Despite a need for jobs, NC county sees resistance to possible ICE facility | Opinion

Hertford County, a rural northeastern area of about 20,000 people bordering Virginia, has a shortage of population and jobs, yet the prospect of gaining more of both is being met with protest.

It’s not that some locals don’t want economic and population growth. It’s that they don’t want what could bring it: the opening of a detention center for people swept up by Immigration crackdown.

Plans for what would be the first privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in North Carolina are vague. For 20 years, the privately owned Rivers Correctional Institution operated in the town of Winton under a federal contract as a low-security prison. The prison closed in 2021, but it is showing signs of reopening as one of many new detention centers that ICE needs to support its deportation push.

The prison’s owner, The GEO Group, and ICE have not confirmed what’s next for the facility and neither responded to requests for comment. But an available prison with a capacity to house 1,450 inmates would appear to fit the government’s need to quickly open a detention center.

The lack of confirmation has not stopped local residents and detention center opponents from outside the county from trying to head off a reopening.

“We don’t want a concentration camp here,” said Caroline Stephenson, executive director of The Cultivator, a group that promotes literacy and access to food in Hertford, Bertie and Northampton Counties.

The Cultivator has helped organize protests against a detention center, citing ICE’s random arrests of immigrants and the subsequent mistreatment of those sent to detention centers.

“Yeah, we’re desperate for jobs,” Stephenson said, “but are we really that desperate that we have to be on the wrong side of history?”

Hertford County commissioners say they don’t know about plans for the prison and couldn’t do anything to stop its reopening as a detention center. Still, they got an earful of opposition during the commission’s Feb. 16 meeting. Detention center opponents are expected to turn out again at the commission’s next meeting at 7 p.m. on April 20 at the Hertford County Courthouse in Winton.

State Rep. Bill Ward, a Republican representing Hertford, Camden, Gates and Pasquotank counties, said how the prison is used is up to The GEO group, not state and local officials.

“It’s a private entity,” he said. “They can determine who they want to lease to.”

But opponents say the opening of an ICE detention center will have an impact beyond the facility itself. It could also spur the arrests of undocumented immigrants in the region.

Mary Anna White, a teacher from Norfolk, Va., told the Hertford commissioners that many people in Norfolk and the Hampton Roads area have been arrested by ICE.

“Just this morning a woman was taken from her car. She was picking up her children, and they were left,” White said. “I worry that more people will be snatched from their families in a similar fashion.”

Jeff Douglas, a semi-retired Episcopal priest who served as rector in the county for more than 20 years, told the commissioners that ICE detention centers are repeating the injustice of interning Japanese-Americans during World War II.

“The Trump administration is currently creating its own gulag prison network,” he said. “The GEO facility in Winton is on their list of places they hope to use in this scheme to deport people regardless of their status and oftentimes in contravention of the orders of the courts.”

Dr. Elizabeth Dreesen, a retired surgeon, traveled from Chapel Hill to Hertford County to oppose the possible detention center.

“Recent news from other cities shows how opening ICE detention centers creates chaos in local communities,” she said.

Some Hertford residents welcome the prospect of the prison reopening and bringing jobs and more economic activity. They also dislike outsiders getting involved in what they consider a local matter.

But this is also a moral matter. Reports show that ICE detention centers run by private corporations have been negligently and cruelly managed. The people held within them often have no criminal conviction and are being denied due process, medical care and contact with their families.

Local and state officials may say they have no power over a federal agreement with a private company, but they do have an obligation to oppose what is happening at detention centers.

The United States shouldn’t be allowing that abuse. And North Carolina shouldn’t be home to it.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com