December 14, 2021 

Hon. Alejandro N. Mayorkas 
Secretary of Homeland Security 
U.S. Department of Homeland Security 
2707 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, SE 
Washington, DC 20528 

Dear Secretary Mayorkas:  

On behalf of coalitions, organizations and communities in Virginia and Washington, D.C., as well as supporters from across the United States, we urge you to promptly act to terminate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract with the Town of Farmville, Virginia and close the Farmville Detention Center, to bring an end to over a decade of well-documented abuse, mistreatment and medical neglect of immigrants in custody. We ask this Administration to fulfill its promise to our communities by “mak[ing] lasting improvements to our civil immigration detention system” [1] by ending immigration detention at ICA-Farmville.  

ICA-Farmville has long forced detained immigrants to endure terrible conditions including excessive use of force, solitary confinement, and limited access to counsel and family members. Due to the facility’s mismanagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, in July 2020 more than 300 people in detention—93% of the population of those detained—became infected, in what was at the time the largest outbreak at any such facility in the country.[2] One immigrant died as a result of ICA-Farmville’s cavalier attitude toward people in dentention’s health and welfare.[3]  

Unfortunately, this was not the first time someone died because of medical neglect at the facility. By ICE’s own account, in 2011, a 35-year-old man died while detained at ICA-Farmville due to the facility’s failure to properly provide a medical screening and delays in referring him to appropriate medical care.[4] 

Such abuses and mismanagement have only grown worse over the past two years. In 2019 and 2020, guards used excessive force against people detained who protested their unsafe conditions by deploying pepper spray and holding people in solitary confinement.[5] By ICE’s own records, for years ICA-Farmville has been plagued by use-of-force issues, unjustified use of restraints, and unsafe contaminated food.[6] 

For this reason, several national civil rights organizations such as the ACLU and Detention Watch Network have identified ICA-Farmville as a priority for closure due its long history of egregious conditions.[7] And yet, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump Administration was planning to expand ICA-Farmville’s detention capacity, in order to detain more residents of Virginia and the District of Columbia. 

Ending the ICE contract with the Town of Farmville will protect immigrants and their families across Virginia and Washington, D.C., and benefit all residents of those jurisdictions. Reducing ICE detention capacity in a state has been shown to reduce arrests that lead to immigration detention.[8] We do not want our neighbors, our essential workers, and our immigrant communities to have to endure abuse in the facility; and we do not want to face a surge in policing and ICE enforcement activity in our communities just to fill currently empty beds, were the facility to re-open for new detained people. ICE is currently paying to maintain thousands of empty beds across the country at enormous taxpayer expense, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.   

Now is the time to act. Due to a court injunction resulting from ICA-Farmville’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis, the facility currently holds an all-time low of 12 people in detention, down from an average of well over 700 prior to the beginning of the pandemic. Closing the facility would not result in a major disruption of operations. 

The below-listed organizations urge your administration to exercise its option to end ICE’s contract with the Town of Farmville, and allow each of the remaining people in detention within the facility to submit a request for release on appropriate conditions of supervision. Cancelling this contract will not only put an end to ICA-Farmville’s long record of abuse, but it will also exemplify the Biden Administration’s commitment to fulfilling its promises of fair and humane treatment of immigrants across the nation.   

We request a meeting with your office to discuss this matter.  Thank you.