Picking pumpkins just got a whole new spin.
Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, emailed her members that Torrance County Commissioner Kevin McCall was an ICE supporter and cautioned teachers against field trips to McCall’s Pumpkin Patch, a popular family-owned business, according to SourceNM.
The online uproar prompted McCall to clarify during a commission meeting: “Our business is in no way communicating or working with ICE, which is utterly false. From its start 28 years ago, our mission has always been to provide a fun, family-friendly place for guests to make cherished memories.”
In his role as county commissioner, McCall recently voted with fellow commissioners to extend the ICE contract with the Torrance County Detention Facility, which Bernstein wrote “has been the scene of various documented human rights violations against detainees, but Mr. McCall and the other commissioners excuse that in the name of economic gain for both the county and private interests.”
She ends with: “Spooky stuff. Beware rotten pumpkins.”
Let’s pause to roll our eyes.
Bernstein has been a champion of teachers for many years, but this was not her finest moment. Teachers understandably fear the impacts of ICE raids on their students. Bernstein should stick to that issue instead of inventing conspiracies.
This pumpkin story is really about the disconnect between rural and urban areas, especially around jobs, and it’s a subject I’ve written about often during my decades of reporting in New Mexico.
If you drive around Torrance County, and I have, you’d see that employers are few and far between. However flawed it is, the detention center is one of the county’s few large employers, with 100 workers. According to New Mexico Political Report, it spends $8 million a year in a county with a poverty rate of 20.4%.
So when Bernstein pans the detention center vote as excusing its lapses “in the name of economic gain for both the county and private interests,” she misses the point. Her “economic gain” looks more like survival in a poor county.
Last month, when I wrote about the state’s ICE detention centers in Estancia, Alamogordo and Milan, I heard from Linda Calhoun, a small business owner in Torrance County who sees a middle ground.
“This issue keeps being presented as a choice between closing the detention centers and leaving things as is because of the local financial considerations. But I see everyone overlooking another possibility, especially here in Torrance County. That possibility is to bring the facility up to current health department standards …
“I read somewhere that the New Mexico Health Department has no jurisdiction over the facility in Estancia because of its contract with the feds. I just don’t understand why that is. Our restaurant has to abide by Health Department standards, as well we should.”
“The building in Estancia is in serious disrepair. They should not be allowed to skate without any accountability. I have seen pictures of huge cracks in the concrete floors. The plumbing and heating don’t work. Detainees are fed frozen burritos that have not even been thawed, much less warmed …”
Calhoun has a point. If the state has the authority to collect gross receipts taxes from these entities, why does it not enforce standards? The answer is that it apparently hasn’t tried.
In September, the New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights blamed many of the three facilities’ problems on a contracting process that creates “confusion when it comes to oversight and accountability and leaves each stakeholder only partially accountable for addressing issues.”
ICE contracts for space with Torrance, Otero and Cibola counties, which are pass-through agents for private owners. The Torrance County manager told New Mexico Political Report that because CoreCivic owns the facility, the county has limited oversight.
More likely, the county is reluctant to pressure CoreCivic because it closed the facility in 2017, and that had immediate economic fallout. The company reopened the center two years later with the ICE contract.
My reading of the civil rights advisory committee’s report is that the state should step up.
The committee recommended closing all three immigration detention facilities and expanding community-based alternatives to detention (the committee chair and vice-chair dissented). It also said the state should stop using these county pass-through contracts, and – most important to this discussion – “create a robust oversight system for monitoring immigrant detention centers in the state.”
The governor, some legislators and immigrant advocates are pushing legislation to close the facilities and ban ICE detention in New Mexico. However, economic development doesn’t always mean high tech or oil and gas. It would be smarter economically (and a kindness to immigrant inmates, who will be detained somewhere that may be worse) to preserve and monitor the state’s detention centers.