Divided prospects: The fight over an immigration detention center

There is a road leading out of Evanston, Wyoming, that is known as the Road to Nowhere. It runs through dry sagebrush bluffs along the edge of Bear River State Park, a green corridor through the rolling high desert just outside of town. Just under 12,000 people live in Evanston, which lies in Uinta County, near the state’s southwestern border. There is a small downtown surrounded by a smattering of residential streets lined with modest, single-family homes. Beyond that, on the windy and treeless outskirts of town, is a Walmart, chain restaurants and a few hotels. To the north, eighteen-wheelers rush by along Interstate 80 on their way to Salt Lake City, while to the south, Highway 150 leads to the Uinta Mountains, a blue smudge across the sky.

Evanston grew up alongside the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 and became a thriving oil and gas town during the late 1970s and early ’80s. But by the mid-1980s, the boom began to sputter out, and many of the long-established businesses in downtown Evanston closed their doors, including Blyth & Fargo, one of the West’s first department stores, which had operated for 107 years. Over the next two decades, the town’s economy fluctuated as the price of oil rose and fell again and again. Since 2015, the last major oil downturn, Evanston’s economy has worsened; the average salary in Uinta County has been consistently $4,000 to $5,000 lower than the Wyoming average. Storefronts have boarded up, and oil workers have left for Texas. But those who remain love Evanston, with its slow pace and family-oriented feel, its homegrown celebrations like Cowboy Days and Cinco de Mayo, the “Fresh Air, Freedom and Fun” heralded in Evanston’s official slogan. They like the low taxes, the nearby mountains, and the fact that Evanston is not California. The town leans Republican, and the few Democrats are mostly moderate. It is a live-and-let-live kind of place, one longtime resident told me. “We all got along OK,” she said. “Or, we did.”

A few miles outside of Evanston, the Road to Nowhere ends in a patch of open land. An ambitious new facility was supposed to be built here and help lift Evanston out of its economic doldrums — a privately run detention center for immigrants awaiting deportation orders. In 2017, the Trump administration was ramping up immigration enforcement, and the government needed more detention centers to hold people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. A private prison company called Management & Training Corporation (MTC) saw an opportunity in Evanston, a town in search of its next industry. The detention center, which would cost between $70 million and $90 million, would bring up to 200 full-time jobs, with correction officers’ entry level salaries starting at $42,000 per year, plus benefits.

For decades, the for-profit incarceration industry has found a welcome home in places like Evanston: rural communities looking for an economic boost. In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. radically expanded the number of prisons — and prisoners — in the criminal justice system. After Sept. 11, 2001, that trend spread to the immigration enforcement system as well. From 2000 to 2016, the number of immigrants in U.S. detention rose 442% — and the growth has continued, with 40 new detention facilities opening since 2017, many of them in rural areas and most of them privately run.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.12/north-economy-divided-prospects-the-fight-over-an-immigration-detention-center
(High Country News)