JUST Talk

Commentaries on Local Justice by Bill Martin

Medical Horrors in the Broome County Jail

May 29, 2026 / / 0 Comments

What is happening? What is to be done?

The ongoing medical disaster in the Broome County Jail should surprise no one.  Family and friends of the incarcerated tell us of plaintive cries for help, of hundreds being locked into cells with diarrhea and vomiting, without showers, and with intensely painful bone and body pains–and being offered small cups of Gatorade and small doses of Pepto-Bismol as treatment. It’s a horror story accompanied by all the signs of a coverup.

At first people on the outside were told by the press releases of the Sheriff and Health Department this was due to a norovirus.  Then it was food poisoning, salmonella.  Or was it poison, as flyers posted in jail pods we are told suggested? Or was it due to meat accidentally sprayed with insecticide and still used as some tell us—without staff becoming ill since their daily food is provided separately even if charged to the food costs of the incarcerated?

Left in the hand of those responsible we may never know, we may never be able to separate fact from rumors that circulate behind a wall of official secrecy. As reported at length in this blog, e.g. here,  the local Health Department for years has not conducted legally required inspections of the health operations of the facility.  The official oversight body, the State Commission of Correction–which currently cannot even meet due to a lack of a quorum of commissioners–has failed to investigate continuous and literally deadly conditions in the Jail.  Broome County provides no oversight and refuses to reveal the costs of lost wrongful abuse and death lawsuits settled out of court.  Grievances and allegations over medical abuse, persons admitted to the jail without medical clearances, and rape go unacknowledged, unaddressed, and continue to flow out to family and friends.

What is to be done?  Here are four beginning steps. You can be certain others, particularly those with medical and incarceration experience, will have other recommendations.

One, an independent commission with open public hearings should be appointed to investigate this and longstanding cases of medical malfeasance. For reasons already noted, it can’t be under the direction of those currently responsible and involved for managing the jail and health conditions there.

Two, the county needs to immediately terminate the private, out of state medical provider and contract with local medical services and physicians responsible to local authorities and oversight.

Three, food purchasing and preparation needs to be removed from an out of sight, out of state, for profit corporation, and be returned to a locally, county-run food facility employing local workers.

Four, the county needs to begin the process of separating the jail from law enforcement by placing the jail under an independent authority as is done in other counties. It is not reasonable to expect the sheriff to run a large law enforcement agency and a very large jail. The county should correspondingly move to construct and enact policies to reverse recent decisions that have made the jail into a regional health care center. Medical services from substance use treatment to the care of the disabled should be in the hands of local medical care givers and providers–and not hidden behind high and secretive walls.

July 2024 County response to Freedom of Information Law request for Health Department legally-required health condition inspections of the jail?

“I was able to connect with our Health Department regarding your below request. The only record they would maintain are kitchen inspections.”

Last Broome County Health Department inspection report on County Jail kitchen only? August 27, 2025: zero violations

 

 

 

Broome County: Fleecing Families, Feeding Sheriff

May 22, 2026 / / 1 Comment

“It just seems so heartless”

This month Broome County moved to radically raise what people pay to be incarcerated in the county jail. Families already spend mightily to help loved ones survive, paying for food, hygiene, haircuts, and irregular fees. Now they face accelerated, monopoly rates to stay in touch by phone, text, or video.

It was not supposed to happen. For over a decade friends and families of the millions incarcerated in our jails and prisons lobbied to reduce the exorbitant costs of staying in touch. Decades of research show that when families stay together, children do better, jails and prisons are safer for everyone, and fewer persons return to prison. And as internet calling replaced landlines, the cost of local and long-distance calls fell amazingly for all of us.

The result? In New York State prisons phone calls are now free, making it possible for incarcerated people to stay in contact with their children, wives, husbands, grandparents and loved ones. In New York City jails phone calls have been free since 2019. But not in Broome County, where the Sheriff just announced stunning increases in phone, video, and tablet rates. Some were increased by over 100%, all generating 44% kickback profits.

Why?

Sheriff Akshar had a ready explanation faithfully relayed by local media, it’s a federal regulation he says: “New rate changes for phone calls ($0.09 to $0.13) and video conferencing (0.14 to $0.17) are due to recent nationwide standards changes set by the FCC. Our tablet vendor, Viapath Technologies, made changes in their pricing in accordance with those new standards.” If only that were true. Like so much in these Orwellian days, its fake news.

No government act, law or FCC ruling required raising rates. Rates rose due to a local decision made by the Sheriff to sign a new contract with the prison phone monopoly, GTL/Viapath. And it is the families of incarcerated in the jail, many held for ICE and the Federal government, that will pay. Five years ago the Sheriff’s take was estimated to be over $500,000/year, it must surely be more now, and rising.

How did this happen? After 20 years of work by families,  in 2022 a bipartisan Congressional vote approved the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act, named after a grandmother who struggled to afford phone calls to her grandson. The Act mandated significant reductions in phone call costs in prisons and jails. In 2024 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new regulations as required by the Act to reduce rates and end kickbacks to jailers, all while funding equipment and call monitoring costs.

But private prison telephone companies, prison wardens, Republican state attorneys, and county sheriffs struck back. And with Trump came two new commissioners at the FCC who moved to defy Congress.  Last October they overturned rates caps, increasing them by as much as 83%. Sheriff Akshar cast this as a mandatory federal action. But this was fiction. The FCC only set legal maximum rates, any jail could set rates anywhere below.  And thus calls remain free from New York State prisons and New York City jails. But not in Broome County.

It gets worse given new technology. Landline phone calls have been fully replaced by the use of tablets with bounded, monitored, and recorded access for phone and video calls, music,  movies and so on—all to be purchased by per minute rates. Tablets became a massive new source of profit for prison phone companies and sheriffs.

I asked men inside what they feared most from rising prices for commissary, punishment block fees, or phone, video, or tablet use.  It wasn’t commissary where prices have just been raised, or phone calls, or video calls now at 21 cents per minute.  It was the new tablet rates which for limited materials went from 3 to 7 cents per minute and from 5 to 7 cents per minute for other uses. Limited 2000-character-only texts to persons inside also doubled in price from 25 to 50 cents. And then there are the fees on top of these rates: if you deposit $15 in your own account, to send 30 texts to a friend for example,  you will pay another $5.44 for the transaction, raising the rate to 68 cents per text:

It’s a complicated structure designed to confuse, but this much is clear: GTL/Viapath gets 60% of sales and the Sheriff’s commission is set at 44%.

The contract brokered by the Sheriff was approved unanimously by the Public Safety Committee of the Broome County Legislature on May 11, 2026, including votes by Democrat legislators Kim Myers and Susan Ryan. On May 21, 2026 the County Legislature met but held over the resolution for another meeting. No comments by the public on this and other financially contentious resolutions were allowed. One thing we know for certain: the Sheriff is already charging people the new rates, lack of county contract approval or not.

 

What will happen? As one family member reported to WBNG, “It just seems so heartless.”  She already spends $500 or more a month to stay in contact with her son and fears for his and others’ mental health if communication is cut off. People will go without food to fund phone calls, food and soap for incarcerated family. Children at home and ICE teenagers in the jail will become more anxious and depressed. The jail will become more dangerous for everyone inside. But be assured, the Sheriff’s ‘discretionary’ funds will grow.

And this is just the beginning: people in the jail report that commissary prices are going up this past month too, already a source of illegal profits. Here state law dictates profits must be reasonable, but they are not. And profits skimmed by the Sheriff are legally required to be spent on items for  the rehabilitation of incarcerated persons. Sheriff Akshar tells WBNG that’s true for phone and tablet profits too:  “as always, any revenue received from those tablet messages and internet use goes directly to improvements to programming, services and other direct benefits to the incarcerated population.”

How would we know? There are no public audits or accounting in any detail. The state oversight body, the State Commission of Correction, doesn’t provide any insight (although it does occasionally admonish the Sheriff for not following basic regulations, including hygienic ones like weekly laundry linen services–which he simply ignores for years).  By state law the county does have to audit the commissary fund (but not other jail funds). You can’t find any figures in the county audit of commissary accounts.  The latest 2024 county audit simply, and most generously, and only notes “inconsistent authorization and documentation of commissary disbursements” and the balance in the fund was over $500,000 (2025 County Audit here). The 2024 audit recorded a balance of $496,000 and “noted that the Broome County Sheriff’s Office does not have any written policies and procedures regarding the Commissary fund” and that “the contract with Trinity Services Group, Inc. to provide food, health, and personal hygiene items for sale to inmates had previously expired” so the jail was operating commissary without any legal, contractual basis to do so.

What one can find via past Freedom of Information Requests is profits being spent on basic hygiene supplies, haircuts, wheelbarrows, oil, lexis-nexus costs, TVs, wages, party favors, copier costs, newspaper subscriptions, food, lawn tractors and trailers, and an armored personnel carrier—all this for rehabilitation?

The Rehabilitation Machine: the Broome County Bearcat

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Further reading/references

 

Big Brother SUNY-Binghamton

April 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Why is SUNY-B Watching You? On campus, in town, and across the country?

AI generated

After the 450 people held in the county jail, who are the most surveilled group in Binghamton? It’s surely SUNY-Binghamton University students. As a recent article in the student newspaper Pipedream recounted, the campus administration has deployed over 1600 cameras and 4,800 access/card readers tracking 18,000 students, 1250 faculty and 2,000 support staff. Cameras and sensors once isolated from each other now function as a single interlinked system, driven by AI software from the Montreal-based firm Genetec.

It’s a vast network encompassing facility access, biometric data, automatic license plate readers, video/camera streams, and communications. Genetec reports the system is overseen by nine staff located in two security centers. Rumors abound about the control room: is it really the “Bat room” in the basement of the library tower?

Genetec proudly advertises its Binghamton system as an integrated, comprehensive model for other campuses.

But ask SUNY-Binghamton administrators or SUNY system officials in Albany about surveillance and the answer is: we have nothing, we know nothing, about Genetec or such things.

Identifying and Targeting Protest by AI

Campus and Genetec officials can be quite blunt about a primary aim of the network: to proactively detect rallies, protest, and demonstrations. In 2024 it took state troopers, County Deputies, and the campus police force to expel pro-Palestinian protestors from the lawn across from the administration building. Today Genetec promises to detect gatherings before groups coalesce. As Dave Martin, Assistant Director of Security Infrastructure and Support stated in a recent Genetec press release, “if a group hits a certain size, the video analytics tools preemptively alert us.” SUNY-Binghamton is only one of many campuses, including nearby Cornell, that deploys Genetec to these ends.

Indeed AI-controlled sensors now aim to wash away historic waves of protest by students and faculty, wiping out a long tradition. No more antiwar marches from campus to downtown Binghamton along the Vestal Parkway, blessed by the President no less, as happened in May 1970.

No more occupations of the administration building in protest of SUNY’s investments in South African apartheid as in 1985.

No more gatherings in open spaces as in spring 2017 when students occupied the public lobby of the administration building, demanding less policing, less surveillance, and more mental health counseling. This was a turning point:  President Stenger dictated no meeting or discussions with students could take place, closed all offices in the building and dispatched campus police to patrol its corridors until students left the lobby at the end of the semester.

Blue Lights Occupation May 2017 Photo: William Martin

A harder stance was taken a year when later a Binghamton University Police Department (BUPD) officer was dispatched to threaten a student with arrest for handing out leaflets against racism in the Binghamton Downtown Center.

And when a protest against genocide in Gaza took place downtown in 2024?

The Center’s doors were protected by a phalanx of BUPD officers and patrol cars as protestors gathered across the street.

Photo: William Martin

Creating the surveillance university

The surveillance campus has been incrementally built over several decades. By the closing decade of the 20th century security cameras, blue light alert stations, and, after a January 29, 1999, decision by the University President, armed police were already ubiquitous. Cameras proliferated everywhere, outside dorms, at food stations, and on OCC buses. Few believed cameras were ever monitored by security, there were just too many of them.

Bingham Hall, OCC Bus, Jazzman’s Cafe Photos: William Martin

A new technological era emerged with biometric sensing and data tracking.  One of the first signs was the appearance of a single fingerprint reader on the turnstile entering the East Gym in 2009. Register your fingerprint with security and you would not need an ID card to enter.

Photo: William Martin

Activists and faculty were quietly alarmed, suspecting this would soon be a new form of mandatory surveillance.  A second mandatory fingerprint reader was soon placed at the gate to Fitspace, the weight and exercise machinery room.

Photo: William Martin

Some faculty stopped using Fitspace.  And then the fingerprint sensor was replaced by a more cumbersome biometric access pad that remains today and entails a scan of all five fingerprints and the input of one’s eight-digit ID number.

Photo: William Martin

Then came license plate readers, tracking everyone going and coming at all  entrances to the campus and across all parking lots.

Campus Entrances Photos: William Martin

Campus Entrances Photos: William Martin

New Cameras from Axis Communications now capture details in color and across the spectrum, something that never could have been done with old analog cameras. “It’s amazing how good they are,” says BUPD Deputy Chief Reilly in an Axis promotion for the system. Cameras mounted on the highest building on the main Vestal campus, the Library Tower, can reach and spot persons and vehicles miles away.

Photos: William Martin

Walk into the UHS clinics across from the campus on the Vestal Parkway and you can see the tower and it can see you.

Sensors also dot the new 15-acre Johnson City Pharmacy School and Nursing School complex, with cameras and license plate readers aimed at heavily travelled public streets and nearby housing complexes.

