The privately-run ICE detention center in Torrance County failed its government inspection earlier this year, with a newly released report finding severe understaffing, unsanitary food and visitation rules that were inaccessible to people with no money, among other complaints.

Photo Right: A screenshot of surveillance video taken shortly before men detained at the Torrance County were pepper-sprayed for engaging in a peaceful hunger strike protesting conditions at the facility. Surveillance and lapel video was obtained by NMILC and ACLU from CoreCivic via an IRPA request.

The failed inspection is the latest in a series of troubling news for the Torrance County Detention Center, which earlier this year reported a massive COVID-19 outbreak among detainees and staff, as well as reports of guards using harsh chemical agents in response to a peaceful hunger strike protesting conditions at the facility. 

The Torrance detention center in Estancia, southeast of Albuquerque, detains male migrants for ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as men and women for Torrance County. It is managed by CoreCivic, a private for-profit prison corporation based in Nashville, Tenn. The inspection was conducted from July 27 through 29 by The Nakamoto Group, a private contractor that inspects ICE detention facilities. ICE has 60 days from the completion to post the results online.

Allegra Love, an attorney with the El Paso Immigration Collaborative who has worked with detained migrants at Torrance and other ICE facilities, said The Nakamoto Group inspections are notoriously friendly to the facilities and failures are rare. 

“I’m surprised that they failed the inspection because I’ve worked in detention centers for the last seven years and they’re all really terrible,” Love said. “You’re never at one that is good or that treats their detainees well, but they all pass their inspections.”

ICE and CoreCivic did not respond to requests for comments about the inspection, which found the facility “does not meet standards.”

During their July review of Torrance, The Nakamoto Group inspectors found 22 deficiencies in how ICE detainees were held, including four categorized as deficiencies in priority components.

"This is not a greenhouse or coffee shop. They're in charge of people's well-being and safety."

Among the most concerning for Love is severe understaffing. Although not a specific deficiency, inspectors noted that “the current staffing level is at fifty percent of the authorized correction/security positions. Staff is currently working mandatory overtime shifts.”

Love said she’s had trouble connecting with a client at the facility, with a staff member saying it would take two weeks just to schedule a legal call. Lack of staff, she said, is a security concern.

“This is not a greenhouse or coffee shop,” she said. “They’re in charge of people’s well-being and safety.”

Twelve of the complaints cited by investigators focused on food preparation, including safety and sanitation concerns with how food was prepared and presented. Food service should be “under the direct supervision of an experienced food service administrator,” the report said. Inspectors also found the facility’s dishwasher wasn’t hot enough to actually sanitize dishes.

That didn’t surprise ​​Ernesto Rodrigo Callado, who was detained for 10 months at Torrance and even worked in the kitchen for a time. The food, he said, was often flavorless and undercooked and was a constant source of complaints.

“The beans were hard, you could throw them at the wall three times and if you kept going you’d break the wall,” Callado said. “They made rice that tasted like going to the yard and eating dirt.”

He said except for a few dishes he tried to prepare his own meals and buy food from the commissary instead.

Alvaro, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities, said he also worked in the Torrance kitchen and noticed food that smelled bad. People often had stomach aches that he attributed to the food.

“Just because we’re immigrants doesn’t mean we have to eat like dogs,” he said.

Inspectors also found deficiencies in visitation access. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the facility replaced general in-person visits with paid video calls through tablets, making them inaccessible for detainees without money.

Callado said the tablets were often slow to load and even just waiting for a photo his family had sent him to load could quickly become unaffordable. 

The report also noted grievance paperwork and medical grievances were not being maintained properly in detainees’ files and directed the facility to ensure grievances are filed as required. ICE received 43 grievances from detainees at Torrance in the year leading up to the late July inspection, two-thirds of which have been substantiated. 

The two other ICE detention facilities in New Mexico, in Otero and Cibola counties, passed their inspections from The Nakomoto Group in January and May respectively.

The ACLU previously called for the closure of the Otero County Processing Center for its long history of inhumane treatment, including denial of access to medical care, retaliatory use of solitary confinement and more. And last year Reuters uncovered numerous unanswered calls for medical attention, inadequate mental health treatment and quarantining procedures and more at Cibola County Correctional Center’s now-closed transgender detainee unit.

Earlier this year, the ACLU of New Mexico filed a lawsuit alongside the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center on behalf of nine former Torrance detainees and the Santa Fe Dreamers Project against CoreCivic and Torrance County. The lawsuit alleged CoreCivic sprayed the men with chemical agents in response to a peaceful hunger strike. The men were protesting inadequate precautions against COVID-19, poor living conditions, and the withholding of status updates on their immigration cases.

Zoila Alvarez Hernández, an immigrant rights attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico, said The Nakamoto Group was correct to fail Torrance after all of the issues at the facility.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that a third-party vendor that (ICE) contracted actually did their job and reported it,” she said. “However, I am not optimistic that CoreCivic and Torrance County will take corrective action to address the deficiencies that were pointed out in the inspection.”

"Why are they still there if we can't meet their very, very, very basic needs?"

In late May, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility, which by then had infected 110 detainees and 16 staff members. There have been 370 COVID cases among people detained by ICE at Torrance, according to the federal agency.

By late May, during the COVID-19 outbreak, Torrance had an average daily population of 29 people in immigration custody, according to data from the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. By late August, the average daily population was up to 126.

For Love, that raises the question of why detainees were sent to Torrance if it wasn’t adequately staffed, among the other deficiencies noted in the inspection.

