A member of Maryland’s House of Delegates said he’s currently working on a bill that would ban new private immigration detention facilities in the state and phase out existing ones by 2021. “Maryland should not be involved in the depravity that ICE has been perpetrating in this country,” Del. Vaughn Stewart told The Baltimore Sun.“This legislation sends a clear message that no one should profit from other people’s misery.”
Stewart said that ICE’s move this past summer seeking to jail as many as 800 people in a new facility in the state is what led him to craft the legislation, which he hopes to introduce in the next legislative session, beginning in 2020. “Stewart also cited federal immigration policies, including family separations at the border, among the reasons for bringing his proposal to end the state’s role in detention,” the Sun reported.
The legislation’s passage could see Maryland joining states such as Illinois and California in taking steps to block private prison profiteers and ICE from joining forces to imprison more people in their communities. Leaders and advocates from Florida and Virginia have also been among those opposing plans to open facilities that would jail migrant kids, successfully blocking one such facility in Florida. “No,” tweeted Florida state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani in July. “We should be closing camps, not opening new ones.”
Nor should ICE be expanding when there’s been no accountability for its seemingly endless abuses. Just this past month, BuzzFeed News reported that ICE ignored a clear instruction to preserve evidence in the death in custody of transgender asylum-seeker Roxsana Hernández in May 2018. A second report from this month included allegations from a whistleblower “that detainees were given the wrong medications and delays in important medications, which, in turn, resulted in worsening conditions, including ‘preventable surgeries,’ and even death,” Daily Kos’ Walter Einenkel wrote.
The Baltimore Sun reported that there’s some local support for a new facility in Maryland. Some apparently hope it can lower what the paper reported was the “$6 million in debt incurred for water and sewer upgrades for a housing development that fell through with the housing bust.” Stewart said families shouldn’t be the ones burdened with this human cost of separation and deportation. “As someone who represents all of Maryland, we all have a stake if our state contributes to the detainment and suffering of people,” he said. “My heart goes out to any town, city or locality that is cash-strapped, but we should not let them receive a get-out-of-jail solvency ticket on the backs of immigrants.”