Photos: William Martin

With the opening of a University Downtown Center in Binghamton came armed guards: enter and you confront a desk staffed by BUPD officers. That’s frightening for some people: one formerly incarcerated person came face to face with a BUPD policeman who had been her correctional officer in a state prison (which for many made the Downtown Center off limits for future justice-related meetings). As of July 9, 2025, members of the public with scheduled meetings can enter only after their host approves them on arrival.

Photo: William Martin

Whose Data?

Privacy and free speech activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the ACLU ask: who gets the data, where is it stored, for how long, and with whom is it shared? Specific companies have been targeted by campus and community activists, as in the DeFlock campaign which recently succeeded in having cameras actually removed in Ithaca and the Tompkins County Legislature recently voted to terminate their Flock contract.  But SUNY-Binghamton? The answer is we don’t know the answer to any of these questions and the Binghamton and SUNY-Central administrations have long resisted any effort to find out.

When I returned to Binghamton as a faculty member in 1999 I inquired if, as I had discovered at the University of Illinois, the University could read all binghamton.edu emails without a warrant given they owned the email domain. I was told no warrants were ever needed, access was open for campus officials. This became of apparent use when the administration investigated athletes of color and Athletic Department officials during the 2009 basketball scandal that led to  President DeFleur’s resignation. When biometric measures were more openly introduced at the East Gym in 2009, I asked where the data was kept, distributed, and who managed it?  The request was denied for “security reasons.”

Fifteen years and a lifetime of IT development later, even the barest pretense of transparency has disappeared. New University policies following pro-Palestinian encampment act to ensure unfettered collection and distribution of data. As on many campuses, protestors during the Gaza encampment suspected the university could track their digital activity and location through the campus’ eduroam Wi-Fi network. University privacy policies now bluntly declare that “Binghamton University may preserve, access, monitor, or disclose information containing all classes of data.” And if the FBI or New York State or campus official wants information?  “An attorney in the office of University Counsel may request data custodians conduct targeted searches of electronic files to find material relevant to the disclosure request.”  There is no requirement that people be notified if their files are read and distributed to local, state, or federal officials. Has campus data and video been shared with just local law enforcement? They don’t say, we aren’t to know.

We do know that Flock license plate readers and Axis cameras are widely used across the campus, while Genetec coordinates both hardware and software. Revelations of Flock and other companies sharing data with law enforcement and Homeland Security/ICE are widely reported. The Deflock campaign has published an incomplete map of Flock cameras in the Binghamton area, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued an incomplete data list from public sources of cameras and sensors. Local media report the University’s Flock cameras track cars on off-campus streets, as is indeed apparent if you visit the borders of the Johnson City and downtown Binghamton campuses; on this point campus officials refuse to answer media inquiries. Ithaca students have rallied against Flock as have Binghamton students who argue the cameras are particularly dangerous for international students given recent local ICE arrests and the large number of ICE detainees, including Long Island teenagers, held in the Broome County jail.

Update: SUNY-Binghamton rally against Flock as reported in the campus newspaper, Pipedream (May 4, 2026): Protesters rally against Flock Safety on campus.  And students battle to bring the Student Association on board: SA Congress votes against Flock Safety resolution

State law says we should know more. SUNY is a state agency, subject to the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) which requires responses within 5 days to requests for records on financing, staffing, and contracts.  What might one ask for? Axis and Genetec tell us of reach of the cameras and sensors, but not their cost, contracts, staffing, and memorandums on the storing and sharing of information. FOIL requests to local municipalities and the County Sheriff have generated sample copies of funding applications and state contracts (see here).

Binghamton University effectively denies all such requests. A FOIL request from January 8, 2026 requesting copies of contracts with Axis, Vigilant, Flock, and Genetec generated a February 12, 2026 response containing a minor three-year old contract for Flock, a denial of any Vigilant contract, and inoperable links to the essential Genetec contracts managed by SUNY system offices in Albany.  Nothing on Genetec or Axis could be found.

A follow-up FOIL for more specific contracts and staffing listed in Genetec postings generated a curt claim that nothing more existed.

An appeal sent to the Office of General Counsel for SUNY in Albany–the reported holder of Genetec and other surveillance contracts–was rejected as well.  No contracts or staff or funding seem to exist for, in the words of Genetec’s published Binghamton Case Study, the “Two Campus Security Centers” staffed with “a 9-person team”.  Apparently, they don’t exist.

[Full text for these FOILs is located here.]

Beyond Binghamton:  Intelligence Centers

SUNY-Binghamton’s surveillance system isn’t exceptional: Binghamton is but one node in a national policing and surveillance network. The initial coordinating work locally is done behind closed doors, in an intelligence collection center, euphemistically labelled the “Southern Tier Crime Analysis Center” (STAC) located in the basement of the Binghamton Police Department.

STAC was created with millions of dollars from New York State and local governments. Official accounts tell us that STAC is linked to ten other Centers in New York State,  450 local, state, and national agencies, and then onward to the national Fusion Center intelligence network with direct integration to federal police and intelligence agencies including Homeland Security, the FBI, ICE, the NSA, and the CIA.

To what extent are data from SUNY-Binghamton license plate readers, optical cameras, and biometric and other sensors integrated with and automatically passed on, stored in, and distributed via STAC? Can other agencies draw upon SUNY-Binghamton data at will?  What do the agreements and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) between police agencies, the STAC, and SUNY permit? SUNY-Binghamton and the SUNY central administration in Albany won’t tell us.

From other sources we do learn the University Police Department is a full member of STAC. A 2021 press release from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services reveals that one of the Directors of STAC is from SUNY-Binghamton and a BUPD officer is assigned to STAC.  What do they do? We don’t know. The campus website on “public safety” notes that memorandums of understanding have been signed by the BUPD with STAC and all local police agencies and the State Police.  What do these say, how much data is shared, who pays whom and for what? We don’t know. A January 2026 FOIL request to SUNY-Binghamton for a copy of any memorandum of understanding with STAC was bluntly refused:  “Please be advised that your request for records is denied on the basis that if the information were to be disclosed, it would jeopardize the capacity of an agency or an entity that has shared information with an agency to guarantee the security of its information technology asset” (January 30, 2026 SUNY-Binghamton response here). A later FOIL request to the University for existing MOUs  with police agencies was bluntly “denied in its entirety”. The reason? “Their disclosure would diminish the effectiveness of future law enforcement coordination.“

A Broome County budget resolution  reveals however that a memorandum of understanding does exist with the County sharing data back and forth with all local law enforcement agencies operating through STAC, including the Binghamton University Police Department. An Axis Communications promotional case study tells us moreover that local police agencies do rely upon and do access campus cameras and video. STAC in turn  is linked to campus daily: it is the source of regular campus alerts to students of nearby police actions and crime reports in town. To be sure, this is a one-way street: no such warnings are provided to residents or youth in Vestal, Johnson City, or Binghamton.

Whose Public Safety?

The press, police departments, and campus administrations justify the vast expansion of mass surveillance and policing to ensure “public safety”. But is that their purpose? Does more policing and surveillance prevent harm and violence and assist students, particularly as the Blue Lights protestors raised in 2017, in relation to the major campus dangers of suicide, sexual violence, and racial abuse? Data from State and campus officials suggest they do not, can not. Consider crime levels and the crimes faced by students. In Broome County index (serious) crime has been falling for over 30 years.

And on the campus?  Every university police force reports crime statistics to state and federal agencies.  SUNY campuses including Binghamton regularly report unbelievably low crime levels, reflected in national data studies that conclude campus crime is “statistically insignificant” (W. D. Allen 2021, 10). No statistics on suicide, a major cause of death of students, are ever reported. And what do we make of the commonly cited statistic that “an estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years” (Obama 2014)? You won’t’ find any remotely comparable evidence in campus crime reports. Binghamton with 18,000 students regularly reports zero to less than a handful of rapes per year.

And students and faculty of color, those vastly overrepresented among those few arrested on the Binghamton campus? Faculty and student organizations writing to the President repeat survey findings that an “overwhelming percentage of the Binghamton faculty–67 percent of Black males, 60 percent of Black females and 50 percent of Asian females” had experienced racial discrimination and harassment as had “67 percent of Black males, 57 percent of Black females followed by 25 percent of Native American Females.” Yet the number of hate crimes officially on campus? Zero, year after year in SUNY-Binghamton’s annual federal crime report.

There is a seeming paradox here: despite rising surveillance and policing, the crimes most feared by students hardly ever happen officially. Yet calls and funding for more police, surveillance, and enclosure of campus spaces accelerate. Why such enclosures and surveillance if the results are so meager? One explanation is offered by analyses of “governing by fear”, instilling anxiety and fear to ensure compliance and secure administrative and state authority.    One might alternatively argue, as does Binghamton PhD. graduate Brendan McQuade in Pacifying the Homeland, that intelligence centers and surveillance mark a transition from the use of mass policing and mass incarceration to social regulation by surveillance. Seen from these perspectives, the pursuit of “campus safety” is an Orwellian construction, fed by fabricated stories designed to induce fear and the acceptance of authoritarian practices.

The geography of surveillance, crime, and punishment we see in Binghamton and other elite campuses offers an additional insight, as surveillance not simply pacifies and regulates student and faculty populations but also serves to separate elite spaces from surrounding streets, neighborhoods, and especially poorer urban neighborhoods. As the nation’s wealthier campuses like Princeton, Columbia and the University of Chicago have expanded outward in recent decades, gentrification has nestled college students into areas of heavily policed poor communities and youth. SUNY-Binghamton’s opening of new campuses and housing in downtown Binghamton and Johnson City exemplifies this process locally. This is a manufactured opposition between “town” and “gown,” produced by a generation state policy and funding. New York State has effectively created two separate streams of youth headed from New York’s urban centers to upstate towns: one group moving to upstate SUNY colleges, and another, poorer, stream destined for state prisons.

The surveillance campus arises from these fears and realities, reproducing carceral and educational inequalities in a deadly symbiosis to the disadvantage of all youth involved. We need not accept this imposed script. We do need to investigate, understand and dismantle it. Removing Flock cameras and the collection and distribution of campus and municipal data collections is a start, a bare beginning.

The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

 

Related commentaries:

 

 

Hochul’s ICE Hoax

February 5, 2026 / / 0 Comments

With much fanfare Governor Hochul announced on January 30th a proposed law to “ensure that New York law enforcement is focused on keeping New Yorkers safe – not doing the job of ICE”.  The list of supporting statements from district attorneys, police chiefs, and county sheriffs should have been a tip-off: it’s a publicity stunt with little effect on ICE operations in New York State.  Even worse, it fits a longstanding Hochul pattern of support for racialized mass policing, the rollback of popular justice reforms, and ever more surveillance by law enforcement on all state residents, documented and undocumented. Hochul and the legislative leadership refuse to endorse legislative proposal that might substantially stop ICE operations and detentions, most notably the widely supported New York for All and Dignity Not Detention bills.

Don’t Believe the Hype

What Hochul’s order does propose is to stop local governments from signing 287g cooperation agreements with ICE.  Yet 287g represents but a sliver of the large number of agreements and the vast integration of New York law enforcement agencies with ICE.  Currently 287g agreements exist in 9 of the state’s 62 counties, signed by 14 of the 528 law enforcement agencies in the state.  Of the 14, only 6 are Task Force agreements that authorize and train local officers to act as ICE agents. One is a Jail Model to house ICE detainees. Others authorize local officers to serve warrants to people in local jails.

Terminating these agreements is a good step. But this hardly impacts the widespread support local and state agencies provide to ICE through the everyday working of the mass policing and mass incarceration system built up over the last three decades under Republicans and Democrats alike. As a Sheriff of  in western NY with a 287g contract responded when asked how Hochul’s proposal would change his operations, he simply said “it wouldn’t”.

Broome County Model?

Consider my county, Broome Count, which regularly has the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of all NYS counties and has housed in the last year hundreds of detainees for ICE. In March 2025 Sheriff Frederick Akshar signed a 287g Warrant Model contract. Yet this had little to do with caging ICE detainees.  As the Sheriff tells all who will listen, his 287g agreement has not authorized or trained his officers to carry out ICE captures or even house ICE detainees—it only authorizes his officers to serve warrants to persons in the jail. Indeed the incarceration of ICE detainees is not new, but has long taken place under a 2002 contract the County signed, like many other counties, with the U.S. Mashall Service to incarcerate persons for the federal government. The current number of persons held for the federal government is spectacular. In past years there have been 5 or 6 people in the jail on federal charges on any given day. This number is now running close to 80 daily, a surge composed of ICE detainees often held for only a few days. We don’t actually know the numbers much less the names of ICE detainees, they like so much of ICE and jail operations aren’t revealed.

Will Hochul’s proposal change what happens in the jail and county? The answer lies in the shifting, slippery legal language promulgated by Homeland Security and ICE. Hochul’s proposal outlaws holding persons on civil charges, but continues to allow the incarceration of persons held on criminal charges.  Almost all commentators have assumed this prevents incarcerating the vast majority of ICE detainees. We know very few have been convicted of any serious crime, and overstaying your visa results only in a civil charge.  But what of other cases? What constitute a criminal charge?

Take the case of a local farmworker I’ll call Juan whom I visited in the Broome County Jail in response to a letter pleading for assistance. Speaking over the  plexiglass visitation room barrier, Juan quietly told us he had been  held for months with no family contact (and no staff who knew his language). He was held on criminal charges solely for crossing the border a second time to return to his ill wife and thankful employer. He ended up being convicted in a federal court on criminal charges and being sent to a federal prison, leaving his children—US citizens, if that matters—visibly distraught and materially impoverished. Others watched his passage grimly.

