The New Mexico Corrections Department is moving its inmates out of the Lea County Correctional Facility near Hobbs after a private prison operator that owns the facility decided it will not continue leasing the land under the prison from Lea County when the firm’s current contract ends in November.
What will become of the 350,000-square-foot facility operated by GEO Group wasn’t clear late Thursday, but the company responded to a request for information from Immigration and Customs Enforcement last fall indicating openness to contracting with the federal agency for use as an immigration detention facility.
The state corrections department will begin moving inmates out of the Lea County Correctional Facility in the coming weeks with the goal of having them out by June 30, according to a letter Corrections Cabinet Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero sent to Lea County Manager Corey Needham earlier this week.
The medium-security prison has a capacity of 1,200 inmates and housed about 1,000 as of Thursday, according to the department. Spokesperson Brittany Roembach declined to say where the inmates will go “for the safety and security of our staff and inmates,” but said the state has more than enough capacity across its other state-operated facilities to house them.
Roembach wrote in an email Thursday the state was ending its contract early because GEO Group decided not to renew its contract with Lea County in November. She did not respond to questions about what if any fiscal impact early termination of the contract would have on the state.
GEO Group owns and runs the prison, but the land under it is owned by the county and leased to the firm, which contracts with the state to hold prisoners there. The private prison operator had recently been trying to sell the prison to the county and the state, but it appears neither entity was willing to buy it.
GEO Group had initially been asking $300 million for the prison but agreed last month to drop the price to $175 million, according to a letter from Chief Executive Officer J. David Donahue sent Tafoya Lucero.
The firm has been unresponsive to The New Mexican’s inquiries about its plans for the prison. However, records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a federal Freedom of Information Act request show GEO Group responded in September to a federal request for information about housing immigrant detainees there.
ICE began looking into expanding its capacity to detain immigrants throughout the West, including in New Mexico, last summer, issuing an August request for information regarding “approximately 850 to 950 detention beds … for adult noncitizens” within two hours of its El Paso office and suboffices in Las Cruces, Roswell, Chaparral and Albuquerque.
GEO Group told the federal government in its application the Lea County facility is “an appropriately zoned, existing structure capable of providing secure residential, medical, and transportation services, as well as all support services necessary to meet the needs of adult ICE noncitizens (male and female) at multiple security levels,” the documents state.
CoreCivic, a private prison operator that runs ICE detention facilities in Cibola and Torrance counties, also submitted information about possibly increasing capacity in those centers.
It wasn’t clear Thursday whether GEO Group would need permission from a local entity to hold federal detainees. Needham said he couldn’t immediately answer questions about how that might work. But a clause in the agreement by which the city of Hobbs conveyed the property to Lea County in 1997 indicates that if the land ceased to be used for a “county jail or state prison” it would revert back to the city.
A bill to ban local governments in New Mexico from entering into immigration detention contracts and phasing out existing ones passed the state House of Representatives this year but failed to reach the Senate floor.
Correction: This story has been amended to reflect the following correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated the state had decided to ends its contract with private prison operator GEO Group. The state is moving its inmates out of the facility after GEO Group made a decision not to renew its lease on the land under the prison.
