GADSDEN, Ala. -- The serpentine Coosa River once brought people and goods aplenty to this pretty Southern town, known first for its riverboats and later for its rubber and steel plants. 

But those times are mostly a memory. The city has struggled since the 1980s. Plants shuttered, and industry moved abroad. Many jobs shifted into the service sector. 

Then, in the late 1990s, a tide of immigrants flowed into Gadsden, delivering an unlikely economic boost. The essential revenue they generated came not from their work in fields, factories or hotels, however, but from their presence in the county’s jail cells.

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Ever since, the Etowah County Detention Center has typically held hundreds of immigrant detainees, incarcerated at the behest of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, as they either await deportation or fight it. 

 

 

The stable jail population has meant a steady income for the county -- $40 per detainee per day, plus additional payments that bring the total to more than $5 million a year – and good-paying jobs. But the revenue stream appeared to be about to dry up in late 2010, when ICE decided to move the detainees out of the remote and controversial Alabama jail, where critics say they often are subjected to indefinite confinement far from their families and lawyers. 

Alabama politicians weren’t going to let that happen without a fight. Records obtained by NBC News show that members of Congress waged a successful battle to stop ICE from ending its deal to lease over 300 beds at the Etowah jail, part of a plan to consolidate its detention facilities and house detainees closer to the courts where their cases are heard. 

The story of the Etowah County jail demonstrates how politicians can shape not just policy, but everyday operational decisions at ICE, an agency responsible for nearly 34,000 detainees on any given day. 

“ICE has understood very clearly … that moving people out of Etowah would not be welcomed,” said Michelle Brane, director of the detention and asylum program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, which recently published a report detailing what it said are ongoing human rights abuses at the jail. “Etowah was a facility we felt should be closed, and to keep it open because of local politics and favors obviously does not seem to be in the best interest of American taxpayers, or the detainees.” 

Growth of an industry
The Obama administration has deported record numbers of illegal immigrants in recent years, including nearly 400,000 in fiscal 2011. It also has detained record numbers of immigrants, thanks to 1996 legislation that expanded the jailing of immigrants pending deportation proceedings. 

As a result, ICE now operates the largest detention system in the country. Most detainees await their court appearances or deportation dates not in ICE facilities, but in a network of private and local jails and prisons that offer the agency beds for far less than it would cost to build its own. ICE currently makes use of more than 200 such facilities. 

Related stories

Read Part 1: Immigrant detainees land in limbo in Alabama jail

Letter never received landed immigrant in 'hell on Earth'

Many, like the Etowah jail, are in financially struggling rural counties that have come to depend on ICE, which pays between $40 and more than $100 per person, per day to house and feed the detainees. 

But ICE itself is under pressure to strengthen Christensen wrote in January 2012 in response to inquiries about conditions in the lockups. The agency has also tried to centralize operations, and give detainees greater access to family and lawyers, Christensen said.

Those initiatives can be at cross-purposes with the needs of cities like Gadsden, the seat of Etowah County, where the fierce pressure brought to bear on ICE when it sought to remove the detainees illustrates how economically dependent the community has become on immigrant detention. 

Immigrants have been dispatched to the Etowah County Detention Center – a large, gray block that sits across the street from shops selling guns, bail bonds and barbecue -- since 1998, when the agency then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service began using it to house detainees it had no room for at its detention facilities in Georgia. 

The federal government helped pay for an expansion of the jail in 2003, kicking in about $8 million to help finance the $13.5 million project. 

Cost savings and jobs
The relationship was good for both sides. It meant steady revenue for Etowah County and much-needed – and cheap -- space for the INS and its successor agency, ICE, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

The county receives not just the $40 per detainee payment from the feds, but reimbursement from ICE for expenses arising from transporting detainees. ICE also rents offices in Gadsden and pays the county officers assigned to the detainees $17 an hour. 

The facility remains a bargain for ICE, which pays day rates nearly three times higher at detention facilities in some northern states. 

But the remoteness of the jail poses problems. For years, detainees and ICE employees have had to travel two hours each way to reach the ICE field office and courts in Atlanta. 

That was one of the justifications cited two years ago when ICE, under pressure from Georgia politicians to make use of a half-empty detention facility there, announced that it planned to pull detainees out of Etowah County in December 2010. 

The county decided to fight. A Dec. 7 email obtained by NBC News through an open records request shows Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt’s staff contacted ICE the day after the announcement. 

“Mr. Aderholt is quite concerned about this move and is requesting any information we have on the decision,” the email reads. 

The email was among more than 800 pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request that detail the fight to keep immigration detainees at Etowah. 

In phone calls, meetings and interviews with the press, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin implored the county’s congressional representatives to intervene. 

“The financial impact of ICE voiding their contract with Etowah County and Alabama will be economically catastrophic to the employees, the county and Northeast Alabama,” he said, according to local newspaper accounts. Voiding the deal, which generates approximately $5.2 million a year for the county, would mean “49 individuals losing their jobs only days before Christmas with no notice whatsoever,” he said. 

The county also was still paying off about $3 million in debt associated with the jail expansion. “Without the ICE contract, Etowah County will not be able to meet these obligations,” Entrekin told the Gadsden Times. 

Members of Alabama’s congressional delegation, including Reps. Aderholt and Mike Rogers and Sens. Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, all Republicans, reacted swiftly. Within days, they sent emails to and met personally with high-level ICE officials to plead Etowah County’s case. 

'Secret, unprofessional and unfair'
Aderholt also publicly assailed the decision, saying, “The manner by which this decision has been made by ICE has been secretive, unprofessional and unfair,” according to the newspaper. “I will continue working with the Alabama delegation and Etowah County to further challenge ICE to reverse any plans to end their agreement with Etowah County.” 

ICE staffers told the Alabama politicians that the withdrawal from Etowah was “inevitable,” documents show. And ICE said the agreement between the county and the agency, set to expire in 2014, simply set terms for ICE to use the facility -- it did not guarantee the agency would do so. 

But emails show ICE officials soon grew concerned they would face budgetary repercussions if they did not find a solution that would satisfy Etowah County. 

An email from an ICE employee cited a conversation on Dec. 7 with Allen Cutler, Sen. Shelby’s appropriations staffer. “Cutler stated there would have to be a resolution that would satisfy Shelby or there would be a stop to all ICE reprogramming requests," it read, referring to requests from the agency for more funding. 

The next day, the local newspaper reported ICE had decided to postpone the pullout. 

In meetings over the following days, ICE staff presented reports that outlined the cost-savings of using Georgia detention centers. They also encouraged Alabama officials to "highlight the need for Secure Communities in AL, which would lead to the use of more facilities in the state." Secure Communities is a controversial program that uses a federal database to identify immigration violators when they are booked into local jails. 

The agency also looked for other solutions -- including the transfer of detainees from other facilities. "We can move 100 women out of Etowah, and replace them with a hundred others,” read one Dec. 15 email. “Not a zero-sum issue." 

ICE eventually backed down, guaranteeing that the detainees would stay at the Etowah County Detention Center at least until March 2011. Records show that the Alabama lawmakers were placated, but wary. Sen. Shelby’s office told ICE they would continue to negotiate on behalf of the county, and asked for a personal meeting between the senator and ICE staff members to discuss their “poor performance,” according to emails. 

True to his word, that March, the senator again queried ICE about the agency’s plans, communications logs show. 

ICE, Rep. Aderholt’s office, and Etowah County officials declined to speak on the record with NBC News. Shelby’s office issued a statement, saying, “In light of the unreasonably short notice of unnecessary job losses just before the holidays, in addition to the fact that the Etowah County facility was already obligated to hold a significant number of beds for ICE for several more years, members of the Alabama congressional delegation met with ICE to request a more realistic drawdown period.” 

But records suggest representatives went beyond such requests. Not long after Rep. Aderholt become chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security in January 2011, giving him power to shape ICE’s budget, he demanded a meeting with ICE. 

'Serious repercussions against our budget'
“I met with Aderholt’s personal staff,” wrote Gary Mead, ICE’s executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, in a March 29 email to top ICE staff. “I do not believe we will be allowed to leave Etowah without serious repercussions against our budget. I have a meeting tomorrow with ERO folks to figure out if there is a reasonable way to make some use of Etowah long term. Discretion may be the better part of valor here." 

Throughout that month, local newspapers reported what a pullout would mean for the county. Sheriff Entrekin said that, in addition to losing revenue from leased beds and jobs, his department would no longer collect fees that ICE detainees paid for phone calls and commissary items, forcing cuts in programs like substance abuse treatment and inmate work details in the community. 

By June 2011, ICE had developed a proposal that satisfied the Alabamians. The agency decided that the detention center would be switched to the New Orleans regional office. That would enable the transfer of long-term detainees held at different facilities throughout the Southeast to Etowah.  

In emails, ICE reasoned these detainees have often exhausted legal remedies and would not need to be transferred regularly to immigration courts hundreds of miles away. At Etowah, it said, they could fight their cases by mail or await their deportation. 

But for some detainees, those waits are open-ended. 

Neville Swaby, a detainee sent to Etowah after the New Orleans Field Office took over, has been at the facility for nearly a year. He is an undocumented immigrant who entered the country illegally from Mexico. He was detained by ICE after serving a sentence stemming from a marijuana possession charge. 

An order for Swaby’s deportation has been in force for more than nine months, but his case is complicated because he has no official country of birth. 

“I don’t have a country to go back to -- I would go to any country,” Swaby told NBC News reporters who visited the Etowah jail in May. “I’m not fighting deportation.” 

ICE has requested travel papers from Jamaica, where Swaby says he was born. But the request has been pending since August 2011 and still no records have been delivered. Meanwhile, the agency has refused to free Swaby, saying his removal is expected in the “reasonably foreseeable future.” To Swaby, it seems simply to be a sentence without end. 

“After six months’ time, nine months’ time, I’m still here,” he said.

 

GADSDEN, Ala. -- Ivan Stobert was in many ways the ideal immigrant.

In 2006, he traveled from Moldova to the United States on a visa. While here, he fell in love and in 2008 married a U.S. citizen. He became a permanent legal resident, bought a house in the Atlanta area and started a cleaning business.

“Finally I made my dream,” Stobert told NBC News. “I buy my house, I have my business. I thought, ‘Wow, I love America!’”

But the love affair ended in December 2010, when the slight 25-year-old found himself locked up indefinitely in the Etowah County Detention Center in northeast Alabama, charged with an aggravated felony and facing deportation.

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More than 250 detention facilities around the country are used to hold the tens of thousands immigrants detained each year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, as they await court dates or deportation. Even those accused of relatively minor infractions, such as overstaying a visa, can be held for months – or even years – fighting their cases without the benefit of rights and resources guaranteed to those accused of criminal acts.

 

Immigrant advocates have for years called Etowah one of the worst facilities in ICE’s sprawling detention system.

In late July, conditions in the isolated facility, which also serves as the county jail, prompted some immigration detainees to refuse food in an act of protest to demand better treatment. A hundred detainees signed a letter to ICE and operators of the jail.

“Some Detainees life’s (sic) are at stake and to disregard this fact is inhumane and not in compliance with ICE (standards),” they wrote.

“They were sending us rotten food, food that’s spoiled,” detainee Javian Lawrence, a 27-year-old Jamaican national, told NBC News in a phone interview from the jail. 

Those detained in Etowah are locked up for myriad reasons -- including overstayed visas or entering the country illegally. But others, like Stobert, say they were caught in the immigration law enforcement web by mistake.

Checking the wrong box
Stobert says his troubles began in April 2009 when he accidentally checked the “U.S. Citizen” box on a motorcycle license application. He said that even though he presented his green card and Moldovan passport along with the application, indicating he was in the country legally, two law enforcement officers arrived at his home more than a year and a half later and arrested him for providing false statements on a government application. He was booked into jail in Atlanta, held for more than a month, then transferred to Etowah.

For what he says was an innocent mistake, Stobert spent nearly a year behind bars. And while he was locked up, he says, he lost his house to foreclosure, his wife left him and his budding cleaning business collapsed.

“I lost everything while I been there,” he said. “I lost my house. I lost my wife. I lost all my cars, whatever I had. I lost everything.”Though his case was dismissed, a hearing on his immigration status is still pending and he remains unsure of whether he’ll be deported or–even worse, from his perspective–locked up again. “I’m not sure,” he said, “if America will keep me or not.”

Locked up in limbo
After scandals including sexual abuse by guards, deaths in custody and the detention of children, ICE announced in August 2009 plans to consolidate its network of detention centers, many of them county jails, and improve oversight.

Three years later, however, the agency still houses nearly 34,000 immigration detainees on any given day in some facilities that critics say are intended to be short-term way stations in the criminal justice system, not used for long-term civil detention. 

Many of the more than 300 men at the Etowah County Detention Center – who spend much of their time in cramped cells, denied access to the outdoors – face open-ended stays in the jail. They include asylum seekers; immigrants fighting deportation or petitioning for special status that would enable them to remain in the U.S.; immigrants from countries unwilling to take them back; and people without the proper paperwork to be repatriated.

ICE’s decision to hold long-term detainees in the Alabama jail is rooted in cost-savings: At just $40 a day per detainee, Etowah has one of the lowest rates of any ICE detention facility in the country.

But it also has its challenges. At the end of 2010, ICE attempted to terminate its use of the facility, citing a number of factors, including expensive transportation costs to and from court, and lack of access to ICE staff and attorneys. Its remoteness also makes it difficult for lawyers and the detainees’ family members to visit.

But money from ICE has become an essential source of revenue to the county, bringing in about $5 million a year that funds a host of programs and services in the community. Losing that revenue would be a “devastating blow” to the budget, Etowah Sheriff Todd Entrekin told the Gadsden Times in 2011.

After a political fight to keep the detainees there, the facility came under the control of ICE’s New Orleans field office. About 100 female detainees once housed at Etowah were moved out. New Orleans now uses the 350 beds Etowah reserves for ICE to house male detainees, almost all of whom ICE expects to linger in the system.

Both ICE and Etowah County officials declined repeated requests by NBC News to speak on camera. But advocates for the detainees object to using a jail like Etowah to detain immigrants for the long term.

"It’s absolutely inhumane,” said H. Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who represented Stobert and others detained in the jail. “If you hold somebody long term they’re supposed to go to a proper jail, a long-term jail facility where they can go outside. In these short term facilities you can’t. You’re basically in a jail cell 80 to 90 percent of the time.”

Detainees currently are held at Etowah an average of 49 days, records show. Yet some, like Stobert, remain far longer.

Challenging deportation
Immigrants face major barriers to challenging their detention and deportation, in part because they operate in a civil, rather than criminal, system. To sneak across the border is a crime, but to overstay a visa – one of the most common ways that people lose legal status – is a legal infraction akin to a moving violation.

But due to the civil nature of the crime, immigrants caught in the deportation process have fewer legal protections than someone accused of murder. They lack the right to representation, a speedy trial, double jeopardy protections or standard habeas corpus.

A report by the Vera Institute of Justice found that between 2006 and 2007, more than 80 percent of detained immigrants fought their cases without a lawyer. Stobert was one of the lucky few who could afford one.

Even so, in April 2011, an Atlanta immigration judge ordered Stobert’s deportation, claiming he had intentionally checked the U.S. citizen box. Stobert, already locked up for over five months, decided to fight and his lawyer appealed. He applied to be released on bond, which would include supervision that costs much less than detention. The motion was denied.  Fogle, Stobert’s attorney, said he believes ICE keeps people in Etowah so that detainees will give up hope.

“People have legitimate cases to stay here in the United States, but if they give up and their spirit is broken in these detention centers they’re just going to sign” their deportation papers, he said. “And that’s not right.”

‘Undeportable’
Many of the detainees in Etowah have complicated cases, stemming from criminal charges or diplomatic intricacies. Even some willing to be voluntarily deported cannot be. Countries like China, Cuba or certain Caribbean Islands regularly rebuff U.S. efforts to return their citizens.

Immigration detainees have constitutional protections against indefinite detention. In 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled ICE has approximately six months to deport or release immigrants after their case is decided.

ICE can, however, hold people longer if it can show that certain special circumstances apply – such as the detainee posing a terrorism risk – or if it can show an immigrant will be deported in the near future. But ICE records show the agency regularly opposes even the release of detainees who it has struggled to deport, and prevails.

Barbados national Hanson Marshall, 35, for example, has been detained by ICE for 23 months. He spent time in detention centers in five states before arriving at Etowah last June.

Marshall, who wears the green shirt that at Etowah signals he’s considered a medium-risk detainee, came to the United States legally when he was 16 and settled in Brooklyn with his family. His visa expired, but he stayed.

Marshall had tangled with the law. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for possessing a firearm. In 2010, he was picked up in New York City on a warrant for a misdemeanor. He spend a week in jail. The day he was to be released, he was instead transferred into ICE custody.

ICE has switched tactics in recent years, concentrating on deporting more immigrants facing criminal charges, like Marshall. But in his case, the deportation has become a Catch-22: Until Barbados issues the necessary travel documents, the United States can’t send him home.

“I would be more than pleased to go back to Barbados but I can’t make it happen,” said Marshall. “It’s not up to me. It’s up to the consulate. But if you stay in immigration for a period of time, and they can’t acquire travel documents, then I shouldn’t have to sit up in jail for the rest of my life.”

Inside Etowah
ICE, which operates the largest detention system in the U.S., relies heavily on jails like Etowah to detain immigrants. Critics have argued for years that jails are not appropriate for ICE detainees, because they live as prisoners -- wearing uniforms, confined in small cells and forced to mingle with general inmate populations.

ICE, too, has emphasized that detention is not meant to be punishment.

