US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to place its private detention network beyond the reach of state inspectors, publishing draft contract terms that declare state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities, according to federal documents reviewed by WIRED.
The new terms were published earlier this month, a day after a federal judge ruled that a contract cannot override state law and ordered ICE’s largest Pacific Northwest detention center opened to Washington health officials.
The ruling, by US District Judge Benjamin Settle, came only after three years of litigation; 10 refused inspections, according to the state; and 3,500 detainee complaints. A Ninth Circuit judge temporarily paused the order on July 21, with a decision on a longer stay expected in early August.
Settle ordered the operator of Tacoma’s immigration detention center to admit Washington state health inspectors, ruling that nothing in the company’s federal contract barred them and that no contract could override state law in any case. The next morning, on July 10, ICE published draft contract terms for 5,500 detention beds in four regions of the country—including language declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities’ operations.
Settle found that the GEO Group, the private prison company that owns the Tacoma facility, had executed a new contract with ICE in the middle of the lawsuit to support the company’s claim that ICE, not GEO, controlled access to the building. “Preemption requires Congressional intent, not a contract,” Settle responded, “and GEO’s new contract cannot preempt state law, even if it purports to.”
Settle also noted that GEO’s court filing omitted part of a contract provision under which ICE agreed to ask the Justice Department to get GEO dismissed from lawsuits over its performance, or to have ICE substituted as the defendant.
The new procurement document, posted to a federal contracting site on July 10 and first reported by the newsletter Project Salt Box, is framed as an early step toward a competitive bidding process, but its terms suggest otherwise. Facilities must begin housing detainees within 30 days of an award—a timeline no new construction could meet—and the required bed counts and locations align with four detention centers GEO already operates: in Tacoma; Aurora, Colorado; Pompano Beach, Florida; and Philipsburg, Pennsylvania.
The Florida requirement, 700 beds, matches the Pompano Beach facility’s contracted bed guarantee exactly, according to ICE’s own facilities data. Operating agreements for the four sites lapse in the coming months: Tacoma’s contract runs through October 27, and the Pennsylvania facility’s county agreement expires September 28. GEO’s securities filings show the Colorado and Florida contract terms end in October and September, respectively.
Companies had less than a week to respond before the window closed July 17.
The draft contract terms are new. But the language attempting to nullify state law is not: It appears nearly word for word in the Tacoma contract that GEO signed in March, in the middle of the lawsuit—the same contract Settle ruled “cannot preempt state law, even if it purports to.” ICE is now proposing to extend it to three more states.
Settle rejected the language once. But his ruling is preliminary, it binds no court outside Washington, and for ICE’s purposes it doesn’t need to survive. Washington needed three years of litigation to get inspectors to the door of one facility—and they are still outside, held off by a stay while GEO appeals. Written into contracts across four states, the same language could restart that fight in each of these locations at once.