Or take the case of uber driver Guan Heng whose detention in the Broome County Jail  generated international media attention due to Guan’s flight from China for posting videos and locations of Chinese detention camps. Guan got picked up when ICE raided his house seeking persons on criminal charges. He had entered the US by small boat without permission and later applied for asylum.  As the American Immigration Council pointed out five years ago, “those who enter or reenter the United States without permission, however, can face criminal charges.”  What does one think ICE and local sheriffs who support ICE will do? Under Hochul’s proposal ICE can simply lay down federal criminal charges for more people like Guan and Sheriffs will legally hold them.

“Illegal Entry”/8 U.S.C. § 1325 makes it a crime to unlawfully enter the United States. It applies to people who do not enter with proper inspection at a port of entry, such as those who enter between ports of entry, avoid examination or inspection, or who make false statements while entering or attempting to enter. A first offense is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine, up to six months in prison, or both. American Immigration Council, 2021

This should have been expected. The  criminalization of migrants and undocumented residents based on stereotypes and minor misdemeanor offenses has been been a central part of the racialized mass incarceration era. Federal immigration prosecutors had long ago entrenched this process by replacing civil with criminal charges for entry and reentry offenses.  By 2016 over half of all federal prosecutions were for immigration offenses. Over forty percent of convicted federal offenders were non-citizens, with 90 percent sentenced for “unlawful entering or remaining in the United States.”

Moving forward it is hard to chart out what would happen if court hearings were held for every person with pending criminal charges for unlawful entry. Certainly sending cases through Federal courts isn’t practical at the moment. As one public defender in a federal court told me, ‘if prosecutors start taking immigration violations to court we would overwhelm and close down the system’. Given the new $ billions for ICE just appropriated by Congress its possible to envision an expanded authoritarian court system.  Easier for prosecutors and ICE would be to revoke Temporeary Protested Status and Deferred Enforced Departure status and criminalize by fiat those lawfully resident.  Faced with this prospect, as we have seen in the Broome County jail, many persons faced with interminable, isolated incarceration will resort to escape by self-deportation.

Local residents might press for an end of coopeation with ICE for financial as well as moral reasons:  it’s costly. The federal government reimburses Sheriffs $110/day per person. Yet the cost per day for a person in the Broome jail is $264 (2025 budget/average daily population). Close the jail’s ICE pod, reduce the jail’s official capacity, and you eliminate $ 3 million in county spending.  Stop the 287g contracts and nothing is changed.  But stop incarceration agreements for those charged with federal crimes? County jails would be blocked from acting as ICE detention centers. But Hochul isn’t proposing that.

Beyond 287g

287g and even housing of detainees is however but the tip of the iceberg of state and local support for ICE’s deportation drive.  For hidden beneath the surface are insidious law enforcement processes to identify, capture and incarcerate undocumented persons. These take at least three, overlapping, local law enforcement operations: custodial transfers, street level stops, and surveillance and data collaboration with Federal agencies.

Getting from Jail and Prison to ICE

Custodial transfers are the easiest to grasp. A few counties like Broome, headed by a longstanding Trump supporter, directly work with ICE to incarcerate and turn over undocumented persons. When faced with disruptive protest, the Broome County Sheriff quite openly says this is his duty.

Sheriff Frederick Akshar: “This is where I am today. If tomorrow, ICE said ‘we need your assistance’ in some effort, I would help them… I do want to be abundantly clear though, that if any one of our federal partners, regardless of what letter the agency starts with, asks me for help today, tomorrow, a week from now, the answer would be yes.”  WSKG, March 28, 2025 “Broome County Jail opts into federal immigration enforcement program”

For most counties standard procedures simply facilitate ICE identification of undocumented persons leading to deportations. It’s straightforward: arrest someone for the lowest level misdemeanor, and their fingerprints and arrest record are forwarded to other local and federal agencies, including ICE.  ICE then turns to county sheriffs to take hold of undocumented people as they are scheduled to be released. Some counties do refuse to hold people after they have served their sentences. But almost all do turn over to ICE undocumented persons at the end of their sentence.  These are very large numbers, a significant proportion of those detained and deported.  Even in Minnesota, touted as center of resistance to cooperation with ICE,  thirty percent of those detained by ICE last year were turned over by local jails and prisons. Half of national ICE arrests were custodial transfers.

Stop and Frisk and Deport

Transfers from local jails and prisons are supplemented by a second area of police work: street and car level surveillance and stops. Persons in cars are especially vulnerable given that persons in cars, unlike homes, have very little protection from unreasonable searches. Everyday traffic violations, such as speeding or broken tail lights, often trigger identification checks of the driver and then passengers, resulting in fingerprinting or database queries (NCIC) that reveal immigration status. Automated networks of license plate readers that scan all cars passing on major and now minor roads are another source. Details as isolated as bumper stickers are now able to be identified and tracked across cities and towns. Capture a car license plate registered to someone who has lost previously legal, temporary protected or asylum status, and that potentially flows automatically across law enforcement networks.

It’s a rapidly expanding system. Binghamton first introduced license plate readers in 2017 at entrances to the city and updated the system in 2023 with more advanced cameras made in Vietnam by Flock (see the deflock campaign here). Since then the state has promoted significant growth and integration of surveillance.  In 2022 Governor Hochul stood in front of 800 law enforcement leaders and announced a $20 million program for new police surveillance technology. By the time the awards were made in 2024 the amount had ballooned to $127 million and 400 police agencies got whatever they had applied for including those in the Southern Tier. The Broome County Sheriff applied and was given $834,118, the City of Binghamton Police Department $468,668, the Johnson City Police Department $136,100, Endicott Police Department $770,000, and the Vestal Police Department $211,700 (the applications and related details obtained by FOIL may be found here).

Centralizing Surveillance Policing and Deportation

New technology and the integration of surveillance networks promise to radically advance data collaboration–and nullify municipal and county efforts to constrain ICE. Scans of over a million cars a week in Westchester County, where sanctuary laws are on the books, unwittingly permitted ICE to obtain information on individual migrants and their movements. New York State’s own  License Plate Reader Model Policy—developed in association with police chiefs, sheriffs, and the state police—bluntly says “LPR data and search results may be disseminated to any law enforcement agency or official”.  This past month Broome County legislators voted unanimously to approve the Sheriffs new $644,484 license plate reader contract with Motorola.  When asked what he did with the data, the Sheriff told legislators that all information could be accessed by any law enforcement agency. The City of Binghamton Police Department remains equally explicit in section 413 on immigration in its policy manual, prohibiting any attempt to prohibit data sharing with any federal, state, or local government agency.

License plate data is but a small fracton of the arrest, stop metrics, investigative, biometric, geographic, and intelligence data police departments and sheriffs collect on individuals.  This and much more finds its coherence and distribution in New York State’s 10 regional intelligence centers, aka “crime analysis centers,” created with tens of $ millions of state funding.

Broome County’s regional intelligence center is housed on the ground floor of the Binghamton Police Department and has a board of directors including representatives of the State Police, the Broome County Sheriff, and police chiefs from the City of Binghamton and the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Massive, bipartisan increases to the ICE budget from $8 to $10 billion, and $170 billion for anti-immigrant agencies overall,  have linked these networks across state boundaries and introduced a leap forward in technology. Recent ICE contracts to tech giant Palantir seek use AI to merge facial, social media, and law enforcement data to track individuals for deportation. Contracts with other firms, including Paragon, an Israeli technology company, seek to take remote control of cellphone location, messaging data, and calls. And all promise to draw on and integrate state and local data.

Hochul and the Justice Retreat

While Governor Hochul speaks of opposition to ICE her new state budget speaks to realities:  it beefs up yet again funding for crime analysis centers and policing, while turning back a package of justice reform laws passed in the wake of a nationwide outcry over correctional officers’ brutal beating to death of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, two shackled, incarcerated men. Hochul’s rejection of measures to increase oversight of prisons and especially jails was particularly dismaying.

These actions followed a pattern however: the Governor has in recent years rolled back bail reform three times, rejected parole reforms, and weakened controls on solitary confinement. State lawmakers and reform activists who had worked long and hard to pass reform bills were outraged and publicly denounced the reversals.  Noting Hochul’s call  for the resignation of U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem following the fatal ICE shootings in Minneapolis, a new campaign has started demanding she fire her man who oversaw the killings in NYS prisons, Daniel Martuscello III, the Commissioner of the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

The Governor knows that the residents of New York State are overwhelmingly and fiercely opposed to ICE operations. Her latest publicity drive should not cover up her continual support for mass policing and incarceration that have been so central to the expanding power of ICE.

Big Brother Wegmans

January 26, 2026 / / 0 Comments
Why is Wegmans Watching  You?

Enter into Wegmans in New York City and you see a sign telling you cameras are recording your face, eyes, and voice. And the data is run into a private database, sent to unknown servers and distributed privately.

When asked, Wegmans say this is only happening in its Manhattan stores. And Wegmans isn’t the only retail chain beginning to do this. Still, we wonder: what is the facial recognition camera doing above your head at the entrance to the Johnson City store, displaying its results on the TV screen to its left?

As New York City media report, shoppers do wonder where their pictures get stored, who has access, and with whom they are shared.  Some say they won’t shop at Wegmans anymore.  Media and shoppers in Buffalo and Rochester are asking: does this happen here, upstate? And as privacy advocates point out, Wegmans policies and assurances aren’t worth more than the paper they are written on–they can be changed at the will of Wegmans.

And biometric surveillance is inherently discriminatory. We know from many studies that surveillance is particularly targeted at poor neighborhoods, women and persons of color.  Facial recognition technology is widely documented to be notoriously unreliable, as New York lawyers have warned their peers. The Johnson City Wegmans has faced protest over racial profiling of a Black female shopper confronted at the surveilled, self-checkout lane. In 2023 fifteen people arrested at  protest at Wegmans, including a former Binghamton mayor, were  banned for two years from the store.

And the police who were subsequently seen standing at the entry doors of the store have now apparently been replaced by cameras…

What might be done?  Simple,  Transparent Actions

To start, the Johnson City Board and city councils throughout the Southern Tier could pass a law that requires all public facing stores that use biometric cameras to post notices about their surveillance practices.  Indeed, it was only due to a New York City law requiring this that we came to learn of Wegman’s new policy in Manhattan. The NYC law also forbids selling collected data.  It a quite simple low-cost ordinance, the language is here. New York City even provides a sample notice to post.

Privacy activists argue we need to go further and ban the use of biometric face/voice/eye surveillance by private business and landlords. This has been proposed to the New York City Council; the bill’s text is here and could be easily modified for local use.  Ask your city councilperson: why can’t we do this here to protect our privacy, our data, our faces from private capture and sale?  A law to do this across the state has also been submitted this January to the Consumer Protection Committee of both the  State Senate and State Assembly (Senate Bill S1422,  Assembly Bill A6031).  Our state representatives could endorse and co-sponsor both. Why not?

 

 

Why is Broome County Jail So Deadly?

January 18, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Twice as Deadly as Rikers Island?

In 2025 the death rate in the Broome County Jail was over twice that of New York City’s notorious jails. Why? What can be done about it?

In New York City rising death and abuse rates drove a tidal wave of protest. The result? New York City’s jails were put under a Federal monitor while protest continued at the doors of City Hall and Rikers Island. New York State prisons—with death rates also lower than Broome County—are also under attack. The trigger here was dramatic, unexpected, and successive video footage of the brutal beating to death of two incarcerated and shackled men, Robert Brooks and Nanti Messiah. A statewide storm of protests ensued. Reforms and more oversight funding have been promised by the Governor and legislators.

No such inquiries much less oversight has emerged in Broome County or other rural and upstate counties. And these counties hold twice as many women and men as New York City.

Why so much death?

The number of deaths in prisons and jails vary considerably year by year. One might speculate that 2025 was an exceptional year in Broome County and New York City. But death rates are rising in many jails. Why? Reporters, activists, and state officials all look for explanations by turning to medical care. Has that been a factor in Broome?

It’s hard to know. No public explanation has been offered by the Sheriff, County Coroner, or the State Commission of Correction (SCOC) for the 2025 deaths of Chelsey Davis and William Warnock Jr. We may not know for years, if ever. The SCOC is required by law to issue a report on all deaths in jails and prisons, but it often takes years before the SCOC releases death reports to families and the public. And these are so heavily redacted as to render them, to be charitable, useless. Are there coverups? We don’t know

Take for example the last published report for Mitchel Lindow, who died in the Broome County jail on November 4th, 2022. The SCOC report was issued much later, in March 2024. It is almost wholly redacted as you can see here:

What can family and friends and the public learn from this? What little text is visible admits repetitive medical malfeasance on the part of the jail administration, medical provider, and County Coroner. In short brief sentences we learn that Lindow was not given a medical examination and history upon admission to the jail as required by state law. We also find out that physicians should have been informed of Lindow’s dangerous high blood pressure results—but were not. One wonders what the blacked-out paragraphs might tell us. Most damning however is the revelation the SCOC could not hide: Broome County misdiagnosed the cause of death. It was not due to a heart attack: “The attending pathologist misdiagnosed the cause and manner of death and that Lindow’s death was attributed to a fentanyl overdose.”

Wilson Hospital, from which jail physicians have been drawn, was told to revise the official cause of death in its files. The Broome County Jail physician and the private, for-profit medical contractor, PrimeCare Medical, were told to examine and report back on why medical records and assessments were so faulty. One wonders if that report has ever been produced.

