How a South Texas County Bet on Immigrant Incarceration and Got Burned
When the Willacy County Correctional Center opened in 2006 to detain undocumented immigrants, local officials banked on the promise of jobs and revenue for the struggling South Texas county. As long as the federal government kept locking up immigrants, the money would roll in. What could go wrong? The answer: plenty.
A decade later, Willacy County is left with a destroyed shell of a prison and more than $100 million in debt. In February 2015, the prison was torched during an uprising, the culmination of a decade of complaints from detainees about overcrowding, maggots in the food, beatings from guards and allegations of sexual assaults. Afterward, its 2,834 inmates were transferred to other facilities and 400 employees were laid off. The prison has sat empty ever since.
Now county leaders are blaming the riot on the private contractor that ran the prison. In December, Willacy County sued Utah-based Management & Training Corp. (MTC) for causing the riot due to its “abysmal mismanagement of the prison.”
The facility earned the nickname “Tent City” for its unusual construction — 10 windowless “tents” made of Kevlar stretched over steel frames. Each tent held 200 men, often with just one guard. Some called it “Ritmo,” a riff on Gitmo, the nickname for the Guantanamo Bay military base.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/south-texas-detention/