DUBLIN — Earlier this year, the Trump administration probed potentially reopening Dublin’s former women’s prison as a detention center for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This week, dozens of local residents turned out to say they don’t want it.
The Bureau of Prisons shut down FCI Dublin, a former minimum-security women’s facility, in 2024 after news broke of the repeated sexual abuse of inmates, deteriorating and uninhabitable infrastructure, and cover-up and retaliation from the former prison’s guards and staff. Felony charges were levied against the facility’s warden, chaplain and several guards, who were suspected of running a “rape club,” resulting in nine convictions.
Before Dublin city councilmembers unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday opposing the reopening of the federal prison for use by ICE, they heard from a long line of community members expressing their adamant opposition to any plan from the government that would reopen the facility for use in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
“Families have been terrorized to the point where people are afraid to leave their homes. Local businesses have suffered significant economic harm as a result,” Liz Schmitt, a Dublin resident since 1979, told the council. “By voting for this resolution you have an opportunity to place Dublin at the forefront of cities in our region that are standing up for the constitutional rights of their residents. You are sending a clear message that our community will not be complicit in brutal and inhumane treatment, and that we expect our government to uphold dignity, justice and the rule of law for all people.”
Stacy Suh, program director for the Detention Watch Network, said there is a dark irony in an ICE detention center being proposed for the site.
“FCI Dublin was shut down because of the powerful survivor-led advocacy by incarcerated women who were subjected to systemic sexual abuse, as well as crumbling infrastructure like mold and asbestos. Immigrant women were targeted precisely because they were facing deportation,” she said.
She said residents already live in fear of immigration crackdowns.
“Many Dublin residents have already testified to the chilling effect of mass detention and deportation. These fears will only worsen if an ICE detention facility opens here,” Suh said. “While this prison is federally owned, the impact of reopening FCI Dublin will hurt Dublin families, many of whom are in mixed-status households.”
Mike Grant, the lone Dublin resident who welcomed an ICE detention facility at the meeting, faced disdain from the many in the audience, some of whom held a thumbs down behind him as he spoke.
Grant, who owns a business called Guns Unlimited Firearms Training, was the only Dublin resident who showed support for increased immigration enforcement. He said he personally invited federal agents to come into Dublin to “get these illegals out of here, and the Bay Area, period.”
The council bickered back and forth on the wording of the resolution, with council members Michael McCorriston and John Morada requesting the council strike an amendment that would have stated the city’s intentions of welcoming and protecting residents “regardless of their immigration status.”
Vice Mayor Jean Josey, who first proposed the resolution after a Nov. 18 meeting filled with residents who spoke out against ICE opening a detention center at the prison, and Councilman Kashef Qaadri both fought to keep the wording, but eventually abandoned it.
“I feel like we’re dancing around the subject,” Qaadri said, who also noted that his parents are immigrants. “We’re making a statement and the statement is directed at immigrants and immigrants that may not have full status.”
The resolution does not affect federal jurisdiction on the property, nor does it allow the city to directly affect any change to the future of the facility.
But McCorriston said the vote was important for Dublin.
“If we don’t question the process, if we don’t think about the direction and just blindly accept things, we’re doomed and our democracy is doomed as well,” he said