What are the Sanctuary policies that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding from Grand Rapids and Kent County: Part III

This is the third in a series that will further examine the various sanctuary policies that Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding that the City of Grand Rapids and the Kent County Commission adopt. In Part I, I looked at the policy that allows officers to provide assistance to federal immigration authorities when there is an emergency that poses an immediate danger to public safety or federal agents.

In Part II, I looked at policies that would prevent local governments from entering into a contract with the federal government to hold immigrants in detention. Kent County used to have a contract with ICE that began in 2012, a contract you can read here.

Today I want to look at policies that could prevent immigration detention centers from being established in Grand Rapids or Kent County. Today’s post is related to Part II, since we are talking about the issue of immigration detention.

There are two aspects of the Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE demand that Grand Rapids and Kent County adopt policies that could prevent immigration detention centers from being established in the city or the county. The first aspect of this demand is to get Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt a policy that would not allow for any new ICE detention facilities to be constructed in the city or the county.

Now that there is the GEO Group ICE Detention facility in Baldwin, MI, it seems unlikely that another one would be built in Kent County. However, having a policy in place to prevent that from even being proposed is what Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding. These groups do not want to wait for the Baldwin facility to be filled, only to find out that another ICE detention center would be built. ICE is arresting, and detaining immigrants at record numbers right now, so it is impossible to rule out the administration’s push for more privately run and constructed ICE detention centers. We already know that undocumented immigrants who are put into detention aren’t always sent to the detention center that is closest to where they live.

The second argument has to do with opposing detention centers that would be using spaces that already exist. For instance, the Kent County Jail could do what the Calhoun County Jail has done for a long time, which is to use the jail as an ICE detention facility. Kent County had previously entered into a contract with ICE to provide ICE holds on immigrants at the Kent County Jail in 2012. The Kent County Commission and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department could agree to enter into a new contract with ICE that would allow ICE to utilize the Kent County Jail to be a short-term or long-term ICE detention space. Kent County was motivated by financial incentives in the 2012 contract and there is plenty of evidence that the Kent County Sheriff’s office is already holding immigrants for ICE, so entering into a new contract to detain immigrants for ICE at the Kent County Jail is very possible.

This is why Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have included in the demands that Grand Rapids and Kent County adopt policies that could prevent immigration detention centers from being established in the city or the county. There is nothing bizarre or silly about this, especially since Grand Rapids and Kent County continue to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with ICE to terrorize immigrants and and separate families in this community.

This demand also aligns with what No Detention Centers in Michigan has been pushing for since they were founded in 2018.  No Detention Centers in Michigan also works directly with the national group Detention Watch Network.