Three Democratic U.S. House members from Arizona want GardaWorld Federal Services to provide more information about the two large immigration detention facilities it plans to build and expand in Surprise and Florence under more than $1.5 billion in new contracts with ICE.
The three lawmakers also said the company has done a poor job so far of communicating with local governments about the massive projects and has failed to answer questions raised by lawmakers in the past.
"It is deeply concerning that, despite the significant scale of these projects and their potential impact on surrounding communities, local governments continue to learn about them only after contracts have been awarded," according to the Oct. 6 letter signed by U.S. Reps. Greg
Stanton, Yassamin Ansari and Adelita Grijalva.
The letter is addressed to Pete Dordal Jr., the president of GardaWorld Federal Services, the U.S. subsidiary of Montreal, Canada-based security company, GardaWorld.
It is the second letter the three Democratic House members have sent to GardaWorld after the company failed to adequately answer questions the three lawmakers raised in a March 11 letter to GardaWorld when the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded the company a $313.4 million contract to renovate a 418,400-square-foot warehouse into a 1,500-bed ICE processing center.
"Unfortunately, your response did not adequately address the questions we raised," the members of Congress say in their letter.
The immigration detention center planned for Surprise is on holdafter the federal government and GardaWorld agreed to conduct an environmental impact review in response to a lawsuit Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed in April against the Homeland Security Department and ICE.
"Our concerns have only been exacerbated by news that" ICE has signed a contract "with a "$1.2 billion ceiling" with GardaWorld to support expansion of an ICE-owned detention facility in Florence, the Florence Service Processing Center, the letter says.
The town of Florence was not notified of the planned expansion and had no additional information about the contract, the letter noted.
The $1.2 billion contract for work to expand detention capacity at the ICE facility in Florence was first reported by Project Salt Box.
The Arizona Republic independently confirmed the $1.2 billion ICE contract with GardaWorld for the Florence immigration detention expansion project through a post published on Sept. 24 on SAM.gov, a federal government website that manages contracts with private companies.
Stanton said in an interview he has been frustrated by GardaWorld's lack of transparency with lawmakers and local communities considering the size of the immigration detention centers, where the safety and wellbeing of potentially thousands of immigrants will be at stake, as well the center's impact on surrounding communities.
"It's life safety," Stanton said. "It is incredibly important that these be built in a way that (they) are safe for the people that are going to be housed there."
Lawmakers are concerned that GardaWorld, primarily known as a security firm, does not appear to have experience constructing and operating immigration detention centers, Stanton said.
GardaWorld Federal provided security at "Alligator Alcatraz," a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades that has been sued over environmental impacts to the area and criticized for reported inhumane conditions, according to the Fort Myers News-Press & Naples Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Network.
"The whole (Surprise) project was done without any transparency, without talking to the mayor and council or the nearby neighborhood or the school district, which is, you know right next to the project area," Stanton said. "So we had serious concerns and they wrote back and didn't provide any substantive answers to any of the questions we were asking, especially about their experience. So that's been very frustrating. Now we find out they're getting a $1.2 billion contract to build a new facility in Florence. That is very, very troubling."
The Arizona Republic reached out to GardaWorld seeking a response to the letter, but did not immediately hear back from the company.
Among the questions sent to GardaWorld in the Oct. 6 letter is to provide "a full account" of GardaWorld's experience designing, constructing, renovating or operating immigration or criminal detention facilities of comparable scope.
The ICE contracts with GardaWorld are part of President Donald Trump's rapid expansion of immigration detention space in Arizona and other states as part of a mass deportation campaign.
The Trump administration is pumping billions of dollars into creating the infrastructure to hold at least 100,000 people in immigration detention centers across the country at any given time, which would help eliminate a major choke point that has hampered the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: House Dems demand answers over Arizona immigration detention projects
