As the Trump administration has vowed to carry out mass deportations of immigrants across the United States, thousands of decisions at every level of government can either hinder those plans or make them a reality.
For Bloomberg Businessweek, reporters Rachel Adams-Heard, Polly Mosendz, and Fola Akinnibi focused on one private detention center in New Mexico, the Torrance County Detention Facility, to show how local government contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can bring a region's economic decision-making into conflict with moral questions about the people being held there and under what conditions. The result is the story "Addicted to ICE," published May 12.
Adams-Heard, a Houston-based reporter for Bloomberg since 2018, says the work started with public records requests. "Fola had the initial interest in looking at these intergovernmental service agreements," she said. "Just blanket the country in public records requests at the county level, to try to get these agreements that ICE has but redacts all the interesting information." The team filed over 100 records requests.
We were watching flight patterns and all of these domestic ICE transfers, and it was becoming clear that these facilities that had typically held people who were crossing the southwest border seeking asylum, that they were starting to hold more people who were being basically flown across the country after being apprehended by ICE on the coast.
We thought it might be more interesting and impactful to go deep on one specific place. I really enjoy stories that have a strong sense of place. It was clear that New Mexico was becoming more and more central to the immigration policy as it's currently being carried out. And it really Illustrated a lot of these issues that we're seeing across the country at these local jails in a way that we thought was helpful.
Here's the opening of the story, annotated by Adams-Heard:
The sun is still beating down on the scrubby New Mexico dirt when an army-green bus pulls into the parking lot of the Torrance County Detention Facility in the small town of Estancia. Behind barred windows, the silhouettes of dozens of men are just visible. Many of them have never been to New Mexico before. It’s March, and New Mexico is cooler, drier, browner than Florida, where they were this morning before being forced onto a plane, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and flown here. How did you decide to start here for the story, and how did your reporting and prep get you to this moment?We got to Estancia early in the morning the day of the commission vote, and we had a bit of time before it started, so we had gone to the detention facility just to check it out. We had noticed two green buses that said Transcor America LLC, which is a CoreCivic subsidiary (the private company that runs the Torrance County Detention Facility). They were just sitting in the parking lot.
We had had a pretty packed day — the commission vote, interviews, a tour with the Estancia mayor — and we were heading to our motel in Moriarty when we passed a green bus going toward Estancia. It looked exactly like the ones we had seen at the detention facility, so we turned around and drove straight there. Sure enough, when we got there, it was pulling into the gates.
This type of transfer — of people picked up far from the southwest border and flown hundreds of miles away to a center like the Torrance County Detention Facility — has really ramped up since Trump took office. So when we were able to speak with someone who was on the other side of the barred windows we saw, we felt like it was the right way into a story about how these facilities have become critical to Trump's immigration agenda.
They’re in New Mexico because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running out of space. In the wake of President Donald Trump's promise to pursue the biggest immigration crackdown in U.S. history, men such as the ones on this bus are being targeted by ICE and local law enforcement in unprecedented ways. The detention facilities closer to home are overflowing. So ICE brings them here, to an ICE town.
John, who’s from the Tampa area, sits on the other side of those bars, watching the bus crawl closer to the sand-colored detention compound jutting out of the flat earth. His vision isn’t good right now; someone fell on him and broke his glasses while he was sleeping on the floor at an ICE facility in Miami. John, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation for talking to the press, was picked up at a regular check-in for a special program typically reserved for first-time offenders of nonviolent crimes. Now he’s almost 2,000 miles from home, from his grandmother, from his two dogs. He knew it was a bad sign when he overheard ICE officers talking about his impending transfer, but he didn’t know where he was going until the plane was ready for takeoff. How did you meet John?Unfortunately I can't really get into that because of sourcing sensitivity, but I can say we spoke with multiple men who were part of different transfers. But when I spoke with John and learned he was part of the transfer we had actually seen ourselves, I knew he needed to be in the top of the story. There was something really powerful about hearing his description of the climate and the landscape and the facility — because we were looking at the same thing at the same time on the same day but we didn't know each other yet. And he had no idea what the next few weeks would have in store.
Over the next few weeks, John will spend sleepless nights shivering in his cell. He’ll join an impromptu Bible study with other guys in his unit and watch the younger ones share their coats with older men during recreation time. He’ll eat in a room with a floor covered in feces. He’ll ask, many times, for supplies to clean it up. He’ll see a nurse for his back and his vision and his climbing blood pressure. He’ll receive nothing but Tylenol. He’ll participate in a hunger strike. He’ll watch men drink water out of a trash can brought in when the facility’s water is shut off. And he’ll gradually start to long to be deported to El Salvador, a country he barely knows, where he hasn’t lived since he was a child. He’ll want this but won’t get it, because this is an ICE jail with hardly any ICE officers. There is so much detail packed into this short paragraph. How did you approach your interview with John to where he shared it with you?My time speaking with John was fairly limited, so we had to be pretty efficient in our interview. I found it works best in these situations to try to work through someone's experience chronologically after establishing some basics (age, where they live, etc). For John, we started with the day he was taken into ICE custody and he just explained in detail what he saw, heard, smelled, felt at each stage in his detention. The other reporters and I felt like it was important to include not just the details about the conditions inside the Torrance County Detention Facility, but also about what he and others were doing to form community and help themselves and each other.
