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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2018
Oregon prison last in country
to house ICE detainees
Brenna Visser/The Daily Astorian
U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici speaks a town hall at the
Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce.
Climate change,
partisanship issues at
Bonamici town hall
Congresswoman
stops for a visit
in Cannon Beach
By BRENNA VISSER
The Daily Astorian
CANNON BEACH —
National issues, such as con-
cerns about climate change and
partisan gridlock in Congress,
were at the forefront at a town
hall hosted on Sunday by U.S.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici.
The visit was a part of a
tour across the 1st Congres-
sional District to answer ques-
tions from constituents. Most
concerns were centered around
whether any progress could be
made on Bonamici’s priorities,
such as expanding health care,
college affordability or curbing
climate change, with a Repub-
lican-held Congress and White
House.
“When I got elected to
Congress, I knew I’d be in
the minority, but that doesn’t
mean I expect my constituents
to expect I do nothing because
I’m in the minority party,” the
Democrat said. “You find com-
mon ground.”
Bonamici cited her work
with Rep. Don Young,
R-Alaska, to develop the Save
Our Seas Act, a bill that reau-
thorizes the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administra-
tion’s marine debris Program
through 2022. She also men-
tioned bipartisan work with
then-Rep. Jim Bridenstine,
R-Okla., that was necessary
to pass the Weather Forecast-
ing Improvement Act of 2014,
a bill aimed at bettering coordi-
nation of NOAA’s research and
forecasting operations.
While bipartisanship is pos-
sible, Bonamici said she is con-
cerned about the lack of over-
sight she feels lawmakers have
over the Trump administration.
Bonamici highlighted the U.S.
Department of Education and
the Environmental Protection
Agency, in particular.
“The current Congress has
not done a good job to provide
oversight to this administra-
tion,” Bonamici said. “We’ve
seen story after story about
them not doing their job or
about a culture of corruption …
we need to crack down where
oversight is needed.”
This issue dovetailed into
the concerns some in the audi-
ence had about whether a
recent report published by the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change — a group
of scientists convened by the
United Nations — was being
taken seriously by Congress.
The report described the global
effects of climate change by
2040.
Bonamici said, as a member
of the House Science, Space
and Technology Committee,
she was disappointed by the
Trump administration’s lack of
response to the report.
“The administration didn’t
even understand who (the Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate
Change) were,” she said.
Bonamici said she still
believes progress can be made
through educating people and
communicating about issues
like ocean acidification and
renewable energy resources,
and that those conversations
need to be tethered to job
retraining and education in the
oil and coal industries.
“We can grow our renew-
able
energy
industry,”
Bonamici said. “But we have
to talk about it in a way where
those working in industries like
coal don’t feel like we’re taking
away their livelihood and their
whole history.”
Inmates held
in Sheridan
By CONRAD WILSON
Oregon Public Broadcasting
U.S. Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement has all but
abandoned its use of federal
prisons to house detainees.
In early June, the agency
announced it was sending up
to 1,600 immigrant detainees
to five federal prisons in Texas,
Oregon, California, Washington
state and Arizona.
But now, only three ICE
detainees remain across the five
prisons that once held hundreds
of immigrants.
There are no ICE detainees
at the federal prisons in Vic-
torville, California; SeaTac in
Washington; La Tuna in Texas;
or Phoenix, ICE spokeswoman
Tanya Roman said in a state-
ment. The three ICE detainees
that remain are inside the fed-
eral prison in Sheridan.
ICE’s large-scale use of fed-
eral prisons to house its detain-
ees was unprecedented and con-
troversial. Many of the detainees
sent to the prisons were seeking
asylum. Yet, they were treated as
criminals, according to multiple
immigration attorneys who rep-
resented the detainees in several
of the prisons, even though few
— if any — of the detainees had
been charged criminally or were
serving a criminal sentence.
“ICE was blending the crim-
inal, penal corrections system,
blending it with the immigra-
tion, asylum system and sort
of creating this unified view
that they all need to be detained
and incarcerated,” said Stephen
Manning, a Portland-based
immigration attorney. He rep-
resents the three remaining ICE
detainees at the federal prison in
Oregon.
Manning’s firm, the Port-
land-based Innovation Law
Lab, originally represented
more than 80 individuals held
at the prison. The government
moved their asylum cases for-
ward because all of Manning’s
clients were found to have valid
asylum claims.
“It was an abject failure of
government policy to use the
federal prisons for the deten-
tion of asylum seekers and I
hope this constitutionally risky
experiment, which failed, reso-
nates and that we won’t see it
again,” Manning said.
Immigrant detainees left
the five federal prisons used
by ICE either because they
were deported, transferred to
civil detention facilities or were
granted bail.
ICE didn’t say if the dra-
matic reduction in detainees
being held in federal prisons
represents a change in policy.
“The interagency agree-
ments with BOP (Bureau of
Prisons) were set up as a tem-
porary measure to meet the
increased need for detention
space during the implementa-
tion of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s zero-tolerance policy,”
said Roman, the ICE spokes-
woman. “Detainees that were
held there would either have
been removed, released from
custody or transferred to another
facility.”
ICE’s agreements to use fed-
eral prisons are valid until June
2019, meaning the agency could
put detainees back in federal
prisons.
But Corene Kendrick, a staff
attorney at the nonprofit Prison
Law Office in Berkeley, doesn’t
think that will happen, at least
not in Southern California. She
worked with the ACLU to file a
lawsuit that would keep detain-
ees out of the federal prison in
Victorville.
“The removal of the immi-
gration detainees shows that
there are limits to the Trump
administration’s zero tolerance
policy towards asylum seek-
ers and immigrants,” said Ken-
drick. “By just putting people
in a medium security prison,
which is designed for convicted
prisoners, the Department of
Homeland Security and BOP
were violating the constitu-
tional rights of the immigrants
and asylum seekers.”
Immigration detainees are
held in civil detention, which
under the law is supposed to be
a higher standard than criminal
detention.
But that’s not always the
case.
Jorge Baron, executive
director of the Northwest
Immigrant Rights Project, said
some asylum seekers being
held in the federal prison near
Seattle told him the treatment
in the federal prison was bet-
ter than the civil detentions’
facilities where they had been
housed in the past.
“This is not to say I saw it
as a positive that they were in
this prison, but just that how
bad our immigration detention
system is that folks who end
up in a federal prison feel like
that’s a more human treatment,
which gives me serious pause,”
he said.
The fact that, for now, ICE
has dramatically reduced its
used of federal prisons does
little to ease Baron, who said
ICE is continuing its efforts to
detain people.
“Now they’re ramping up
more facilities down on the
southern border,” he said. “So
they may not be using the fed-
eral prisons, but they’re still
detaining an incredibly high
number of people throughout
the country.”
Gates gives $1 million to carbon control measure
Associated Press
SEATTLE — Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates has
given $1 million to a Novem-
ber ballot measure in Wash-
ington state that would charge
a fee on carbon emissions
from fossil fuels.
Gates wrote in a blog post
recently that he would con-
tribute to the Yes on 1631
campaign. Updated finance
records show he donated $1
million. Previously the Pub-
lic Disclosure Commission
records had shown that Bill
Gates had given $500,000
and his wife Melinda Gates
had donated $500,000 in sup-
port of the initiative.
The measure has raised a
total of $11 million.
I-1631 would charge large
polluters an escalating fee on
fossil-fuel emissions start-
ing at $15 per metric ton. It
would be the first direct car-
bon fee of its kind in the U.S.
Opponents, including top
oil companies, have raised
nearly $22 million to defeat
it. They say it would hike gas
and electricity prices.
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