She had said she cares about stopping the flow of fentanyl and other drugs over Arizona’s southern border with Mexico. She wants resources to battle the cartels. However, she has also said, she does not support tearing apart families by arresting otherwise law-abiding residents with less than permanent legal status.
"The governor has made clear she will use state resources to stop crime and secure the border and believes President Trump should follow through on his promise to focus on deporting violent criminals," a Hobbs spokesperson told Phoenix New Times earlier this week. "She will not use state resources to indiscriminately round people up, go after Dreamers, or attack people who have lived in their community for years, pay taxes, and follow the rules."
The federal government is indeed rounding people up, and it needs places to hold them. The greater the detention capacity, the more Immigration and Customs Enforcement can comb the country for otherwise innocent immigrants to fulfill Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
If Hobbs is against that, then why did her administration just sell a dormant state prison to a private corporation that may use it to house immigrants?
On July 23, Hobbs’ Department of Administration officially sold the defunct Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility in Pima County for $15 million to Management and Training Corporation, the same company that ran the building from the 1990s until its closure in 2023. The facility can house 500 people.
MTC currently operates multiple detention and correctional centers in the U.S. and abroad, in addition to five ICE facilities. The company has not said what it plans to do with the Marana prison. But with ICE desperate for detention capacity — and with $45 billion in new federal funding to find or build it — using the Marana prison to house ICE detainees appears plausible. After all, the state of Arizona has no need for more prison beds, which is why the Marana facility sat unused in the first place.
That possibility concerns immigrant rights activists who are wary of Trump’s ballooning deportation regime.
“I’m absolutely concerned about the very likely scenario that this facility will become an ICE detention center,” said Noah Schramm, an immigration and border policy strategist at ACLU Arizona. “Congress has appropriated a large amount of money to expand the capacity of detention facilities in a way that clearly dovetails with this administration’s goals. This can’t be looked at in a vacuum.”
The sale has been in the works at least since April, according to 13 News in Tucson. MTC previously owned the facility before selling it to the state in 2013 for $150,000. Hobbs shut down the prison in 2023 because the state didn’t need the additional detention space. At the time, Hobbs touted $15 million in savings to the state by ending its contract with MTC to run the facility, calling the decision to close the prison a “good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
The small city of Marana suffered without it, however. Local jobs were lost, and the town stopped benefiting from the increased state-shared revenue that came from the prisoners being counted as residents and being hired to do work (some of them at rates below the state’s minimum wage). In January, Republican state Sen. John Kavanaugh floated a bill to rent the facility to ICE for $1 a year.
The bill was shut down, partly thanks to the work of advocacy groups such as the ACLU.
“We were active in opposing a lot of legislation related to immigration this session, this bill being one of them,” said Schramm. “I testified against this bill in committee. Our main argument was that this is part of an agenda, and not a good use of this facility.”
A smart move?
As far as Hobbs’ administration is concerned, the more important factor seems to be that it wasn't a good price for the facility. A Hobbs spokesperson confirmed that she had a say in the decision to sell, and Hobbs applauded the move in a statement sent to New Times via press secretary Liliana Soto.“The Marana prison was going unused,” it read. “The state made a smart move, netting taxpayers $15 million that can be used to expand access to affordable child care, invest in public education and fight Veterans homelessness, rather than allowing it to sit vacant and cost taxpayers money. As for the facility’s future use, that’s up to the new owner, not the state.”
Of course, when weighing whether to sell, it wouldn’t have been hard to guess what that future use would be. When the Capitol Media Services interviewed Marana town manager Terry Rozema about the sale, he said MTC officials told him that it may use the prison as an ICE facility. A MTC spokesperson did not confirm that to New Times.
Phoenix New Times received a separate statement from Rozema, who said the town was not involved in any discussions about the sale. However, he wrote, Marana has “always been in favor of a facility use that would generate local employment and create opportunities for collaboration on essential public services — such as road and street cleaning — that could be performed by inmates.”
Kavanaugh told Capitol Media Services that it would be “good news” if the prison were used for immigration detention. “I love the idea that we’d have expedited removal in Phoenix,” Kavanagh said. “It’ll be removing illegal aliens quicker and it will possibly scare some of them out of the state.”
If the facility does end up being used as an ICE detention center, Schramm says the ACLU will continue to speak up about the human rights violations they see taking place in such facilities. Other ICE facilities in Arizona — particularly Eloy Detention Center, which is run by private prison group CoreCivic — have distressing human rights records.
“From our experience with detention centers in Arizona and what we’ve heard and been saying for decades, there are real concerns about the conditions of such facilities and access to basic rights and medical care,” Schramm told New Times. “To us, that concern is only made more dire by the fact that the federal government is attempting to increase the number of facilities and deport people very quickly and without demonstrating any regard for humane treatment of people in deportation proceedings. It’s important that we now be watchful of what takes place in the background.”
Schramm said he recognizes the economic problems that Hobbs claims the $15 million sale price will help address. But he wonders what else the move will cost Arizona residents — particularly those who wind up in ICE’s dragnet.
“This reflects a tendency amongst Democrats — to say nothing of Republicans — about a willingness to abandon basic foundational principles of our country when it comes to the treatment of immigrants,” he said. “We’re troubled by the way this is likely to position Arizona as a detention state for a larger national agenda.”