“We’re not a penal institution,” John Morton, director of ICE, in a 2010 speech at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.,-based think tank. “We detain people for purposes of removal. We detain people because if we release them they would pose a danger to people or run away. We’re not incarcerating anyone.”

On a tour of the Etowah County Detention Center in May by NBC News, ICE detainees in Unit 10 crowded to the door of the glassed-in recreation area to speak with reporters. Men from countries like Sierra Leone, Morocco, Poland and Guatemala shouted to be heard while other detainees worked out in the room behind, lifting weights and doing pull-ups on metal bars.

The rec room in each unit provides the detainees with their only exposure to natural light or open air, both of which come through a narrow grating high on one wall. Otherwise, detainees go outdoors only when bused to court proceedings, for emergency medical care or when taken to the airport to be deported.

The facility that houses the detainees is by most appearances a jail. Two levels of cells line the large rectangular units. Detainees eat at tables in the middle of the pod, and bunk in small cells behind heavy doors. Mattresses are thin, the showers are bare and public.

Like the rest of the jail’s inmates, the immigrants are not allowed contact visits with family or friends, except under special circumstances. Visitation takes place via a video screen. Detainees interviewed said the no-contact policy discouraged their spouses, children and friends from driving hours to see them.

Detainees also said the commissary, where they can purchase extra food or toiletries, is prohibitively expensive. Phone calls, often the single link to families sometimes thousands of miles away, can cost up to $1 per minute.

Immigration lawyers, and courts, are also difficult to access from Etowah. Many detainees described inadequate medical care, although the detention center operates a clinic with a full-time nurse and weekly visits from a doctor.

ICE’s own reports have noted deficiencies. A 2008 inspection report noted two suicides by county inmates within a six month period. ICE records from that year also indicate that a female detainee tried to hang herself in her cell. The food supply was the subject of a grand jury investigation in 2010.  Jurors concluded it was sufficient.

Since coming under control of the New Orleans Field Office, ICE detention monitors have worked “worked hand-in-hand with facility staff to address these issues and work to implement corrective where necessary,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen wrote in January 2012 in response to a query about conditions.

Passed inspections
Human rights monitors from the Women’s Refugee Commission also indicate Etowah has made steps to improve the facility, but a recent report from the group indicated problems persist, including complaints about food. The human rights group said the county had been addressing some of the concerns raised in the report.

During the visit by NBC News in May, the menu listed meals with beans, tortillas, fruit, hot dogs, and hamburgers. But Stobert and other former and current detainees said such improvements were recent. 

Also new are some niceties in the units at Etowah that house the immigrants, who were recently allowed to participate in programs formerly available only to county inmates. The wall of one, for example, is adorned with a painted mural of the world. There also are fish tanks in each unit. Officials have also implemented programs for detainees and improved access to medical care, among other reforms.

According to an ICE spokesperson, inspectors found no violations during the facility’s most recent review. Etowah County is currently soliciting bids to build an outdoor recreation center on top of the jail in order to bring the facility up to ICE’s most recent standards, which would also increase pay for officers who oversee ICE detainees.

In May, a detainee in Unit 4, which holds those with the lowest risk classification, was training a dog as part of a new Puppies Without Borders program, intended as an “outlet to relieve the stress of being detained.” The man, a native of the Philippines who declined to give his name, said he was being held while he awaited a decision on his petition for a U-Visa, a special visa offered to immigrants who have been victims of a crime. Smiling as the puppy scurried across the catwalk, he said Etowah was far better than the ICE jail in Illinois that he was transferred from. 

“This is like heaven,” he said of Etowah. “The other was like hell.”

But by July, when detainees staged a brief hunger strike, many complained that the facility had reverted back to some of its old ways, serving food that was rotten and nutritionally inadequate. 

“The situation has not been resolved,” detainee Anthony Orlando Williams said in a phone interview from the facility, where he has spent nearly three years because he has no official country of origin to which the U.S. can deport him. “It’s just been tolerated.”

Following the protest, detainees in Unit 9 were on lockdown, held for nearly 22 hours a day in their cells, according to detainees and their advocates. Nonetheless, they say the strike may just be the first in a series of actions aimed at forcing ICE to move them out of Etowah. 

“It’s hit a fever pitch,” said Abraham Paulos, executive director of Families for Freedom, an immigrant rights group that has been tracking conditions at Etowah. “We’ve never seen a demand of leaving Etowah. They don’t care if they’re still detained, they just don’t want to be detained in Etowah.”   

Read Part 2: When ICE sought to shutter immigration jail, politics intervened.