Dublin’s correctional facility was shut down in April 2024 amid a significant sexual abuse scandal, through which at the least eight former staffers, together with the previous warden and chaplain, have been sentenced.
“For the federal government to say ‘We wish one other facility or an ICE facility,’ that will imply extra points at hand,” Chavira stated. “If our rights have been violated underneath these circumstances, what offers anyone the thought [that] it’s going to vary?”
Since Trump took workplace in January 2025, ICE has opened two detention facilities in California — the Central Valley Annex and California Metropolis Detention Facility — each on former state jail websites. The president’s landmark “One Huge Stunning Invoice Act” final summer time supplied $45 billion to increase ICE detention, so as to “assist ICE legislation enforcement perform the most important deportation effort in American historical past,” an ICE spokesperson stated by way of e mail.
Beaty stated GSA is actively pursuing further properties for ICE and has created an “ICE Surge Workforce.”
She stated the Dublin web site is susceptible as a result of CCIJ believes the company is particularly concentrating on Northern California, the place there aren’t any energetic detention facilities — the farthest north of California’s eight ICE detention facilities is in Bakersfield.
“ICE is particularly eyeing Northern California as a result of due to a few years of profitable group organizing, the ICE contracts within the area have been ended,” Beaty stated.
“This limits ICE’s capacity to conduct mass enforcement within the area, and it’s a part of why we right here within the Bay Space haven’t seen the extent of ICE terror that different elements of California have seen,” she continued.
In February, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, together with East Bay Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, despatched a letter to then-Division of Homeland Safety head Kristi Noem urging her to not repurpose the Dublin facility as an immigration jail, and asking questions on whether or not there have been plans to take action within the works.
On the time, Padilla instructed KQED he discovered circumstances on the new California Metropolis facility, the place he’d simply visited, “deplorable.”
Dublin’s Metropolis Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors have additionally each handed resolutions opposing reopening or repurposing the location for any detention or correctional use sooner or later, citing workers misconduct and harmful infrastructure points.
“There could be little question in regards to the will of the individuals. We don’t want an ICE detention facility in our group,” stated the Rev. Kelly Miller-Sanchez, the pastor of Resurrection Lutheran Church in Dublin. “FCI Dublin is a web site the place horrific human rights abuses occurred. It’s stained with the blood of its survivors, and it’s a blot upon the historical past of our stunning metropolis. Turning this web site into an ICE detention facility would compound the accidents, each bodily and ethical, that this web site has already prompted.”
