Prisoner Transfer Continues at Willacy County Detention Center
Facility deemed unlivable after Friday’s riot
As many as 2,800 inmates to be moved from Texas prison
Law enforcement officials from a wide variety of agencies converge on the Willacy County Correctional Center in Raymondville, Texas on Friday, Feb. 20, 2015 in response to a prisoner uprising at the private immigration detention center. A statement from prison owner Management and Training Corp. said several inmates refused to participate in regular work duties early Friday. Inmates told center officials of their dissatisfaction with medical services.
FBI spokesperson Michelle Lee said while officials have made “significant progress” in negotiations with the protesting prisoners at the Willacy County Correctional Center, the situation still remained far from resolved. The uprising broke out late Friday morning after more than 2,000 prisoners began protesting the medical services — along with cruel treatment and sexual abuse — and work conditions provided at the privately run prison facility. Demonstrations escalated when the prisoners stormed the recreation yard and began throwing objects and started fires. Authorities said correctional officers attempted to disperse the crowd by deploying tear gas, but those efforts proved ineffective due to wind conditions.
By Saturday, authorities described the inmates as “compliant” and willing to negotiate.
Inmates in the facility, located about 200 miles south of San Antonio, are primarily immigrants held in federal custody for entering the U.S. illegally. A spokesperson for Management & Training Corporation (MTC), the private prison contractor in charge of the facility, said plans are currently underway to relocate the entire prison population – roughly 2,800 inmates – to institutions in Texas and out of state. So far, 570 of those prisoners have already been transferred.
The latest uprising at the Willacy County Correctional Center began quietly on Friday morning, when prisoners refused to go to their work assignments or to breakfast. Then, inmates broke out of the massive Kevlar tents that serve as dorms. Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence told reporters some had kitchen knives, sharpened mops and brooms. Prison officials sprayed tear gas; a SWAT team, the Texas Rangers, the FBI and the US Border Patrol all showed up. It took two days to quell the demonstration.
The uprising, or unrest, as prison officials called it, began early Friday at the Willacy County Correctional Center — operated by the privately held prison company Management and Training Corp. on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Management and Training's 10-year contract with the federal government is worth about half a billion dollars.
The facility is about 40 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in Raymondville, Texas, and has been nicknamed Ritmo, or Raymondville's Guantánamo, for its "crammed and squalid"conditions.
Two hundred inmates are packed into each Kevlar tentlike structure that serves as housing, with no privacy between beds or in the bathrooms, where toilets and showers are open without partitions, the ACLU said in a 2014 report titled "Warehoused and Forgotten."
Insects and spiders crawl through holes in the tents and bite detainees. Toilets frequently overflow, and the water was shut off for days in 2012 after it started to look yellowish-green, according to the report. Authorities gave inmates bottled water two days later.
Prisoners refused to go to breakfast or report for work on Friday in protest of what they said was inadequate medical service at the prison. Inmates broke out of housing structures and converged in the recreation yard, setting fire to several Kevlar structures.
Guards responded with tear gas and other nonlethal forms of crowd control, and only minor injuries were reported.
The riot left the prison "uninhabitable," according to Ed Ross, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. As many as 2,800 prisoners will be moved to other institutions, he said.
It is not the first riot at the facility. Last February, authorities ordered a lockdown after a disturbance at the correctional center. State, county and local law enforcement agencies had to be asked to assist in guarding the facility, according to local media.
The ACLU report also found a pattern of abuse and inhumane conditions at four other privately run federal prisons in Texas that house immigrants.
Those facilities, known as criminal alien requirement (CAR) prisons for immigrants, house noncitizens, most of whom have been convicted of only immigration offenses.
“At the CAR prisons we investigated, the prisoners lived day to day not knowing if their basic human needs would be met, whether they would get medical attention if they were hurt or ill,” Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said in a press release last year. “The Bureau of Prisons creates perverse incentives for the for-profit prison companies to endanger human health and lives.”
The 13 CAR prisons in the U.S. hold more than 25,000 immigrants. This weekend’s uprising is the third such event at CAR prisons in the last seven years. In 2008 the death of inmate sparked an uprising at another Texas prison. And in 2012 a prison insurrection over mistreatment led to the death of a guard.
The Willacy facility was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. But after “Frontline” reported rampant sexual and physical abuse and medical neglect at the facility from 2006 to 2011, ICE announced it was transferring detainees out of Willacy. Management and Training obtained a contract to hold prisoners for the Bureau of Prisons — the contract it operates under today, the ACLU said in its report.
Meanwhile the FBI will remain onsite to assist with maintaining operations. Lee said the situation at the facility is stable with a “balance of cooperation” since the inmates are aware of the extent of the damages and how they will impact the prison population.
“They recognize that conditions are really bad there,” she said, “the sooner they can get out, the better.”