The City of San Antonio’s legal team could soon take action regarding a proposed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said ICE and the Department of Homeland Security missed a Sept. 30 deadline from the City of San Antonio to submit more information about a planned processing center on the East Side.
Now, city leaders are pushing for legal action to make sure ICE’s facility gets the proper environmental assessment and local permits. City Attorney Andy Segovia would be the one to take any legal steps, Jones told reporters after a council meeting Thursday.
“We think we are in a good spot here, and look forward to the city attorney’s recommendation shortly,” she said.
It’s the latest step the city has taken after community members began rallying against a proposed ICE processing center on the East Side.
ICE purchased a 640,000-square-foot warehouse on 542 SE Loop 410 Access Road for $66.1 million at the beginning of the year. Local residents and critics of federal immigration policy have raised concerns about conditions at similar facilities, which hold ICE detainees who face deportation proceedings.
On Oct. 3, hundreds marched through the East Side to protest ICE’s deportation policies and the proposed processing center in San Antonio.
ICE has filed cases to deport more than 4,400 Bexar County residents since President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
San Antonio reaction
City officials wanted clarity on the facility’s environmental assessment and impact, as well as its plans for local permits, before ICE started to renovate the Eastside warehouse.
They were alarmed when the agency signed a contract with GardaWorld Federal Services in August to do work at the proposed facility and gave DHS until Sept. 30 to respond to its questions.
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said signing that contract before taking other preliminary steps paved the way for legal action. The proposed facility is in his district.
“What we’ve seen succeed in other cities is the federal government taking an action that demonstrates that, whether it’s construction or operation of a facility, that it is going to happen. And so for us, to me, the contract with GardaWorld signifies an action,” McKee Rodriguez said.
A proposed ICE facility in Washington County, Maryland, was delayed after local authorities sued over what they said was a failure to assess environmental impact.
San Antonio City Council members will discuss the issue again on Oct. 15, but Jones said Segovia could take action before then because council members were pushing for speed on the issue.
“My hope is that by that meeting we will have already taken legal action,” McKee-Rodriguez said.
Energy questions
Filing a lawsuit would be ultimately up to Segovia.
During the Thursday meeting, council members also directed local utilities and city departments to evaluate how the proposed ICE facility could affect their services.
That includes examining how water, power and emergency services would cover a facility used to process and detain up to 1,500 people at any given time.
Council members Misty Spears (D9) and Marc Whyte (D10) pushed back on the effort to find a legal avenue to slow down the process, arguing that the City of San Antonio didn’t have the authority to weigh in on immigration policy.
Whyte called the move “nothing more than political theater” and said it was a waste of San Antonio’s resources.
“If we end up filing a lawsuit, that’s going to be a further waste of money. And why? To delay. To delay makes the people in the community happy,” Whyte said. “There is nothing that this city government can do to change what the federal government is doing here in San Antonio and across the country.”
But other council members said learning more about the facility could be a tool for future legal action in addition to concerns about an environmental assessment.
Local authorities across the country have raised similar concerns and ICE has even reversed plans, contrary to Whyte’s statement. In Pennsylvania, ICE decided not to use two warehouses as processing facilities after local authorities raised concerns about the capacity of local water and power systems.
That’s part of the reason council members wanted to study ICE’s impacts on local infrastructure.
“It’s not a secret. I don’t want to see this facility take place,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “What this action does today is arm us with information, data, resources, anything that can help inform a legal challenge. This isn’t going to lead directly to [a lawsuit], but it might support it if you challenge the specific facility legally.”
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.
