Update, Oct. 11, 2 p.m.:
Friday afternoon, Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins retracted his statements claiming the state-run women’s prison at Framingham is closing. He said parts of the prison are closing temporarily for renovations, creating a need for women inmates to be held elsewhere. But a spokesman for the State Department of Correction (DOC) also disputed that statement. Jason Dobson from the DOC said there is no renovation project happening at MCI-Framingham that would reduce prison beds.
State prison officials are disputing statements from Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins that the state plans to close down its women’s prison in Framingham.
Tompkins said his decision this week to stop housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at his Boston jail is based on a need to provide more beds for hundreds of female inmates who would be displaced by the closure of MCI-Framingham.
“When we became aware of the fact that they were going to close, I reached out to Tom Turco, the secretary of public safety,” Tompkins told WGBH. “We do some fantastic gender-specific programming and we are more than willing to take all the little ladies in.”
Cara Savelli, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Correction, said late Thursday there is no such plan to close MCI-Framingham, which currently holds about 450 inmates.
Roughly 200 of the women held there are awaiting trial, many them sent from county sheriffs’ departments — such as Essex, Norfolk and Plymouth counties — whose jails don’t have female units.
Those three counties confirmed they now plan to send female inmates to Suffolk County’s jail, instead of the state-run prison in Framingham. Sheriffs’ departments from Essex, Norfolk and Plymouth counties said Thursday they didn’t know of any plans to close Framingham, but they opted for Suffolk because it’s closer to their headquarters, easier to reach by public transportation and is more aligned with their treatment programs for inmates.
Tompkins said ending his department’s contract with ICE has nothing to do with political controversy over immigrant rights. The decision comes three months after activists protested outside the Suffolk County jail demanding that Tompkins end immigrant detention there. Tompkins told WGBH that Suffolk has transferred all but two ICE detainees out of the prison, and the ICE wing is mostly shut down -- though due to sunset provisions in the contract, it is possible some ICE detainees could continue to move through the facility until mid-December.
Despite the protests, the state’s biggest immigrant advocacy group said Thursday that Suffolk’s break with ICE is bad news not just for advocates but also for families of hundreds of immigrants who have been held there.
“Until we stop detaining people, it’s not going to help to close this facility,” said Amy Grunder at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). “We have no idea where people are going to be transferred. All their support systems are here. This creates a great hardship for families and for attorneys if they have them.”
ICE officials would not say where they will relocate immigrant detainees when they leave Suffolk sometime before mid-December.
Five other jails in New England currently hold immigrants for ICE, and their numbers have risen sharply over the last three years since the Trump administration ratcheted up immigration enforcement, widening arrests to include undocumented immigrants without criminal records.
In Massachusetts, county-run jails in Bristol, Franklin, Plymouth and Suffolk are now holding 759 immigrants, a 48 percent increase since the summer of 2017. The state receives nearly all the revenue from ICE for those detentions: $32.2 million in fiscal year 2018.
Jails in Dover, New Hampshire, and Central Falls, Rhode Island, are now holding just under 200 immigrants for ICE.
Brianna McKinley, an intern at WGBH's New England Center for Investigative Reporting, contributed to this report.