Apparently no one read and acted upon the June 2023 SCOC report of the previous person to die in the jail, Brandon Loori, which bluntly stated that “there was a complete failure by the medical staff to properly assess and provide treatment for a gravely ill individual… had Loori been timely sent to the hospital for a diagnosis and treatment, his death could have been prevented.” That report was heavily redacted as well:

And where did the fentanyl that killed Mr. Lindow come from? If you can attribute Lindow’s death to a heart attack, one need not apparently pursue the matter. Doing so has proven to be inconvenient. In the previous year an officer was discovered smuggling in meth, Adderall and other substances into the jail–but was tried and convicted only for bribery. He served no time, pleading addiction due to a past sports injury and ongoing treatment. This is defendable: substance use is an illness and people need treatment and not criminalization. The all too obvious contradiction here is that neither the Sheriff nor District Attorney apply this principle to other county residents. Far from it: they have launched a new drug war which has contributed significantly to increasing the daily jail population by fifty percent over the course of 2025.

Nor are the irregularities around Loori’s and Lindow’s deaths isolated cases. The Broome County Jail, its private medical provider, and the Sheriff have lost successive lawsuits over wrongful deaths (Alvin Rios, Salladin Barton, Thomas Husar), sexual and racial abuse (most recently the Holland case), and the beating of youth (the Vega and Legal Services youth case). Many cases have been settled out of court, with the county government refusing to reveal financial losses—despite rulings by the State Committee on Open Government that payments cannot be shielded by non-disclosure agreements with individuals.

This is the residue of entrenching mass incarceration: too many ill people are classified as criminals and incarcerated when they need medical treatment instead. County funding for the health department has been severely cut while jail funding and staffing have been dramatically expanded. Jails have now become responsible for drug and mental health treatment. But jails are not medical centers and cannot be turned into them. The evidence is all too clear that these county policies are deadly.

How might the tide of abuse and death be turned back? People have turned to multipole state and local agencies and met, so far, only obstacles and obfuscation.

State Commission of Correction?

One might start with the state institution charged with oversight of jails, the State Commission of Correction (SCOC), which has for years been composed of Sheriffs and jail administrators. It is charged by state law to conduct regular inspections of all jails but has in practice long failed to do so as documented by state audits (e.g. State Comptroller here) and successive investigative media reports (e.g. by NYFocus here). Its ways are mysterious, with few public meetings and little transparency as state legislators and community activists have long known and shown.

Indeed, the SCOC has been most effective in supporting Sheriffs and dictating the building and staffing of ever larger jails. Recent public protests have led to a new law that gives the SCOC more funding and the appointment of two part-time commissioners. The reform was so watered down however that advocates for the bill, the Jails Justice Network, organized a December 23, 2025, protest against the Governor’s and legislative leadership’s evisceration of the legislation.

If the state has failed to exercise oversight, what of local authorities who oversee and fund the jail’s daily operations?

County Health Department?

One might take the next step and approach the County Health Department. State law requires the Sheriff to request annual inspections by the County Health Department. But no inspections take place. The Sheriff simply tells the SCOC that “the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection” (2022 inspection p. 6).

March 2022 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the Broome County Jail, “Commission staff spoke with administration and noted that the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection.”

State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7015.3 “The chief administrative officer shall request that the local health authority with jurisdiction over the facility perform annual inspections of the facility. The results of such inspection shall be recorded in writing, together with a summary of the action taken to address any deficiencies, and maintained on file at the facility.”

Audits?

The Broome County Audit of the jail regularly reports inadequate financial accounting. The 2024 audit focuses only on profits from the commissary fund (which had a balance of $496,202 effectively a slush fund for the Sheriff) and found no policies or procedures to track revenue and expenditures. Revenue-generating contracts for food, health, and hygiene products were all long expired. No regular auditing of the jail’s out-of-state medical provider Correctional Medical Care and now PrimeCare Medical appears to take place. Financial losses due to court actions over inadequate care by PrimeCare Medical are frequent in Broome and surrounding counties.

A subsequent audit of PrimeCare Medical operations in Broome discovered that PrimeCare had long been charging the county for hours of services not rendered to the incarcerated, covering dental to mental health care. But this was oddly not determined to be fraud. Why CMC officials did not face felony charges under Theft of Services and Grand Larceny laws was never explained. CMC was simply allowed to pay back the funds—slowly over twelve months, with no interest.

Elected Officials?

One might finally turn to elected state officials who guard both the purse and health of county residents. By state law elected state representatives are empowered to conduct oversight visits to county jails, unannounced and with staff in hand. Some legislators in other counties have done so. But large demonstrations and protests at the Broome County Jail, in Albany, and at successive County legislative meetings have not persuaded Broome County’s Senator and Assembly representatives to ever make an oversight visit.

ICE Enters

Recent overcrowding in the jail due in large part to an expanding influx of ICE and Federal detainees has put yet further pressure on medical care. As an official ICE detention center, the jail has witnessed rapid, short inflows and outflows of ICE detainees. For detainees it is an immediate problem: how can you get adequate medical care? People go to the medical unit to find no one speaks their language. Local residents in the jail are fearful too, with one attempting to file a grievance over inadequate screening of new arrivals.

Sheriff Frederick Akshar :  “This is where I am today. If tomorrow, ICE said ‘we need your assistance’ in some effort, I would help them… I do want to be abundantly clear though, that if any one of our federal partners, regardless of what letter the agency starts with, asks me for help today, tomorrow, a week from now, the answer would be yes.”  WSKG, March 28, 2025 “Broome County Jail opts into federal immigration enforcement program”

In the last two months, whole sections of the jail have gone into masked isolation mode, including pods containing ICE detainees. After at least one person was taken to hospital and tested positive for TB, rumors arose of active TB cases in the jail. In this instance the Health Department, so absent otherwise in jail medical dilemmas, held an extraordinary joint press conference with the Sheriff at which the Broome County Health Department Medical Director, flanked by the Undersheriff, Sheriff, and County Executive, told the public not to worry, there is no confirmed case of TB, “there is no outbreak.”

Looking forward

Broome County regularly achieves the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of all 62 New York Counties. Community organizations, activists, and families have mounted impressive campaigns in the last ten years against racialized mass incarceration and mass policing, ranging from rallies at the jail, to court watches, to marches for the treatment and not criminalization of those with disabilities and mental health and substance use illnesses.  To date state and county legislators have failed to listen, continuing to entrench the long-term trend of decreasing funding for local health resources while steadily increasing funding for the jail. As long as these commitments and policies hold, it is hard to be optimistic about the health of county’s residents outside as well as inside our supersized jail.

 

 

 

Where are your people from? Update

December 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Here is an updated and expanded map of official ICE detainees in the Broome County Jail up to October 15, 2025:

This includes persons from  Albania, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burma, Cameroon, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czech Republic, D.R. Congo, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea,  Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan,  Romania, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, St. Lucia, Taiwan, Tajikstan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela.

We need followups:  Who and why was the Ukrainian citizen deported to Russia according to the ICE data? How many persons arrested locally or held on state or Federal charges are later turned into ICE detainees? Why doesn’t the Broome County Jail include on its list of “inmates” on the Sheriff’s app the names of any ICE detainees, some who spend many months in the jail?

Source Note

This map was generated from government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Justtalk. The dataset on detentions (here) is incomplete. The dataset runs only to October 15, 2025,  missing continual flows since then. It excludes lists of persons for whom ICE sent detainers to the Broome Jail with uncertain outcomes. And some people who have been held in the jail under Federal charges aren’t recorded under ICE even if held only on successive deportation charges.  So the numbers and countries are assuredly more numerous than this map suggests;  Jamaica and Azerbaijan, for example, also likely belong to the list.

Support ICE or Free Gendri Ortiz?

November 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

ICE is back in the local news: Binghamton and Long Island communities  and media are now responding to last week’s revelation that the Broome County Jail is caging a Long Island teenager, Gendri Ortiz Paredes, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). How does Ortiz end up in Binghamton?  Well the Broome County Sheriff, an ardent Trump supporter, has a formal agreement to house ICE and Federal detainees, signed and paid for without consulting County legislators. So Gendri was transported from Long Island to overnight in an ICE Manhattan center and then onward to the Broome jail where he has been for over four weeks.


Local newspapers in Binghamton and Long Island are picking up the story. Gendri is uncertain about what is going on, anxious, puzzled, and visibly shaken.  Not a single staff person can speak his language. His school superintendent wants him back in school. His mother is distraught.  His soccer teammates miss him (he is a midfielder, wearing number 17).  His teachers speak admirably of his work and want him back in school. His English teacher simply states “To be honest with you, he’s a great student…very respectful, honest, hardworking,” someone who “got along great with everybody, even with the other teachers, too ….  I consider him a friend.”

In one sense he is not alone: he is just one of scores of persons captured from around the state and then bundled in and out of the Broome jail for days, weeks, months.  Like others he was kept incommunicado, in this case in solitary, for the first two weeks. How many more are there? What are conditions inside? ICE doesn’t easily reveal who these people are, where they are captured, or where and how long they are in our jail.  The Sheriff doesn’t provide any details either. Their names and numbers are not listed on the Sheriff’s app’s inmate roster.  Local and regional farm workers and roofers are often only discovered when persons visit the jail. Jailing Ortiz is of course  part of wider drive to capture and hide ICE detainees of all ages.

Where are your family from?

Hidden away, its easy to pretend this a distant problem. Most people presume ICE detainees are from faraway Mexico or central America. Don’t believe it. It’s a much wider sweep ranging across Africa, the Caribbeean, Europe and Latin America.  Here are a few of the locations represented by people held for ICE in the county jail (list below). Where are your family from?

While Gendri and other teens and kids fester in ICE detention centers,  an organized campaign is growing to expand the number of all teens, citizens or not, tried in adult courts and held in adult jails.  It’s worrisome: there is a long history of abuse of youth in the Broome  jail. The County  lost successive lawsuits over the beating of  Black teen (see here) and the tear gassing and housing of a naked youth (see here). The County no longer houses people under 18.  The Sheriff along with others—including District Attorneys around the state and NYPD Chief Tisch under NYC Mayor Adams and soon to be mayor Zohran  Mamdani—would like to change this by rolling back the “raise the age” law, bringing teens less than 18 back into adult courts and presumably the jail. This battle is accelerating into the new legislative year.

Note

*Albania, Angola, Bangaladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czech Republic, D.R. Congo, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Spain, St. Lucia, Taiwan, Tajikstan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Venezuela.

This map was generated from government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Justtalk. The dataset on detentions (here) is incomplete. The dataset runs only to September this year, missing continual flows since then. It excludes lists of persons who had detainers requested by ICE. And some people who are held in the jail aren’t recorded under ICE but under other Federal charges (even if held only on deportation charges).  So the numbers and countries are assuredly more numerous than this map suggests;  Jamaica and Eritrea for example also likely belong to the list.

 

Broome Jails Long Island Teen for ICE

November 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This week Newsday reports from Long Island that another Roosevelt High School teen has been captured by ICE.  This time the teen was sent not to a Texas ICE detention center but to the Broome County Jail.  He has actually been there for over two weeks now, far from his mom and school (he is  a midfielder, #17, on the men’s soccer team).  He sits alone, anxious, and in shock. He does not know what will happen to him.

Why is Broome County Jail caging Long Island teenagers for ICE? Is it because the Broome Sheriff and Nassau County Police Department have both signed 287g agreements with ICE?  Or is because Broome is the official ICE detention center on the route from NYC to the over-capacity Buffalo ICE detention center?

It isn’t because he makes $ for the Sheriff:  indeed by the Sheriff’s own admission it costs $274 to keep someone for one day (his estimate during the state correctional officers’ illegal strike that he supported). And yet the Federal Goverment only reimburses $110/day.  And there are scores of Federal detainees held every day, some for months and months. How many ICE detainees are there, how long are they incarcerated here? We don’t know.  But clearly $ millions are being spent to maintain for years a supersized jail.

In the face of three successive protests and much testimony in the Broome County Legislative chamber against ICE detention, 12 of 15 county legislators voted recentlly to endorse the Sheriff’s budget with $ for ICE.  Did they really want out-of-town teens incarcerated at their, our expense?

How Broome County Subsidizes ICE

September 6, 2025 / / 1 Comment

What does Broome County spend to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)?  It’s hard to know, for the figures of the number of daily ICE detainees in the County jail and their food, housing, medical care, and transport costs remain hidden, largely folded into the total number of persons caged on Federal–and not county–charges.

It’s a longstanding practice: since at least 2002 when a contract was signed with the U.S. Marshalls service, Broome County has held Federal detainees. The number used to be 20 or so persons a day.  Since Trump took office and the County Sheriff signed an additional cooperative contract with ICE, the number of Federal detainees has ballooned to now 60 or more a day. On some days busloaeds of persons are brought into the jail by ICE in shackles, required ever more food, medical and correctional staff overtime, laundy, etc.

It’s a wonderful deal for Federal agencies like ICE:  Federal reimbursements are only $110/day per person, less half the cost the County government pays. The average daily cost of incarcerating someone in the jail in 2024 was $278  (Broome Jail budget of $33 million divided by avearge daily population of 395). The average daily number of persons caged in the first seven months of 2025 rose to 405,  lowering the daily cost to $230–still more than double the Federal payment.

Do the math and Broome County is gifting the Federal government over $1 million so far this year.

Perhaps it is time for county legislators to stop voting as they have for years on the food, housing and other jail contracts that hide these subsidies—and cancel the contract with the U.S. Marshalls service has turned the County jail into  a detention center for ICE and other Federal agencies.

 

Yes the BC Jail is an ICE Detention Facility: ICE Says So

August 18, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Yes, the Broome County Jail is an official Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility.  And who is being held there for ICE?  We don’t know for sure, but it has included people from Azerbaijan to China, from Ecuador to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey and Venezuela–among others.

The Sheriff repeatedly tells us that the 287g agreement he recently signed with ICE is only to allow his ICE-trained deputies to serve warrants in the jail.  All quite accurate. But thats a diversion. The jail has held scores of persons for ICE this year, presumably under the  contract with the U.S. Marshalls Service that has for decades included caging ICE detainees—often seized in the past through raids conducted by ICE alongside joint task forces of the Sheriff, Johnson, and Binghamton police departments (see for example Press and Sun Bulletin January 2011, p.3).

Who is being detained now? We don’t know. What does ICE say?  As little as possible.

As reported here previously,  the Deportation Data Project among others has been collating information from ICE through multiple Freedom of Information Requests.  Their data sets located here reveal that the Broome County Jail is listed on ICE datasets as an ICE “Detention Facility”.  The datasets are small and list few persons among the scores or hundreds held in the Broome County Jail at one time or another in recent months.  But look at this clip from just one ICE data set, and you can see the Broome County Jail holding ICE detainees, predominantly Black and Brown people, from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas.

The dataset is seriously incomplete.  Other datasets on the site which cover ICE detention to detainer to arrests operations have persons from Iran to Russia and Mexico in the Broome County Jail. No one knows what a full accounting might reveal.

These persons are held without due process or legal representation which led a Broome County Legislator to resign from the jail’s advisory group.  Our elected officials have nvertheless signed off on all the jail funding with few if any questions–for years.

Can our County Legislators make few inquiries on what is being done in their name, and report back to us on what is going on?

And if any county legislators want to stop acting for ICE (and save the County lots of money), they should act to cancel the contracts that allows the jail to be at the beck and call of Federal authorities and pass the additional costs of housing hundreds of persons.

The next stop? The City of Binghamton and local police departments.

They should stop reporting to ICE, through the surveillance center housed in the Binghamton Police Department, the status of persons spotted on our streets by local surveillance devices and those stopped, interrogated and held on local charges.

Will city and council members and our mayors keep ICE out of our community, our data, our literal biometric faces?

Act yourself:

Bipartisan Generational Poverty (op-ed)

August 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Press and Sun  Bulletin

Trump is just the latest in bi-partisan effort to increase inequality, poverty  Opinion

Bill Martin, a Johnson City resident, writes about the failings of the Baby Boomers in ensuring an unequal economic system that favors the elites.

Robert Reich, former cabinet minister and advisor to Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, is promoting his memoirs with an exceptional claim: the problem we face is generational, the Boomers’ long-term dedication to advancing elite wealth while impoverishing the rest of us. Inequality and poverty march forward regardless of which party is in power.

This insight helps explain our current dilemmas. Trump might best be seen not as the counterpoint to Democratic administrations but as the culmination of a bipartisan history.

This startles, but think: Bill Clinton in 1992 famously called for the end of welfare. Democrats and Republicans alike have promoted free trade, the World Trade Organization, and NAFTA (including Reich) — and agree today on cutting trade with the world’s next largest market and innovator, China. Barrack Obama was famously called “deporter in chief,” expelling more migrants than Trump has (so far). Biden offered us the politics of abundance at the reckless prospect of accelerating the national debt and terminating Social Security. All only to be capped by Trump’s big beautiful bill.

Broome County has suffered mightily through it all. Once home to high tech firms like IBM − which alone employed 18,000 persons − we now buy our computers and cellphones made and often designed in Asia. The fallout has been managed by cutting city and county social and health funding on the one hand, while criminalizing poverty and creating an ever-larger police and penal complex on the other. Broome now holds dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of all 62 New York counties.

This continues to be a local, bipartisan effort. Our Democratic congressional representative votes regularly in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. State, county and city representatives remain quiet on migrant rights and racialized policing. The county sheriff has signed a contract with ICE and houses scores of detainees, all while previously flying the Israeli flag over county offices. The Democratic County Executive remains silent, while neither Democratic nor Republican elected legislators have raised visible objections. Yet county residents continue to object and rally at town halls, outside county offices and outside the county jail.

Meanwhile Trump blames decades of decline and impoverishment on the back of migrants. Local and national Democrats do not offer an alternative. One must go back to 1986 and Ronald Reagan to find model legislation that would grant legal status to the people who have worked for decades on our local farms, restaurants, nursing homes and construction — all while paying taxes (and with much lower crime rates than the average citizen). Sadly, as Reich argues, both parties remain indebted to the same billionaire donor class. Our remaining local billionaire reaps his profits from waste management, a fitting outcome to a generation of decline by design. Bankers and developers thrive, yet little trickles down.

Is it any surprise that many disdain wealthy elites and switch, in anger and desperation for relief, from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and Trump again?

Voters deserve better choices. All of Broome County deserves better.

Bill Martin is a Johnson City resident.

What are Broome County Legislators doing about ICE/287g?

August 15, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My county representative is Susan Ryan.  County Legislator Mary Kaminsky recentLY spoke to the press about ICE and the jail.  We need to ask them to do more.  Here is my letter from August 7, 2025; no reply yet. You can find your legislator’s contact info here. 

***

August 7, 2025

Dear Legislators Ryan and Kaminsky,

I write to you as my local legislator and as the one legislator who has recently addressed this issue.

I request that you investigate and report back to me and county residents on how the Broome County, through the Sheriff, signed agreements to have County officers act as ICE agents with the County covering the costs and liabilities of doing so.

Please document and assess as part of this process the financial and legal costs to the County of covering the very large numbers of undocumented persons being shuttled in and out of the county jail for Federal authorities, often allegedly held without proper judicial warrants and legal representation, including but not limited to those held for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  This continuing and largely secret operation has contributed to the recent increase in jail numbers from 300 local residents in recent years to nearly 500 persons total currently according to state statistics.

All this requires considerable real dollar funding for food, housing, supervision, and basic and inadequate (by past legal rulings and lost county lawsuits) medical care.  Even current local persons held in the jail have filed grievances on this.  And at this rate of expanding incarceration, we county residents will soon face demands for an even larger county jail and all that implies.  Broome County already has regularly held the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate among all 62 New York State counties.  Might we ask why?

Specifically, were you and other legislators consulted on these agreements with federal authorities and the use of county resources, staff, officers, and funding? You have voted for specific, current contracts for medical, food, commissary, staffing, and communication resources for the jail that depend on the number housed. Do you still endorse these? Can your curtail expenditures for ICE and other federal detainees?

If you have acted on these matters recently, or have concrete plans to do so, please let me and others know. This is of wide public interest as the local and regional even international press coverage of the county has indicated.

I have attended county meetings to listen to discussion on these matters, but have found that no discussion takes place, specific items are bundled into blanket votes without notice or discussion.  And of course residents may not speak even briefly to the meetings, as they do in Binghamton City council meetings, except basically once a year on the county’s formal budget.  Persons who have protested and tried to speak in the past have been arrested in your presence as you may remember.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter. I look forward to hearing from  you.

Sincerely,

William Martin

 

 

What’s Driving Broome’s Popping Jail Population?

August 15, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Maxed out?

Why would Broome County need to build a new jail, again? Reflecting steadily falling crime levels and rising justice reforms, the Broome County Jail’s population has been falling for five years.  After a peak of 500 ten years ago it has hovered around 310 in the last two years.

Source: New York State, Division of criminal Justice Services (DCJS), “Jail Population”

This year however the number of incarcerated has been radically accelerating, approaching 500 and heading further upward as a chart of the daily population since January 1, 2025  shows.

Source:  “Average Daily Population” reports of Broome County Jail as sent to NYS DCJS, via Freedom of Information Request.

Why? What’s driving this forward? 

Is it ICE detainees? The big jump in late March was the influx from ICE raids to the north of us, with ICE suddenly dumping busloads of persons, with the Sheriff’s blessing, into the Broome County Jail under a longstanding Federal Marshalls contract. Most of those folks left within a few days. In a July 23, 2025 statement to the local NPR station WSKG (he declined an interview), the Sheriff stated that the average number of ICE detainees in the first six months of the year was 7 to 8 a day.  This number thus cannot account for the numbers we see in state data.

Was it “state readies”? The illegal strike by state prison guards led to a rising number of convicted and sentenced persons being kept in the jail rather than being sent to state prisons. These so-called “state readies” rose from 10 on an average day in recent years to 60 by the end of June. But those numbers have fallen by 50% and continue to decline.

Is it persons held under the longstanding Federal Marshall contract? The numbers of those being held for the federal government is indeed a better bet, reaching around 60 in recent weeks–well above the average of 20 in recent years.

Still, this doesn’t account for the rise from 300 to 500. And it’s a losing bet: it costs over $250 per day to keep someone in the jail, and the County gets only $110/day from the Federal government. Right-sizing and shrinking the jail to only county residents even under current laws and courts could generate real savings.

Whose figures count? Daily numbers in the jail are also reported on the Sheriff’s app.  But there is a problem here: the totals there are running 60 less than what he is reporting daily to DCJS (and received here after a freedom of information request).

Sheriff App Numbers DCJS Numbers
7/29/2025 418 478
7/30/2025 419 480
7/31/2025 423 481

 

Who are the missing persons?

We don’t know . Is it ICE prisoners? Maybe, no one reports their presence and they are reportedly held without due process or legal representation.  Or new ways to circumvent bail reform, as in targeting people on parole, particularly after the Governor’s rollback of bail and other criminal justice reforms? Might be .  Perhaps its due to more aggressive policing and task force operations, inspired by Trump and NYS increases in police funding?  Is it more road stops and checkpoints made possible by $ millions spent on local surveillance cameras with everything integrated into the downtown intelligence center linked to local, state, federal police?

We don’t know, yet.  City and county legislators don’t know apparently and don’t respond to protests and inquiries from residents.

What we do know is there is a clear trajectory ending in a carceral crisis crisis in the jail and the call, as predicted here in May, of a call to expand the jail yet further, again.

Build It and They Will Come?

Broome County Jail 1908, 1930

As community activist and scholar John Eason and colleagues have argued, it was the building of new prisons in poor rural (and largely southern Black) communities that drove forward mass incarceration.  In crude terms, it’s a case of “they built it and mass incarceration came”. This observation stands in direct opposition to the common media and academic view that understands mass incarceration as phenomenon driven by urban racism and urban crime–with New York City featuring most prominently in the 1990s prison industrial complex boom. Analysis and activism alike have far too long been restricted to prisons and not jails, and individuals and not the large penal complex rooted in communities and neighborhoods. And of jails, we only hear of big city jails.

Might “build-it-and-they-will-come” also be true of jails? It’s no small matter: jails are the gateways to prisons,  far more numerous than prisons. They incarcerate more individuals than prisons given the larger number of persons that cycle in and out jails on a daily basis.

Might this be true of Broome County Jail? In 1988 the jail housed less than 200 persons.  A brand new jail was then funded, located outside the city, and opened in 1996 to hold 536 persons.  Jail numbers rose.  In 2016 the county legislature in voted $6.8 million, over a protest in county chambers, to expand the jail to a capacity of 600 with a new medical wing.

County Legislature Rally vs Jail Expansion 2014

After falling in a subsequent wave of protests against mass incarceration and mass policing, jail numbers are now rising to 500 and beyond. Broome County regularly claiming the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of all 62 New York counties. Calls for a new expansion are likely to ensue, a common refrain often resisted but rarely prevented.

Will county legislators once again vote and fund more incarceration? We are likely to soon find out.

Broome County Jail 

 

 

Where are the Southern Tier’s ICE detention centers?

July 7, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We are puzzled:  what county/city facilities along the Southern Tier are now official ICE detention facilities?

The Broome County Jail has worked with and housed ICE detainees in the past under its regular Federal Marshalls contract, but is not an official jail detention facility.

But Bloomberg ran a story today suggesting otherwise  (7/7/2025) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/trump-administration-adds-60-facilities-for-detained-immigrants?srnd=undefined (behind a paywall also on New Republic here):

“Trump Administration Adds 60 Facilities for Detained Migrants
The expansion has added thousands of beds to ICE capacity, as the department prepares for an influx of cash from Congress”

The takeaways are:

  • immigrant-detention sites are expanding across the country through agreements with local jails and private contractors.
  • The goal is to achieve at least 100,000 available detention beds, with capacity of over 59,000 people as of late June.
  • The expansion includes new facilities, such as “Algator Alcatraz” in Forida a tent complex

And the story contained a map of new and old facilities but what are these three ones along the Southern Tier of NY state? 

ICE’s list of detention centers. the source of Bloomberg’s data apparently, at  https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities  includes only these in NY state, none along the Southern Tier:

USCIS online https://www.uscisguide.com/state-regulations-and-laws/detention-centers-and-immigration-facilities-in-new-york/ offers up a different list of faciltiies at Otisville, Southport, and Buffalo but none are along the Southern Tier either.

So who is working with ICE officially in any capacity?  Might it be them?

The current list of  ICE 287g agreements in NY State list these, which don’t fully answer the question either. Broome is not a listed jail detention site (only Rensselaer is):

So where has ICE come to an agreement with NYS county or city forces to become detention centers?  Keep watching….

Broome County, ICE, and the Carceral Crisis

May 13, 2025 / / 1 Comment

We Need a New Jail!

Expect that call to come soon, for there is no question about it: the Broome County jail is filling up, steadily reversing declines in the jail’s population in recent years from well over 500 incarcerated to less than 300 local residents. While there is little information from county officials, reports from inside recount persons being haphazardly “double-bunked”, a second shift laundry shift being put in place, and buses arriving and departing with waves of new detainees.

What’s Up?

