COMMUNITY PRESSES FOR CONTRACT CANCELLATION AS PLYMOUTH COUNTY JAIL EXTENDS ICE OPERATIONS UNTIL JANUARY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | September 21, 2023
Media contact: Aaron Steinberg, asteinberg@plsma.org
Plymouth, MA – Plymouth County Correctional Facility’s (PCCF) most recent Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA), which allows the jail to detain immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was set to expire today, September 21, 2023. Yesterday, Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office disclosed that the contract has once again been extended until January 2024.
For years, organizers, communities, detained and formerly detained people, family members, and advocates have mobilized to end ICE detention in Massachusetts. To date, IGSAs have been terminated in Franklin, Suffolk, and Bristol Counties as a result of continued community pressure. Amid continued transfers and growing evidence that the presence of ICE detention correlates with the intensified regional immigration enforcement, immigrants’ rights activists are calling on Sheriff Joseph McDonald to end Plymouth’s contract with ICE as well. “The fewer cages we have for ICE, the fewer people they will detain” says Annie Gonzalez of the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN).
Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office first entered an IGSA to detain immigrants on behalf of the federal government in 2008, and has since quietly continued to extend this contract in 60-month increments. With just under one hundred people currently detained for ICE at Plymouth, this moment marks a crucial opportunity to prevent ICE from incarcerating any more of our community members and to “keep families together and stop criminalizing immigration,” as civil rights and civil liberties advocate Marco Battistotti urges.
Detained people have spoken courageously and at length about the civil and human rights abuses they have endured at PCCF, including acts of brutality by staff, placement in solitary confinement, racially charged verbal harassment, unaddressed language access needs, inadequate medical and mental health care, rotten food and poor sanitation, and lack of access to programming and services. “Nobody should be treated the way those detained by ICE in Plymouth are treated,” says Gonzalez. A comprehensive timeline and specific examples can be found here.
These are only the latest in a long series of strikingly consistent accounts from inside Plymouth, whose documentation spans over a decade. Through it all, the responses of PCCF and ICE have been characterized by denial and obfuscation, a pattern within which the lack of transparency around contracting fits squarely. We take this opportunity to demand that Sheriff Joseph McDonald cease contracting bedspace to ICE at PCCF, and that ICE use its discretion to release the immigrants who remain confined there.
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Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN)
Detention Watch Network
Hartford Deportation Defense
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition
Never Again Action Boston
Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts (PLS MA)
Unitarian Universalist Mass Action