The development of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center has loomed over the Eastside of San Antonio in recent months. After weeks of pleading with national leaders to abandon the plan, San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones is asking the new head of the Department of Homeland Security to reconsider.
Just as protests and marches began to fight reported injustices at ICE detention centers 75 miles south of San Antonio in late January, including allegations of mistreatment of children and families, word of an ICE processing center in the Alamo City emerged. As San Antonio families feared separation and sudden deportation amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, City Council convened to discuss how to handle DHS presence in public spaces in January.
Now, Jones is “requesting” the newest leader of the department to again try to stop the building of this new facility, claiming it will hinder an already struggling economic sector in the city. It seems Jones hopes the new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin will lend a more sympathetic ear after replacing the ousted DHS Secretary, Kirsti Noem, who was ousted in early March.
“As I shared with your predecessor, my community is not interested in hosting an ICE processing facility and believes it will further depress economic activity in a part of town that already struggles to attract economic development,” Jones wrote to the former Oklahoma senator.
The mayor, joined by several county leaders and federal reps over San Antonio, sent a letter to Noem in February noting how “troubling” it was to discover ICE was planning a facility in the city without notifying local officials. By law, federal actions trump local code. So, federal plans don’t need to go through local channels for approval.
Shortly after the plans were confirmed in late January, several national reps lined the front of San Antonio’s city hall to condemn the treatment of families at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Dallas) questioned the treatment of detainees at the detention facility, saying leaders at the site offered up a false image of education and mistreated children and parents.
“This is what happens in communities on the Eastside of San Antonio. School are closing, but we have a warehouses available, enticing and celebrating policies that we see at the federal level,” Essence Preparatory Superintendent Akeem Brown told MySA sitting in his office overlooking to impending ICE processing facility. “While schools are closing… we have opportunities like that being created across the street from us.”