The most immediate cause behind the rising numbers?  From press reports one suspects the new 287g agreement the Sheriff inked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one of just four Sheriffs to do so out of 62 counties statewide.  After a protest out at the jail and a disastrous public townhall, Sheriff Akshar revealed that eighty-eight ICE detainees had in a short period been cycled in and out of the jail.

Who they were, what charges they faced, how long they were in jail, and where they went is unknown. It’s a bit mysterious. While in the jail ICE detainees were housed in locations without visitation. They were not recorded on the Sheriff’s app’s roster, nor the ICE locator, nor the Federal locator. Family and friends didn’t know where they were.  Was this a momentary surge for a few days or a continuingtrend?

A Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the NY State Department of Criminal Justice (DCJS) for the daily reports points toward an answer (data attached here).  Here is a plot of the occupancy figures for the jail from January 1 to March 31, 2025:

Overall, the jail population has increased by over 27% in the first 4 months of year and over 30% above the average for 2024 (323).

What’s driving the increase?

What stands out first is the abrupt peak in late March at 450 persons housed in the jail—attributable indeed to the quick influx of persons held for ICE who cycled in and out quickly.  Where did they come from? From outside Broome county, following upon  March 24-28th ICE raids in the Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and surrounding areas that led to the capture of 133 people, overwhelmingly persons without any criminal conviction as has been the case for deportations nationally (ICE reports only eight of the 133  had a criminal record in their past—far below the one third of Americans who have a criminal record).  For Broome County this was an unprecedented surge. While the county sheriff has for over two decades had an agreement to house persons on Federal charges, the daily average in the last ten years was eighteen. The FOIL data shows that in late March there were seventy-six people incarcerated for the Federal government.

Why the Broome jail? And where did they go after their short stay?  ICE has only one detention center in New York, in Batavia outside Buffalo. ICE relies on jails to house detainees when Batavia is full up as it has been lately.  Broome apparently offered up spaces in return for payments of about $100/day per person. From the Broome jail we know some individuals went to Boston, some to other jails (e.g. in Delaware county), and many to Texas for immediate deportation.  It’s a common NY pattern as research published by the Deportation Data Project and mapping by Bloomberg reveal:

Bloomberg, May 1, 2025

While the March ICE surge moved in and out quickly, the number of Federal persons has steadily creeped up since them. The Sheriff for his part repeatedly states he will do all ICE asks of him, and he has sent officers off for extensive ICE training and certification. What they will do when their training is complete is unknown.

A second source for accelerating jail numbers is the state prison crisis driven by violence and strikes by correction officers.  Statewide protests against the on-camera murder of Robert Brooks Sr, followed by the murder of Messiah Nantwi, were accompanied by an illegal strike by thousands of correctional officers who demanded more power, money, and the nullification of the HALT law that has limited solitary confinement. Faced with prisons with no officers, the Governor called in national guard troops to help run the prisons. This was costly, running an extra $100 million per month. Sheriff Akshar and Congressional Representative Josh Riley sided with the officers, joining them on picket lines outside prisons. After extended negotiations 2,000 officers decided not return to work and the Governor fired them–creating a continuing carceral crisis.

The state prison crisis dramatically increased persons in county jails as the transfer of convicted persons to state prisons, or “state readies”, was stopped by prison authorities.  At the beginning of 2025 the number of persons waiting transfer to state prisons from the Broome County jail was less than five. Thereafter the numbers rose inexorably and are now ten times that number, adding to increases in Federal detainees. The upward trendlines in both are unmistakable when charted:

It is tempting to assume the rapid rise in ICE detainees and persons awaiting transfer to state prisons will reverse as staff is rebuilt at prisons and new ICE detention centers.  The latest state budget includes at least an additional $500 million however to cover continuing costs to offset the 2,000 missing officers.  Meanwhile current budget proposals in Congress propose an extraordinary 365% increase in ICE’s current $3.4 billion budget, with $12.4 billion for detention alone.  It is unlikely current either of these trends will be reversed in the near future.

The future?  Build more cells—or empty them?

A simple linear projection of current trends estimates the number of persons in the jail will by late summer hit 500, and by late fall the  maximum capacity of 550 persons will be breached.

Barring any offsetting trends, expect the Sheriff and County legislators to launch a campaign for a major new jail expansion, extending efforts to increase jail populations by rolling back recent bail, parole, and earned time reforms.

What might counter such trends? New York State legislators could pass both the New York for All bill that would prevent all local law enforcement officers from collaborating with ICE, and the Earned Time Act that would extend release to more incarcerated men and women. State Senator Lea Webb and State Assemblyperson Donna Lupardo are among the many who support both bills. County legislators might move funding from jails as medical treatment centers to community treatment centers that have public oversight.  And perhaps we might no longer accept that there is a “staff shortage” at state prisons and recognize–as even the Governor and the NYS Department of Corrections do when faced with the prison crisis–that prisons actually have a surplus of people incarcerated for far too long. It’s time to let them return home.

Trump’s Deportation War: NY Sheriffs to the Rescue?

April 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Trump ran his campaign on the promise to deport millions of migrants, refugees, and asylees. How is he doing?

So far, it’s bluster and a mad scramble to hit deportation targets. At present rates there is no prospect of deporting a million, much less the millions promised throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign. Trump isn’t happy, and a relaunch is underway. What does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) need to fulfill Trump’s fevered deportation dreams? $ Billions more, yes, but in New York it all rests on local law officers, especially county sheriffs.

The opening salvos in Trump’s deportation drive were impressive: the Laken Riley bill, passed with the support of 48 Democratics, turned accusations of minor crimes such as stealing diapers, a slice of pizza, or squatting in an empty building into criminal, deportable convictions. More eye-catching were made-for-TV spectacles of ICE teams dispatched into their feared zones of “sanctuary” cities. In Chicago it was Dr. Phil traipsing after ICE officers with a media posse in tow, in New York City it was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem riding along with bulletproof-vested officers into the heart of the Bronx. Then came the attack on the international students at visibly elite universities, from Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia to Momodou Taal at Cornell.

Meanwhile proclamations issue forth announcing the termination of longstanding immigration agreements and regulations, turning people with residential status into illegal criminals. One after another Trump and his appointees announced the elimination of birthright citizenship, asylum appointments, refugee admissions, temporary protect status, parole granted to Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans among others, and student visas and green cards.

Yet the results to date have been thin. Planned before Trump came into office, the lurid big raids that produced nearly 2,000 ICE arrests a day in late January fell away. ICE’s easy target lists are empty. By mid-February arrests had fallen to fewer than 600 per day, far below the 2700 needed to reach one million a year. ICE stopped reporting figures. Kristi Noem removed top law enforcement officers at ICE. In Trump’s first term total deportations reached 1.5 million, half as many as in Obama’s first term. The latest March data show that at the current pace it’s hard to imagine these levels ever being reached.

Will Sheriffs Ride to the Rescue?

A baseline flow of deportations does continue from the everyday and unnoticed arrests conducted by city, county, and state law enforcement officers. Stop someone on a highway or a city street and hold them for a misdemeanor, and their fingerprints can be taken and made available to ICE databases as part of the booking process. Any success by ICE in driving deportation numbers exponentially upward depends however on a radical change in local police support. County sheriffs and city police officers would need to take on the grinding task of seeking out and arresting those wanted by ICE and holding them in county jails.

It is this imperative to mobilize local police that led to the dropping of Federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Adams: it is access to the files and cells of Rikers Island that ICE needs most. And Trump’s much publicized threat to prosecute the Sheriff of Tompkins County, home to Cornell University and Ithaca, one of New York State’s few “sanctuary cities”? His crime: releasing an undocumented man after his sentence was served.

Yet New York’s local police and sheriffs already cooperate readily with ICE. ICE was told of the Ithaca man’s pending release and given every opportunity to obtain him but failed to do so. New York Governor Hochul, New York City Mayor Adams and local police chiefs and county sheriffs regularly state they do report to ICE undocumented persons that fall under their control. What ICE wants is much more. But how to entice or force sheriffs and local police chiefs to submit to the direct supervision of ICE and reallocate their officers to some or all of the ICE tasks of searching out, capturing, arresting, housing and transporting more migrants, refugees, and asylees?

Relaunching the 287(g) project

Homeland Security has long tried to bind together sheriffs, city police, and ICE. Since 1996 the 287(g) program has allowed Homeland Security to train and deputize local officers to identify, process, and detain undocumented persons. The most infamous example remains Maricopa, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s use of 287(g) authority to racially profile and illegally detain Latinos, for which he was convicted in 2012 only to be pardoned by Trump in 2017.

The majority of sheriffs, county governments, and police have rejected such alliances, fearing the loss of control over their own forces, the hostility and noncooperation of their own poor and migrant residents, and lawsuits over racially and ethnically discriminatory stops and arrests. Fewer than 100 of the over 15,000 local police and sheriff’s offices participated at the end of Trump’s first presidency. As 2025 dawned, only one of New York’s 62 counties, Rensselaer, had a 287(g) agreement with Homeland Security.

The new administration promises to do better. On January 20th Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, authorizing ICE to expand and enforce 287(g) authorizations. Several states including Georgia and Florida are moving to require all local law enforcement agencies to participate. New 287(g) models now exist for three modes of engagement: training local officers to take on full ICE duties and powers, participation in multi-agency deportation task forces, and housing ICE detainees and enforcing ICE powers in local jails. The returns so far are mixed. New cities and counties have joined, largely from southern and western states, most notably Texas and Florida.

And New York? In February Nassau County signed a 287(g) agreement, setting aside 50 jail cells for migrants and deputizing 10 detectives to make immigration arrests outside the jail. The New York Post, ever agitating for more law and order, enthusiastically promoted the model: “Rensselaer and Nassau—the only two New York Counties that partner with ICE so closely—provide blueprints for local leaders statewide.” In February 2025 one more joined the effort, the Lake Placid police department (although it has since disappeared from online listings). In March 2025 the Broome County Sheriff, long a Trump supporter, announced he would participate in the Warrant program but only to serve ICE warrants on persons already in his jail.  The other 59 of 62 New York counties remain outside the program as do city police forces. It’s a slow pace. Diverting local officers to ICE duties and supervision still remains, it seems, unattractive in both urban and rural counties.

Follow the Detention Money: $ Billions

Trump’s not giving up: attacks on migrants remained the centerpiece of his recent speech to Congress. What is needed to turn this around seems to be cold hard cash. “Border Czar” Tom Homans tells Congress ICE is out of money and he needs more money, more agents, and soon. Republican budget bills propose up to $175 billion for immigration and border enforcement; ICE’s entire budget in 2024 was $8.5 billion. But will even a fraction of the promised billions make the difference in locating, detaining, housing, and deporting people?

The problem is not detention space, not with the funding on offer. The are plenty of empty public and private prisons, county jails, military bases, and even college dormitories. Jails are particularly attractive as staffed and approved incarceration spaces, and jail populations have fallen significantly. And sheriffs, unlike police chiefs, are independent operators, largely free from external controls. They cannot be recalled. Many have long been Trump supporters. Many sheriffs have long had Intergovernmental Service Agreement contracts to incarcerate persons for the United States Marshals Service (USMS) and ICE (e.g. Broome, Tioga, Albany counties). In 2018 USMS paid local jails $1 billion to hold pretrial detainees, while ICE paid $340 million to detain migrants.

In New York it has been a steady revenue stream for county budgets. As the Sheriff of Albany county put it in 2018, “When we bring boarders in that offsets the cost of the county jail. The county jail for Albany is about $40 million, so this year I’m anticipating bringing in about $8 million so obviously that’s going to drop the tax burden on the taxpayers;” $4.5 million of that was for ICE detainees. Federal prisoners and detainees occupy over half the cells of the Yates County jail in New York’s Finger Lakes region in 2025. The 2025 Livingston County budget openly proclaims “The jail is still a revenue generator for the county.” In larger counties like Broome along the State’s Southern Tier—with the highest incarceration rate of any of the state’s 62 counties—holding a few dozen persons on Federal charges generates a $1 million or more per year for the Sheriff.

How many of these migrants, asylees, and undocumented persons are and might be held in jails? We don’t know. For years the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse has studiously collected and disseminated detention data, only to be stalled momentarily after Syracuse University removed its files from University servers. It is now available via a new independent home. Its latest report concludes it is impossible to determine who is being arrested, targeted, and deported and as for the future “just what will actually occur remains uncertain.”

Disappearing People

And now more people simply disappear as 287(g) agreements expand. Under previous Biden and Trump regimes undocumented persons were already often held on Federal criminal, rather than ICE charges. This literally disappears people as I found out when a dairy farmworker wrote to me upon the advice of an incarcerated man in a county jail.  I could not find him in local sheriff’s listings, ICE detainee locators, or Federal Bureau of Prisons locators. He didn’t exist. Removed and dispatched far from his family he had become, as in so many in authoritarian regimes, isolated and alone, invisible, living in a caged space hidden from family, friends, and allies.

Cross the northern, Canadian border, or even worse in the eyes of Federal and ICE authorities, assist someone to do, and one is sentenced to one or more years in a Federal prison. Sitting in a Federal courthouse in February I watched as the diminutive dairy farm worker, shackled at the waist, hands, and feet, stumbled into the courtroom. His employer sent a letter praising his high skill levels and valued labor. He testified he had come back to the US to see his sick wife and to be a good father to his children. To this the Federal judge violently denounced him and sentenced him to over a year in a Federal prison—after which will be deported to Guatemala. Back to the Broome County jail he went, to be transferred 3 weeks later to the Delaware County jail, where now sits awaiting transfer to a Federal prison. Yet this is no model for increasing deportations.  As a Federal Public Defender told me, if we take these cases to trial the (Federal) court system will collapse.

