise arrangement.

“I kind of felt like we were in a very difficult situation, where the city as a whole was involved in a situation where you may not have direct control over what’s happening,” he said. “Why should we put our citizens in a partnership where we may not have direct control or direct say in any operational affairs or any decision-making?”

ICE's Office of Detention Oversight reviewed Mesa Verde in 2016 and found the facility was compliant with just four of 16 of the agency's detention standards. It found 43 deficiencies, including related to sexual abuse and assault prevention, staff-detainee communication and use of force and restraints, according to the California Department of Justice's February 2019 review of immigration detention in the state

Residents divided over proposal

For McFarland residents, the detention center proposal has become a question of morals and money.

Maria Trujillo, a McFarland resident who spent about a month in GEO’s immigration detention center in Bakersfield, recalls feeling treated there as if she were a “caged dog.” She is opposed to the plan to convert the prisons into detention centers, she said, because, “I don’t want people to experience what I did.”

When police arrested Trujillo and her husband in October 2017 for a domestic dispute, they realized the mother of five children and grandmother of seven had let her green card expire 11 years earlier. Law enforcement officials handed her over to federal immigration authorities, who detained her at Mesa Verde.

Trujillo still shudders when she recalls the underwear the GEO guards gave to the women. It had been washed, she said, but still carried the stains of other women’s menstrual blood and fluids. She recalls the food she dreaded eating — the chicken that, she said, was still pink inside. And she recalls the endless nights of insomnia, as her thoughts swirled with what-ifs.

“I had a psychologist inside,” she said in Spanish. “I told her, ‘if you send me to Mexico, I don’t want to live.’”

Trujillo was transferred to another detention center in Northern California and released about four months later. She is again working in the fields and cleaning houses, and is in the process of getting her new green card.

Raul Chavez, who is 26 and has spent nearly his whole life in McFarland, sees the issues differently. He worked as an officer and instructor at Central Valley until he was laid off in November, as the facility was closing. He is hopeful that GEO will be able to convert the prisons into detention centers, and that he gets hired to work at one of them.

He has heard his neighbors threaten to leave McFarland if GEO opens the facilities.

“Well, if they don’t come in, and we’re stuck with these high [water] prices and not as many good-paying jobs to sustain a life, then what makes you think that I’m not going to move?” he said. “And it’s something I don’t want to do.”

Chavez admitted he, too, was once uncomfortable with immigration detention — until he had the opportunity to work for three weeks in GEO’s immigration detention center in Aurora, Colo.

“I’m not for, you know, caging up my own race,” he said he thought to himself, as he was going into the assignment.

Once he got there, however, he said he was surprised to see detainees treated like “normal people.” The experience, he said, changed his perspective on detention centers.

“I know for a fact that I’m going to go in there and actually treat these people with the utmost respect,” he said. “If I did it for the killers and rapists over here, then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be as respectful or even more respectful to the detainees that we might possibly get in the future.”

'A city without a future?'

Last Wednesday, less than a week before the Planning Commission hearing was scheduled to take place, more than a dozen McFarland residents gathered at a local Catholic church and prepared to canvas the city. Members of the group said they had seen text messages offering to pay people to knock on doors on GEO's behalf. These volunteers' goal was to collect 4,000 signatures from neighbors opposed to GEO's proposal to convert the prisons into detention centers.

Among them was Esmeralda Gonzalez, who was born in Mexicali and has lived in McFarland for about 30 years. She was dressed in the same Nike baseball cap, plaid shirt and jeans she'd worn while working in home construction earlier in the day. She had replaced her work boots with black sneakers, so she could more comfortably walk up and down the city's residential streets.

Gonzalez, a mother of five who also works in the fields, said she is opposed to immigrant detention centers in McFarland or anywhere else, even if they do provide revenue for the city.

“I’m not going to sell out my people or exchange them for money,” she said in Spanish. “We want businesses that don’t sow fear.”

If the proposal is approved, she said, she plans to move out of McFarland.

“I’m not going to stay in a city without a future,” she said.

As the sunset, Gonzalez knocked on people's doors.

"Have you heard about what's going on?" she asked one neighbor. "We need your help, please," she implored another.

The door-to-door campaign was just one element of what Alex Gonzalez, the community organizer for Faith in the Valley, called a "David versus Goliath" fight.

"It's definitely very challenging," he said, "but it's also been very encouraging seeing that people who are undocumented and have roots in the community are willing to fight to keep ICE and GEO out of their communities."

GEO, meanwhile, said during its fourth-quarter earnings call last Wednesday that it expects the Central Valley and Golden State facilities to be incorporated into the ICE detention center contracts by the second half of this year. The company said the two facilities, along with another state prison that could be incorporated into a detention center contract in the city of Adelanto, are expected to generate $100 million in revenue annually.

Rebecca Plevin reports on immigration for The Desert Sun. Reach her at rebecca.plevin@desertsun.com. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaplevin.