Santa Barbara County supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to monitor for any proposed ICE detention centers, and discussed how to block them from being created in unincorporated areas.
The county’s land use codes already implicitly ban private detention centers, but Planning and Development Director Lisa Plowman said the board could also pass a moratorium blocking the project if one is proposed.
“This is just one additional measure that gives the county additional time, potentially up to two years, to analyze what the potential impacts would be,” Plowman said.
A moratorium would require that the county show the proposal is an immediate threat to public health and safety.
Currently, there are no immigration detention centers in Santa Barbara County.
Supervisor Laura Capps, however, expressed concern at Tuesday’s meeting that the county could be surprised by an application from a private entity.
"It's happening across the country,” Capps said. “They're literally springing up on communities, and it really defies local control.”
Groups like Human Rights Watch have noted a sharp increase in inmate deaths in immigration detention centers during President Trump's second term.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called conditions “disturbing, unsafe, and unsanitary” after his office inspected centers in the state.
Plowman said her office would monitor for suspicious applications that “looked and quacked like a duck.”
“It's got a very specific design, a detention facility,” Plowman told Capps. “It looks more like a jail than it does a residential project.”
The Planning and Development Department will now report applications for potential private detention centers in unincorporated areas to the Board of Supervisors.
Federally-owned or leased properties would not be affected by a potential moratorium, since Santa Barbara County’s regulations don’t apply to them.
All eight of California's ICE detention centers are currently privately-run, but that could change soon.
Private prison operator CoreCivic announced on Monday that it closed a deal to sell two facilities to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to Cal Matters.