More insidious and hidden is the incipient formation of New York’s very own gulag archipelago as persons captured for deportation are diverted and fed into an ICE transportation network. One node is Broome County jail, where people arrested in central, northern and the southern Tier regions are now being transported. New York has only one detention center in New York State in Batavia near Buffalo with a capacity of 650. Reports from inside the Binghamton jail recount a constant inflow of ICE detainees into and then outward by bus loads to the ICE detention center in Boston.

How many are crisscrossing the state? Local Broome activists estimate over 100 persons have circulated through their jail in only a few weeks, most likely the results of a series of ICE raids across Buffalo, Rochester and the far North that captured over 130 persons. Cells in the Broome jail now have double bunking with multiple pods of 50 people being dedicated to ICE and other Federal prisoners. Why Broome? Expanded in 2016 to cage 600 persons, the jail in the last several years has regularly held half that number of local residents and is fully equipped with disciplinary and medical units. Lacking any records of admissions, we and their families do not know what charges persons are held on, when and how long they are housed, and where they are headed to within New York, the United States and beyond. Disappearing people has now been institutionalized.

Still, this level of cooperation between Federal, state, and local law enforcement remains unable to generate the numbers that Trump demands. What ICE needs is officers to search out individuals on a massive scale, and there are only 5,500 trained ICE agents around the county. New York State alone has over 55,000 officers employed by cities and counties. Will political pressure from Trump, vast sums of money, and threats to cut Federal funding alter the calculations of county sheriffs and municipal police chiefs? Will they take on the duty of searching out, capturing, arresting and housing more migrants, refugees, and asylees? Media spectacles targeted at sanctuary cities and leading anti-Trump activists will undoubtedly continue. Large scale deportation will require much more. Will the funding and political pressure be successful?

Who Fights the Sheriff?

The state trooper came up to my car, leaned in and asked: “Are you here for massage”? I fit the profile: an older white male pulling into the parking lot in front of an Asian massage parlor. He was there with a covey of FBI, Homeland Security and NY State troopers while helicopter and highway patrols lurked in the distance. I had been called out on the morning of February 27, 2025, as part of my community’s nascent rapid response team, alerted to a possible ICE raid. Any arrests had already been made and dispatched. No press releases or police reports have appeared although the raid was noted in local media; the FBI had no comment. Rumors of Asian women being admitted and kept only overnight in the local jail circulated. Without names and booking numbers, it is impossible for local jail activist groups like Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier to find them and assist.

This small incident is but one sign of the emergence of a widespread grassroot support movement across the country. New York City, a longstanding center of resistance and protest, captures the headlines. Less visible is blossoming of new groups in New York’s small and large towns, marshalling support for migrants, refugees, and asylees. Know-your-rights training workshops for migrants and allies have taken place across the state by the Immigrants’ Rights Coalitions, the ACLU, various college migrant rights clinics, the Cornel Farmworkers Project, the Rochester Rapid Response Network, and the Syracuse Immigrant and Refugees Network among others. Latin American students are rallying at colleges and universities. A statewide rapid response network is growing month by month, stretching from Batavia, Buffalo and Rochester in the west, to Syracuse in the center of the state, to Ithaca and Geneva in the Finger Lakes region, to Binghamton along the state’s Southern Tier. Advocates and abolitionists from New York City to the upstate Jails Justice Network are lobbying in Albany for the New York for All Act which would outlaw all local law enforcement working with ICE everywhere in the state. Testimony in city and county legislatures against any engagement by local sheriffs, jails, and city police forces grows. Protests against Sheriffs engaged with 287g have taken place in Binghamton, Ithaca, Rochester, Long Island, and Syracuse  among others. A townhall hosted by the Broome County Sheriff was disrupted by scores of persons protesting the Sheriff’s agreement to house scores of detainees in secret. In Sackets Harbor, population of 1400, over 1,000 marched to the home of “Border Czar” Tom Homans protesting the seizure from a dairy farm of a 3rd grader and his family. As Trump marshals his forces, so too does resistance advance. As uneven as it is, the battle has been joined.

An Eid of Sadness—and Revelation from the County Jail

March 30, 2025 / / 0 Comments

A story from the Broome County Jail…

The article by Shahad Ali in Truthout on Eid in Gaza this year was stunning, a grim remembering of what had been joyful Eid days in Gaza past. Yet it captured the spirit of communal celebration and resistance even as Israeli bombs fall from above. Should one send it to the young Black man trying to practice his faith under parallel, difficult conditions, literally caged in our county jail? He had been pressing for services on Jummah, sometimes leading them, filling in the kutbah. Despite the county paying over $100,000 for chaplain services, an Imam for Friday services was not to be found. Were the hotdogs they were being served halal? He didn’t know.

The note was texted to him, with some  concern that such a story might be too depressing.  Life in jails and prison can test even the most strong…

And then his generous, revelatory response back, a moment of instruction from inside:

“There’s a saying in Islam: The reminder benefits the Believer. So, while this type of news is saddening, it also inspires me to strive against the regimes and people and entities that represent and support such genocides. Whether it be intellectual or spiritually, we must all strive for a better tomorrow…”

ICE Comes to Broome County (updated March 30, 2025)

March 23, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Update March 30, 2025:  the jail is now an ICE detention facility

Both the Sheriff and multiple news agencies reported that the new 287(g) contract with ICE described below was restricted  to simply serving warrants on people already in the jail. Yet within three days it was evident that a new flow of ICE detainees were being brought to and incarcerated  in the Broome County jail.  Multiple sources report an estimated 50 to 60 new people being incarcerated on behalf of ICE, arriving from distant counties along the Canadian border to central New York.  They are hidden from public view, denied any legal representation, and kept in conditions of isolation and solitary where they can’t connect to the outside world or have visitors. Their wives, husbands, children and friends do not know where they are or the condition they are in–or even if they are alive. Local employers in central New York have lost some of their most highly skilled workers, from the farms that produce the food we eat to those that provide the daily health and human services our community relies upon.

What can be done? Local legislators at the county and state level need to investigate how this came about, with whose authority, and what the conditions are in the jail. By law, state representatives may enter the jail unhindered. They need to do so and talk to the people being caged there. County legislators need to investigate how the sheriff, unlike other sheriffs in the state, have been able to undertake these commitments and brutalities without any clearance by the legislature which funds the jail’s operations. They need to ask: Who’s paying for all this vast expansion of incarceration? How much violence is generated by stuffing too many people in too many cells with too little support much less supervision? What are the health conditions there as numbers escalate and crowding occurs? Local organizations that work in the jail need to examine the material and moral conditions under which they work, including work by local churches colleges, and NGOs. Can they continue to operate under these new conditions, behind closed doors, with no oversight by local, state or federal agencies?

*****

Five months ago in a newspaper op-ed I raised the question of how Broome County might respond to candidate Trump’s call to deport millions. Today the questions are different:  Will Broome County deputies act as ICE agents? Will the Broome County Jail operate as an ICE detention center? All signs indicate that the answers today are yes.

It’s all part of putting into practice Trump’s desires. On January 20, 2025 Trump issued an Executive Order on Protecting the American People Against Invasion, declaring war on migrants, refuges, and asylees. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was tasked to fulfill his promise to deport millions. After a series of media spectacles the numbers being deported are, however, well below levels achieved during the first administrations of both Trump and Obama. Not even a million at currents rates is in sight.

The use of local law enforcement officers has quickly and quietly become critical. ICE has only 5,500 officers nationwide while in NY State alone there are over 55,000 local police and county officers. If there is any chance of Trump deporting one or more millions, it will require the use of local law enforcement. Including ours in Binghamton and Broome County.

And here enters ICE’s 287(g) project.

ICE’s recently revamped 287(g) program ties local law enforcement to ICE in three possible ways: a jail model to report possible detainees to ICE, a task force model to work with ICE on a limited basis, and a warrant service program to train and certify local correctional officers to act as ICE agents.

This past week local media reported that the Broome County Sheriff has joined two other NY counties in signing a 287(g) agreement, in this case with as a Warrant Service partner (see reports on WIVT/ABC, WBNG/CBS, Press&Sun Bulletin).


ICE 287(g) Participating Agencies

All the media postings described minimal commitment to ICE, with the Sheriff stressing new work was restricted to the jail only. His correctional officers would now simply serve ICE warrants on incarcerated persons directly he said, rather than as in the past notify ICE to do so (see WIVT/ABC report).

This is at best disingenuous.


Ask the obvious question: if jail officers are simply serving a warrant, why are eight to ten needed? Why send them  off for training and issue them ICE credentials to be carried at all times? And what does the loss of eight to ten officers—ICE does not cover their salaries—do to the staffing of the jail and the county budget? Do we hire more officers?

Take a look at the details of ICE’s Memorandum of Agreement for the Warrant Service Office Program and many more questions arise.

  • Should the county be handing over the supervision of its officers to ICE as required (“Immigration enforcement activities conducted by participating LEA [local law enforcement agency] personnel will be supervised and directed by ICE”)?
  • Who ensures that the Sheriff’s deputies follow mandated “DHS and ICE policies and procedures” (and what are these?)?
  • Are ICE supervising officers now stationed locally, in the Sheriff’s offices?
  • What is the new chain of command?
  • Who hires and pays for new expenses in addition to officers’ worktime for ICE, e.g. required interpreters? (“Qualified foreign language interpreters will be provided by the LEA” (note that none are available in the jail))
  • And is anyone comfortable with the requirement that the county will give ICE unhindered “access to appropriate databases, personnel, individuals in custody and documents”?

There is of course no oversight of the jail in any of these areas. The County Executive and legislators haven’t said a word. It isn’t clear they were informed or signed off on the commitment to ICE.

Follow the Money?

And who wins and loses not just politically but financially from these arrangements? Here is a clue: as several news reports tell us, the Sheriff ‘anticipates renting out beds in the jail to ICE’. This is in fact a longstanding practice: the 2025 Broome County budget reports $1 million in revenue (2023) from incarcerating on average 25 persons daily for Federal government agencies including ICE. Does this make sense? It now costs over $100,000 per year to keep one person in the jail while the Federal government pays only $40,000 ($1,000,000 divided by 25 = $ 40,000 per person).

Is the intention to increase these numbers driven by ICE’s need for detention spaces? We don’t know. Designed to hold 600 persons, the jail now regularly has around 300 local persons on any given day. If ICE arrests and detentions aided by local officers escalate, what will happen to jail staff workloads, morale, the health and safety of staff and the incarcerated? And the county budget? No approvals appear for new commitments to ICE on the list of county legislative resolutions for the past several months.

Disappearing People?

A hallmark of a movement toward an authoritarian regime is the use of state power to arrest and disappear persons. And now this is happening in the United States—and Broome County. Persons detained under Federal auspices and held in the Broome County jail simply disappear from sight. They are not reported or able to be located on the Sheriff’s App roster, the Federal Bureau of Prisons locator, the ICE locator, or the national VINE search sites. Take the case of an undocumented worker arrested far outside the county, and sent here by Federal authorities on charges for illegal entry only. He’s held for almost a year in our jail, where he is officially invisible, unseen and unheard, locked out of sight to family and friends and allies even after being sentenced.

And others more recently captured in Federal/ICE raids? This past month local media reported that a local massage parlor was raided by a joint task force of the FBI and State Police. Attempts by WBNG/CBS and WIVT/ABC to cover the story were rebuffed, no comment was the response from the FBI. I witnessed part of the raid, involving over dozen marked and unmarked police vehicles and officers—including people wearing HSI/homeland security vests. Who was detained? Sex workers (undocumented?) or sex traffickers? We don’t know, they have been disappeared. Reports from persons in the county jail suggest five Asian woman were kept there for a day and then moved on by ICE. True? Other unconfirmed reports speak of Asian men held briefly in the jail. How would we know? Who in the county or state government knows? Will they too be sued?

What’s next?

In his statements to the press the Sheriff holds open the prospect of expanding his work ‘in the near future’ by assigning deputies to conduct ICE investigations and detentions outside the jail, on the streets and roads of the county. Given his longstanding support and friendship with Trump, this is likely.

For the county this threatens not just a legal and moral morass but potentially a financial one. The County Budget Director and County legislators already fear Musk’s efforts will lead to the loss of an estimated $142 million in federal funding, not including Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP. Perhaps they are holding out the hope that some of this threatening fiscal cliff can be offset by at least a few millions of the $175 billion to be devoted to ICE?

A more likely prospect is diverting to the jail the results of increasing hunger and homelessness across the county, initiated by severe cuts to federal support of central NY food pantries. Under these conditions a return to the past looms and the jail—already the largest substance use and mental health treatment center in the county—can easily become, as in the past, the county poor house.

Hold on to your hats–and watch for the impact on our streets and roads and in our homes.


Broome County Alms House 1876

ICE and Our Local Police: Partners in Surveillance?

March 11, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Are local police forces turning over data on every car passing on our roads to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of Trump’s deportation drive? That’s the question raised by a March 12th article in the Guardian on Westchester County NY on “Ice accessed car trackers in sanctuary cities that could help in raids, files show” . From what we know, this would seem to have long been local policy in Binghamton and Broome County.

A year ago I posted an article warning of such possibilities: “Hochul’s Watching You (and so is your local PD). It provides details on the rise of license plate readers (LPRs) deployed by local city police forces, the Broome County Sheriff and SUNY-Binghamton. Governor Hochul recently provided over $1 million to expand the system locally. The Sheriff alone received $840,000.

