The Orange County Commission will vote Tuesday on a resolution opposing any plans to convert a warehouse in unincorporated Orange County into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
The resolution says a detention center could affect tourism, quality of life, and local resources, like water, sewer and public safety. It insists that ICE should not bypass or undermine local land use regulations.
It also notes that, so far, federal officials haven't notified Orange County regarding any new facility.
ICE officials did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.
In a memo dated Feb. 12, ICE spelled out the agency's aggressive plans to meet its growing demand for beds by acquiring and renovating new detention and processing facilities.
It plans to spend $38.3 billion on that effort this year.
“The new model is designed to strategically increase bed capacity to 92,600 beds,” the memo states.
Public pressure
Amid public pressure in response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the county has also pushed back on the increased numbers and repeat bookings for noncriminal ICE detainees at the jail. Those numbers declined in February but still far exceed the daily averages from a year earlier.
Erika Gómez-Tejeda is a coordinator of the Immigrants are Welcome Here Coalition. She said the coalition has grown in one year to include 70 groups, including faith, immigrant rights, civic and community organizations.
Its members have rallied and spoken at commission meetings to advocate for immigrant rights. They’ve been pushing in recent months for the county to file a lawsuit to clarify the limits of its legal requirement to cooperate with immigration enforcement.
Gómez-Tejeda said they oppose using detention for what amounts to a civil matter.
“It is very, very important,” she said, “for there to be a clear statement from a county government, from municipalities across the state, to stand up and say, ‘No, not, not here, not in our communities, not in our backyards.’”
Commissioner Nicole Wilson
The County Commission agreed last month to ask the county attorney to draft the anti-detention center resolution. It’s on Tuesday’s consent agenda -- one of several items to be approved by a single vote.
The resolution won't have the force of a moratorium, which is what Commissioner Nicole Wilson said she still wants. She said a recent state law -- SB 180 -- would likely make the moratorium null and void out of the gate.
“But in the meantime,” Wilson said, “we've seen great success across the country in the use of resolutions or orders that ... were stated positions of a local council or commission objecting to a processing or detention facility within a warehouse within a jurisdiction. So, and of course, this one would be in Orange County.”
Changes at the jail
Mayor Jerry Deming sent letters to federal officials last month to address two sets of issues concerning ICE detentions at the Orange County Jail.
First, under its longstanding Intergovernmental Service Agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service, the county is getting reimbursed far less than it costs to house ICE detainees without local charges. The reimbursement rate is $88 a day per inmate, but county officials say the actual cost is $180.
The county has been attempting to resolve that discrepancy since August. Demings gave those negotiations a March 13 deadline.
Second, the jail has seen much higher numbers of detainees -- including ICE detainees being held without local charges -- than were anticipated in the IGSA. Federal officials also were repeatedly rebooking detainees to get around a 72-hour limit.
Demings set a March 1 deadline for ICE to end the rebookings and limit the number of noncriminal detainees.
In the meantime, the Orange County Jail reports the daily average number of people being held without local charges dropped from 142 in January to 49 in February. But that average number is still nearly four times as many as the average in February of last year.