Maybe things could have been different. While John’s plane sat on the tarmac at the Miami airport, Linda Jaramillo sat in a jailhouse turned government building in Estancia, the county seat, discussing the private detention center that would soon detain him. Torrance County’s more than $2 million-a-month contract with ICE was set to expire unless Jaramillo and her two fellow county commissioners voted to extend it. I appreciate the way you use time to show how different pieces of the system are operating concurrently. How do you report and write in a way that allows you to do this?On a high level, I think this is a type of story where timing is really key. We wanted to show how there are people very far from Washington, D.C., who are making decisions that have a dramatic impact on how the White House's immigration policy is carried out on the ground. And I think a lot of these more local decisions get ignored because they seem routine or boring or small compared to what happens on a federal level. And yet these are the decisions that are in part responsible for the hundreds of men being flown across the country to rural detention centers.
On a practical level, keeping a running timeline really helps me. Two events may seem completely unrelated to each other until you report out the bigger context. And to weave John and Commissioner Jaramillo's stories together, we had to report it out to the minute, really. Fola and I looked back at the time stamps on our photos and videos from the commission meeting and the bus transfer, and then we were able to see when the plane took off from Miami using flight data to piece together how all these seemingly separate events unfolded throughout this one day in March.
Immigration lawyers and advocates were there to beg them not to. The Torrance County Detention Facility is one of the system’s most troubled, they argued. It has a long history of failures that at one point led a federal watchdog to demand an immediate evacuation, something ICE declined to do after disputing the findings. At the meeting, an activist read testimony from a man detained at the facility who said he had to wait almost four hours for an ambulance to take him to get treatment for a third-degree burn he got while working in the kitchen to make money to call his family. “Please, truly, we need help from people outside,” the advocate read. “We’re human beings. Please. We’re not prisoners, we’re not animals. We’re human beings. I urge you to not extend the contract.”
No one spoke in favor of extending the county’s ICE agreement. No one had to. Since signing the contract six years ago, the Torrance County Commission has voted to approve regular extensions without much hand-wringing over its role in U.S. immigration policy. How did you and Polly and Fola divvy up the reporting work?Fola and I split up the Torrance County reporting, and Polly focused on Cibola County, where CoreCivic's other big ICE detention facility in New Mexico is. The state legislature had also debated a bill that would have gotten rid of these types of county agreements with ICE, so Polly had been at the (New Mexico State Capitol) Roundhouse watching that debate unfold. We were really intentional about not just parroting these claims about the economic importance of these contracts without seeing the numbers for ourselves, so Fola spent a lot of time digging into the county budget and the town's tax revenue. And we filed a bunch of public records requests for the agreements themselves so we could see how the monthly revenue from ICE changed over time.
Jaramillo is the newest commissioner, the only woman and the only Spanish speaker. A Republican, she came to her current job with a quarter century of experience as the county clerk under her belt, but serving as commissioner is different—she has more power now, she says. On that day she pledged to use her authority to visit the facility, to see for herself what it was really like inside. And then she voted to extend the ICE contract. So much of this story puts the reader in the room at pivotal moments. How much of this is planning to try to be there in person versus reconstructing what already happened through interviews?We tried to do as much in-person reporting as we could outside of the actual detention facility, which we weren't able to visit. Fola and I had spoken with Commissioner Jaramillo and Mayor (Nathan) Dial multiple times leading up to our trip, and Polly had done the same in Cibola County. We had also talked to former CoreCivic employees and other people in detention to give us a sense of what it's like inside these facilities. But being there in person was really important. I remember when John explained how his nose and lips cracked after he got to New Mexico, I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had made the trip from somewhere similarly humid (Houston) that week. Even though I don't know what it's like to be in ICE detention myself, it was a small part of his experience that I could relate to because I had arrived there at the same time. The commission meetings are all online, but being there in-person for the vote was really important, because we were able to watch body language as recordings of these men in detention were played for the commissioners. We didn't really include any 'man on the street' interviews, but when we were talking to folks in Torrance County we'd ask them what they thought about the ICE contract and got a sense of some of the local attitudes toward the detention facility.
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Mark Armstrong is editor of Nieman Storyboard.