“Why are they still there,” she said, "if we can’t meet their very, very, very basic needs?”

“With violent crime on the rise, we must invest in more police.” You’ve probably heard this recently from the media, elected officials, and some people directly impacted by gun violence. The pain of communities facing the threat of interpersonal gun violence demands that something be done to protect families, create safer streets, and save lives. If you combine that desperate need for solutions with a society where police have been legitimized as the first, last, and only resort, it’s easy to understand why people would clamor for more police right now.

While this may seem like a logical response, the facts show more policing is not the answer. Let’s explain why, and what alternatives communities can invest in to help effectively reduce violence.

The 10 points below unpack why prioritizing alternative responses to harm and violence is more effective and longer lasting than shoveling even more money into policing, and without the increase in racial injustice and harassment that comes with more officers. These points will also help you see right through cynics who cry “law and order!” for reasons that have nothing to do with actually addressing violence or repairing communities.

Investments in housing, health care, jobs programs, education, after school programs, gun control, environmental design, and violence interruption programs have all been proven to quantifiably reduce violence. For example, one study found that every additional community-focused nonprofit in a medium-sized city leads to a 12 percent reduction in homicide rate, a 10 percent reduction in violent crime, and a 7 percent reduction in property crime. In Philadelphia, simply cleaning vacant lots in neighborhoods below the poverty line resulted in a 29 percent decrease in gun assaults.

Police typically deal with violence only after someone has already been killed, injured, or otherwise harmed. Even then, many police departments are alarmingly ineffective at holding anyone accountable for violent crimes, as reflected by low “clearance rates” (whether any suspect is ever charged for a reported crime). For example, a recent study found Chicago has a homicide clearance rate of about 40 percent, which drops to just 22 percent when the victim is African American.

The uniquely American dependence on police as first responders to every social problem is the product of decades of reliance on antiquated and disproven theories about safety, the fearmongering of powerful police lobbyists, and policymakers’ racist support for devastatingly harmful militarized policing in communities of color. Policing as a one-size-fits-all solution to violence is simply a bad and dangerous policy choice made by elected officials — one they now have a responsibility to correct.

America has steadily increased police funding year-over-year regardless of whether crime rates are going up or down. There is no documented connection between the two. In 2020, for example, Houston, Nashville, Tulsa, and Fresno all increased their police budgets — and all saw increased homicides. Most experts believe the recent increase in homicides in some cities is due to the pandemic, economic stress, unprecedented gun sales, and the defunding of community services — not a lack of resources for police.

As noted above, community investments have proven effective at reducing violence, and the converse is also true: Underfunding and defunding these supports for decades in communities of color has a deeply destabilizing effect that increases the likelihood of homicide, violence, and other crime.

In addition to long-term investments in social infrastructure, “violence interruption programs” — community-driven interventions to prevent or peacefully resolve conflict — are proving remarkably effective. For example, in Baltimore, directly impacted staff and volunteers of the Safe Streets Program engage in conflict resolution and connect people to services and resources. Since last June alone, the group has peacefully resolved over 400 conflicts without police, 70 percent of which involved a gun.

While any and all loss of life to violence is tragic and unacceptable, elected officials who are charged with crafting sensible policy would be wise to keep some long-term perspective in mind. In 1980, there was an average of 10.2 murders per 100,000 people nationwide; in 1991 it was 9.8. In 2020 there was an average of 6.5 murders. In recent months, although homicides in particular have ticked up, overall violent crime continues to fall or remain near all-time lows. For example, in New York City, violent crime overall is currently down and homicides down 2.4 percent compared to the same time last year.

The data show officers spend more than one-third of their time responding to non-criminal calls, and about 80 percent of the arrests they make are for low-level and non-serious offenses like “disorderly conduct” and substance use violations. Just 5 percent of arrests and 4 percent of police time are spent on the most serious forms of interpersonal harm. This focus on low-level arrests fuels racial injustice, harms families, and sows distrust. It also means police departments are spending a fraction of their enormous budgets on investigating violent crimes. Starting today, mayors and police chiefs could follow the lead of other cities that have prohibited officers from focusing on some low-level offenses, and shift more officers and resources into investigating homicides and violence, while investing new dollars in non-police alternatives that will actually address the root causes of violence.

Violence is caused by many different things, including poverty, alcohol, guns, interpersonal conflict, unmet mental health and social needs, juvenile trauma, and more. It is no wonder then that relying on a single approach — policing — has not worked in the past and is not going to work to meet the moment now.

Reducing violence is difficult and takes time, but the solutions are not mysterious. To see them in action, just look at a nearby affluent (likely majority white) neighborhood or community. You’re likely to find a neighborhood where people have stable, well-paying jobs and access to well-funded public services, experience little violence, and have a fairly small police force that responds only when it is wanted. Instead of fully and equitably funding all these same approaches in low-income communities and communities of color, we overfund police year after year after year.

This is a critical moment to decide which path we are going to take to combat violence. Are we going to continue the racist, harmful, and dangerous status quo of endlessly cutting blank checks for police while neglecting proven alternatives? Or will we finally decide to fully invest in a more effective multi-pronged approach to public safety and community health?

As you are reading this article, there is a good chance that your city leaders are debating whether to increase their police department budgets instead of spending those dollars on violence interruption programs, affordable housing, or recreation centers. They are likely weighing decisions about how to spend billions of dollars in new federal funding that can either be allocated to police or to alternatives like mental health care services.

You can make a difference by calling or emailing your mayor and council members today and asking them to prioritize alternatives to police.