LPRs collect and distribute data on every passing car through contracts with private corporations, e.g. Flock, whose standard practice is to share and send streams of data to local and Federal law enforcement agencies.  LPR data is locally compiled and shared with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies through the recently expanded regional intelligence center, aka “crime analysis center,” housed in the Binghamton Police Department and funded and directed by New York State.

For those working to support undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylees,  the danger has always lurked in the background that license plate readers will be used to locate, arrest, and deport persons.  Most deportations take place through everyday actions by officers, e.g. after police or sheriff deputies stop persons on streets or cars and discover undocumented persons.  Are local cities and the county sheriff sharing the data directly with ICE?  One must assume so, given the nature of the contracts with Flock and other corporations. The Sheriff has long celebrated the use of LPRs and has been a vocal Trump supporter.  The Broome County jail regularly houses dozens of persons for the Federal government, including pesons held on Federal migration charges, and earns $ 1 million or so every year from doing so. Section 413.4 of the  Binghamton Police Department’s Policy Manual explicitly states their officers will contact ICE and hold persons for them.  Binghamton University cooperates with the intelligence center as well and has a representative from its force on the center’s board of directors.

We need to know more.  Does Flock and other contractors share data and with whom?  Do local city and county governments, and SUNY-Binghamton, affirm and validate the collection and distribution of data on everyone to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and ICE?  We don’t know. We should. Ask your local representatives.

And next time you drive down Riverside Drive,

or Vestal Parkway

or Main and Floral

or enter the SUNY-Binghamton campus,

do wave to the camera overhead.

 

 

 

 

 

How Trump’s immigration policy could impact Binghamton, Broome County

November 15, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin Op-Ed, 11/15/2024

How Trump’s immigration policy could impact Binghamton, Broome County

William Martin, Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University, writes about the implications Trump’s deportation policy could have in Broome County.

William Martin
Guest Columnist

Anticipating President-elect Trump’s arrival, they are preparing to close the southern border. Not the United States, but Canada, which is expecting a surge of refugees across its border with the U.S. And New York State is again the passageway from south to north. How will local officials and agencies react?

For Broome County, Trump’s policies portend a bonanza or a disaster depending on where you sit, what forces you control, and whose interests you serve.

The financial benefit is already in place: the county now gets $100 to $300 per day for every federal detainee held in the jail. Indeed it’s a way to maximize county profits by using, as explicitly stated in 2024 County Budget objectives (p153), “available cell space to generate revenue” by housing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees.

Meanwhile, the county has forcefully acted to prevent refugees from settling here. In May 2023, Democratic County Executive Jason Garnar was among the first of over 30 upstate counties to declare a state of emergency, which prohibited local hotels from housing refugees and migrants. Republican Broome County Sheriff Frederick Akshar promptly dispatched deputies to enforce the order.

Gov. Hochul has recently contributed to the effort by allocating over $2 million to Broome County and local city governments to vastly expand policing and surveillance devices. More identification, stops, and searches are on the way. The Sheriff alone is putting in 65 more cameras with his $834,000, adding to the City of Binghamton’s existing and expanding system. SUNY Binghamton has its own system, too.

Much more is coming. Trump promises that money is no object in the effort to track, detain and hold migrants and refugees. Funding will be in the billions — some estimates run to $1 trillion — raising new possibilities and dangers. Finding millions of migrants will require the assistance of state and local police departments. Nearby federal detainee centers, as in Batavia, have little or no room — thus the reliance already on county jails. Broome County’s jail, expanded in 2016 to house 600 persons, now regularly has less than half that number. Will refugees and migrants soon fill it? Empty local dormitories and apartments — as in the still-vacant Bible School Park complex in Johnson City — are other possibilities.

Broome County has a mixed historical record here, welcoming at times large inflows of migrants, most notably from southern and eastern Europe. In the 1920s during the last Great Depression and worldwide trade war, Binghamton became the state headquarters of the Klu Klux Klan, hosting Klan meetings, hillside cross burnings and hooded parades on Main Street, including marches against non-Protestant, most prominently Catholic and Italian, immigrants.

Faced with radical new federal policies and billions, what will county, city, and police officials do? What plans are being put in place now? How will local community leaders, including pastors and the Broome County Council of Churches, and social service organizations, respond? We do not know. Let the conversation begin, in public.

William Martin is Professor Emeritus, SUNY-Binghamton.

BC Jail: Another death–and a win on calling rates

July 19, 2024 / / 0 Comments

First the good news:  after much national protest and pressure, the Federal Communication Commission has trimmed back the super-profits of jails and prisons from telephone and video calls. These incredible rates have been generating $ millions for the BC jail’s private contractor and the Sheriff’s own slush fund (he rakes off a 44% cutback as reported here).  A new schedule of maximum charges will come into effect on April 1, 2025. For Broome County this would reduce the cost of telephone calls from 25¢ (often much more due to fees) to no more than 7¢, and for video calls from 25¢ or much more to 12¢.  All still far too much. More information is here in the report by Prison Policy Initiative.

The sad news: yet another report of an unnecessary death in the BC jail due to medical maltreatment, in a story laying out the malfeasance of the jail’s private medical provider that pursues profit at the cost of death.  This time the story from NYFocus starts with the Broome County Jail and covers the whole state:

“Brandon Loori had been locked up in the Broome County Jail for less than a week in May 2022 when he called his mom…”

Perhaps its time for local legislators and pastors to provide some oversight and visit the jail, unannounced, as they are allowed to by state law? Or perhaps the health department might investigate?  And where is  the County Legislature review inquiry mandated by The State Commission of Correction? The SCOC report on Loori’s deathends with this directive to the Chair of the BC Legislature: “the County Legislature shall review the above findings and conduct an inquiry into the fitness of the currently designated provider.”

As in the past, County Legislators fail to act.

***

Extracts from a highly redacted State Commission of Correction report on Loori’s death (full text here)

FINDINGS:
1. Branden Loori was a 38-year-old male who died on 6/13/22 due to septic emboli to the lung from infective endocarditis following his release from the custody of the Broome County Sheriff at the Broome County Jail (CJ). The Medical Review Board has found that there was a failure by medical staff to perform adequate assessments and recognize clinical indicators that hospitalization was necessary. The Board opines that had Loori been properly assessed and timely transferred to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment, his death may have been prevented….

The Medical Review Board opines that Loori exhibited clear signs of an acute illness, consistent with a possible PE and/or acute coronary syndrome and should have been immediately sent to the hospital for an evaluation at that time….

The Medical Review Board opines that there was a complete failure by the medical staff to properly assess and provide treatment for a gravely ill individual….

The Medical Review Board opines that there was an unacceptable delay of over 48 hours in obtaining hospital level care for Loori and his documented worsening condition. Had Loori been timely sent to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment, his death could have been prevented….

TO THE CHAIR OF THE BROOME COUNTY LEGISLATURE:
As the appointing authority for the delivery of jail incarcerated individual health services pursuant to Correction Law section 501, the County Legislature shall review the above findings and conduct an inquiry into the fitness of the currently designated provider….

Hochul’s Watching You (and so is your local PD)

June 17, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Hochul’s Watching You (and so is your local PD)

By Bill Martin / June 16, 2024

Get ready: Governor Hochul is now building a mass surveillance system across the upstate region. And it’s coming this month to your local police department and county Sheriff. The end product? Cameras that can record and track every car entering and moving about Broome County, with results transmitted to the regional intelligence center in downtown […]

Enforce the laws: slave labor, abuse and illegalities at the Broome County jail

April 20, 2024 / / 1 Comment

On April 18, 2024 Legal Services filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Frederick J. Akshar, Broome County Jail administrator Robert Charpinsky, Corrections Officer Philip Stephens, Broome County, and Trinity Services Group (the jail’s food subcontractor headquartered in Florida). It charges them with enslaving free persons, forced and unpaid labor, harmful and unlawful coercion, and violating state labor laws. Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier has issued a press release with more detail and a call to action. Further reading on prisons, jails and forced labor may be found here.

The Broome County Jail and its Sheriff have lost successive lawsuits over wrongful deaths (Alvin Rios, Salladin Barton, the outstanding Thomas Husar case), sexual and racial abuse (most recently the Holland case), and the beating of youth (the Vega and Legal Services youth case) as reported on this blog and elsewhere in the media. The continuing problem: there is no active oversight as this latest lawsuit shows us yet once again. The State Commission of Correction, consisting of a retired Sheriff and a former NYC Department of Corrections administrator, has proven to be more adept at forcing the building of new jails than protecting the unfortunate persons who end up in county jails. The result is that even the thin laws and regulations formally protecting those in the hidden cells and cages of county jails are widely ignored. The damage is widespread–and thanks to local activists and activists increasingly coming to light.

We need systemic solutions to a systemic problem. JUST closes it press release by (1) calling on local legislators to cosponsor and promote two bills before the State Assembly and Senate that would end slavery and provide new oversight of labor in state prisons (but not jails in the bill, yet), and (2) asking “County and State officials, including the Attorney General, Comptroller and our elected representatives, to provide independent oversight of the jail and its operations as they are empowered to do under state laws”.

Here are three areas that show the systemic problem in three critical areas covered by limited existing laws and regulations:  sexual and racial abuse, medical and health violations, and financial malfeasance imposed on those in the jail as it has become the center for displaced, discarded, ill and impoverished residents of the county.

The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, their families, and local activists have long written state and county authorities, legislators, and the press in all these areas. The Comptroller, Attorney General, and State and County Health Departments should at the very least do their legal duty.  State law empowers all local Assembly and Senate members to make unannounced inspection visits to jails.  Some state legislators have done so in their counties. But not yet in Broome County. They need to do so.

Sexual and Racial Abuse

Public records provided by successive and successful lawsuits by families (wrongful deaths), Legal Services of Central NY (youth and Vega abuse cases), and NYCLU (Makkyla Holland case) have documented in detail rampant and continuing racial and sexual abuse in the Broome County jail. Yet the abuse continues and abusers go unpunished. Officers continue to abuse persons of color with the ready use of the n-word, while sexually abusive treatment and language are directed toward women, men, and LGBTQ persons alike.  Allegations of rape circulate. Not a single person has ever been disciplined for these behaviors. Complaints and grievances by incarcerated persons of violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 are not allowed to be filed; grievances of any sort are regularly denied contrary to state law as documented yearly by the State Commission of Correction, including in the most recent March 2024 inspection report.

March 2024 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the Broome County Jail, “Commission staff reviewed several grievance packages and found that the grievance coordinator continues to issue determinations that grievable grievances are non-grievable.”
 
Bill Martin, Truthout, March 24, 2024, “In NY Jails, Prisoners Must Submit Their Abuse Grievances to Their Abusers,” Can openly transphobic and homophobic jailers be relied upon to enforce nondiscrimination settlements? Can disabled and injured youth, especially young Black men, depend upon legal settlements to end abuse in our jails?
Medical and Health Violations

State law now requires medically assisted treatment for persons with substance use, and the Broome County Jail handbook lays out procedures for MAT.  Yet these are not followed. JUST members and family visiting the incarcerated are regularly told of instances of persons detoxing without MAT;  attempts by persons to get on methadone are denied for weeks and months, despite appeals to UHS and OASAS offices in Broome County and regional headquarters.  Media reports, most recently in NYFocus, document the problem in detail. Unsanitary conditions and severe shortcomings in medical procedures are regularly reported, even by the State Commission on Correction’s own annual inspections with no external oversight and follow-up provided.  State law requires county health departments to inspect the jail but as the Sheriff has reported to the State Commission of Correction every year, the BC Health Department has not provided any inspection reports and apparently refuses to inspect the facility.

NYFocus, Sept 27, 2023: “‘Doom County Jail’: Dysfunction Plagues Program for Incarcerated Opioid Users. Men locked up in the Broome County jail describe an opioid treatment program so shoddy, they risk withdrawal, relapse, and overdose.

March 2022 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the  Broome County Jail, “Commission staff spoke with administration and noted that the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection.”

State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7015.3  “The chief administrative officer shall request that the local health authority with jurisdiction over the facility perform annual inspections of the facility. The results of such inspection shall be recorded in writing, together with a summary of the action taken to address any deficiencies, and maintained on file at the facility.”

Financial Malfeasance

Despite a significant drop in the number of persons incarcerated, the budget for the jail has steadily grown while funding for community health and social services has steadily been cut.  There remain however no oversight of jail finances and financial irregularities that contravene state law persistently appear. The sheriff recently had to admit that the county had been billed for and paid their out-of-state medical provider $250,000 for services that were not provided.  There were no fines or investigation. In order to meet basic hygiene and food needs, the incarcerated and their families spend $ millions at the jail commissary. State regulations require the Sheriff to spend his considerable profits (up to 44%) from unconscionable costs for commissary, telephone, video and tablet use –e.g. calls to family cost 4 cents/minute from state prisons, but 25 cents per minute from the BC jail—on the rehabilitation of inmates.  Yet there is no accounting of the $ millions accumulated from these fees; past investigations reveal purchases range from lawn tractors, trailers, to retirement party costs.  State and county authorities need to investigate and conduct an audit of jail purchases and expenditures.

State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7016.1 “ (b) The prices of any items offered for sale shall be fixed by the sheriff, or official in charge, to the extent that the commissary operation will be self-supporting and will provide a modest return above costs. (c) Profits resulting from commissary sales shall be deposited in a separate bank account and shall be utilized only for purposes of prisoner welfare and rehabilitation.”

JUST May 13, 2019 letter to County Executive and SCOC (unanswered),  “an examination of the county records regarding jail commissary and related accounts suggest significant irregularities. We request that you conduct a thorough examination and audit of the accounts for at least the last three years.”

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