CHICAGO _ Mary Flott thinks of her hometown of Dwight, Ill., as a quiet, quaint village. But she worries that if a proposed development is built, people will identify it more with a large immigration detention center that would sit on the side of the highway.
Flott, 71, had already been opposed to President Donald Trump's policies when she learned in recent weeks that the national debate about immigration was coming to her backyard, less than two hours southwest of Chicago. Last week, Dwight's board of trustees voted in favor of an agreement that brings Virginia-based Immigration Centers of America, known as ICA, one step closer to building an immigration detention center there.
The effort in Dwight is the latest attempt to build a private detention center near Chicago. Pushback from activists and the community has stopped other proposals over the past decade.
For the plan to go forward, the company must now secure a contract with the federal government by September 2020, said Jared Anderson, the Dwight village board president.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to comment on the proposal. However, ICE is looking to contract with a detention center and recently posted a request for one within an 80-mile radius of Chicago's immigration court, according to a website with information about federal contracts. The federal agency is seeking a facility that can house 1,000 people in various levels of security and that could facilitate travel to and from cities like Milwaukee and Indianapolis.
Immigration advocates say a private detention center could nearly double the population of detained immigrants facing deportation in the Chicago area.
For Flott, the past couple of weeks have felt like a crash course in the country's immigration laws. The first time she heard about the ICA proposal was in February.
"I don't think anybody in Dwight is going to come up with a really good, humane cost-effective means of dealing with immigration," Flott said by phone. "I think by having a detention center here, it promotes the idea that we are OK with the policy the way it is and I'm definitely not."
