Clergy protest as Miami Correctional Facility ICE detentions set to begin

BUNKER HILL, Ind. (WISH) — Clergy and congregants on Monday said their faith gives them a duty to protest the use of an Indiana prison in Miami County for immigration detainees.

Several dozen people gathered outside the Miami Correctional Facility to demand officials reconsider their decision to allow U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use it as a detention facility for people suspected of being in the country illegally. Contract details made public at a State Budget Committee hearing earlier this month revealed the extent of the state’s cooperation with ICE. Up to 1,000 men will be held in a currently-unused part of the prison, with each detainee held for a minimum of 72 hours. The federal government will reimburse the state up to $300 per detainee per day and the Department of Correction will offer starting pay of $28 an hour for corrections officers at the facility, up from the current $24 an hour.

Darren Cushman Wood, senior pastor of North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, told News 8 this amounts to the state profiting off the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement drive. “This is about money, about greed, and the state of Indiana is making a lot of money off of the exploitation of immigrants. The money that is going to flow through the DOC (Indiana Department of Correction) by way of (U.S.) Homeland Security is astronomical.”

Protesters marched up and down U.S. 31 in front of the prison before holding a prayer vigil. Tracy Smith Malone, bishop of the Indiana Episcopal Area of the United Methodist Church, called the decision to hold ICE detainees at the Miami Correctional Facility “an act of inhumanity and injustice.”

“To detain immigrants to such a place is not justice. It is a violation of human dignity,” she said. “We are talking about men and women and children, God’s beloved, refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants who are our neighbors and our friends and our siblings in a human family, who have fled violence, who have come fleeing poverty.”

Rabbi Aaron Spiegel of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance said immigrants are being used as a scapegoat for the nation’s problems in a manner similar to that in which Jews were scapegoated in Germany in the 1930s.

“The idea that all of the problems of American society can be lumped onto immigrants is not only false, but a continuation of the demonization of the other,” he said. “It is as old as history.”

The first detainees could arrive at the Miami Correctional Facility as soon as Wednesday. This summer, the Department of Defense, now known by the Trump administration as the Department of War, also earmarked Camp Atterbury as a potential site for a temporary detention facility but there have not yet been any moves toward setting up such a facility.

Organizers said they tentatively plan to hold another protest on the last Monday in October.

Neither the Braun administration nor the Indiana Department of Correction responded to News 8’s requests for comment on the protest.

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