Iced in Victorville

Pretty chilling article over at the San Diego Union Tribune today, ICE is sending 1,000 immigrant detainees to Victorville prison. Please read it carefully, digest it, consider it and share it.

The first bus of about 250 detainees is scheduled to arrive in Victorville on Friday morning around 8 a.m. from Texas, according to an official from the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents federal prison workers.
Eric Young, AFGE Council of Prison Locals national president called the situation “a nightmare.”
He worried about understaffing at the facility and emphasized that the situation could be dangerous both for prison employees and ICE detainees.
Nine housing units at the prison were previously closed, Young said, because the prison didn’t have enough people to staff them.
“They’re opening them all back up with no new staff,” Young said. “It raises red flags for us.”
Even teachers and other staff who don’t normally work as correctional officers will get pulled in to help supervise the influx of prisoners through a process called “augmented staff.” That means they won’t be able to provide normal programming services to help inmates with rehabilitation, Young said.
Staff at the prison received a couple of days notice that inmates would be moving to another building to make way for ICE detainees. Young worried that medium-security inmates might still have a way to “prey upon” ICE detainees, something that he says they see happen to nonviolent offenders who end up in the prison population.
“They’re going to be in a prison environment, and that’s unprecedented,” Young said. “It’s going to be a very different experience for them."