Latest news with #Estancia
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Prep baseball: West Ranch defeats Mater Dei to capture Southern Section Division 2 title
It was a night when gnats came out by the hundreds at Cal State Fullerton's Goodwin Field. Fans swatted them away. Players endured. 'In my ears, on my eyes,' said West Ranch pitcher Hunter Manning of the insect invasion. 'You have to keep going.' After 101 pitches in the Southern Section Division 2 championship game Saturday night, Manning celebrated by catching a pop fly for the final out with runners on second and third to close out a 2-1 win over Mater Dei and finish his senior season with a 10-0 pitching record as he heads off to UC Irvine. It was the final game for coach Ryan Lindgreen, who is stepping down to devote more time to his three young children. Like last season when Hart coach Jim Ozella ended his coaching career with a Division 2 championship, Lindgreen got to celebrate the same way. West Ranch has decided not to play in next week's Southern California regionals. Errors got Mater Dei in trouble from the beginning, when a dropped fly ball off a hit by leadoff batter Landon Hu led to a West Ranch run in the first inning. Then a throwing error on a ground ball set up an RBI single by Ryan Oh in the fourth for a 2-0 lead. Manning was in control for much of the game. He retired the first nine batters in order and finished with six strikeouts and no walks. But a one out error in the seventh gave Mater Dei an opening as Manning began to tire. Bradley Beaudreau singled and Brady Guth hit an RBI single to make it 2-1. After a fly out, Mater Dei had the tying and winning runs at second and third. On a 3-and-1 count to CJ Ciampa, Manning caught a pop up between home and first, launching the West Ranch celebratory dogpile. This team had two no-hitters in the playoffs and a walk-off hit from Ty Diaz in the semifinals to come away with the first championship in school history. Manning also gets bragging rights in the family. His uncle, Pat, was a top player at Mater Dei in 1999 and teammate of Mater Dei coach Richard Mercado. Glendora 2, San Dimas 0: Aaron Jacobsen delivered two doubles and the pitching duo of Tanner Gable and Brayden Johnson combined for the shutout in the Division 3 championship game. Johnson threw the final 3⅔ innings, allowing one hit with two strikeouts and no walks. Santiago Garza had three hits. Estancia 4, Pasadena Marshall 3: A three-run triple by Jake Humphries in the bottom of the seventh inning wiped out a 3-1 deficit and gave Estancia the Division 6 championship.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Jake rakes walk-off as Estancia baseball wins second CIF championship
FULLERTON — The Estancia High baseball team has held tightly onto the belief all season that hard work could mean eventual success. It started with the first game of the season, a 15-3 loss to Woodbridge that veteran coach Nate Goellrich called 'ugly, putting it nicely.' 'We went down the line after the game and I told the guys that was going to define our year,' Goellrich said. 'We can either work to get better, or it was just going to be a lost year. To their credit, man, they worked hard.' Like the season itself, the most important game of the campaign also didn't start well. Estancia gave up three runs in the top of the first inning to Pasadena Marshall on Saturday in the CIF Southern Section Division 6 championship game. Undeterred, senior starting pitcher Vaughn McCrea and junior reliever Lincoln Silva shut out Marshall the rest of the way. In the bottom of the seventh, things set up for senior Jake Humphries to be the hero. The only remaining player from the program's first CIF title team in 2022 delivered, stroking a bases-loaded triple to deep right field to score three and help Estancia earn a 4-3 victory. 'This title means everything,' Humphries said. 'This team had so much perseverance. We had a good season, but man, we got kicked down so many times. But it's about how many times we got right back up. It's amazing.' Marshall (20-7-1), which shares the Eagle mascot with Estancia, jumped out to the lead in the opening frame. The designated visitors scored three unearned runs after Trevor Lam reached on a one-out infield error. Nate Callaway's double brought him home, then a single by Ben Muro scored two more runs. Estancia (20-13) answered with a run in the bottom of the second, courtesy of a two-out rally. Carlos Hauser drew a full-count walk, then No. 9 hitter Athan Perez followed with a single to right. The lineup flipped and leadoff hitter Miles Dodge roped a double to right-center to bring home Perez. That was all Estancia would get off Marshall ace pitcher and senior left-hander Caleb Thatcher. He threw 5 ⅔ innings, allowing the lone run on four hits. He walked four and struck out 10. The score stayed the same until the bottom of the seventh. McCrea, bound for Lewis and Clark University in Oregon, kept Marshall at bay for the rest of the game until departing with two outs in the top of that frame. 'It was just a journey,' McCrea said of the season. 'We were projected to finish last in league and we just won CIF. It's a big switch-up from what everybody thought.' Silva allowed a double to left to Callaway in the seventh, but a Marshall pinch-runner was easily out at home, with Estancia junior catcher Sawyer Atkinson supplying the tag. Goellrich joked that Silva was a 'super vulture' in the playoffs, earning three wins in each game that McCrea started, also including the opening 10-8 win over Alhambra and a walk-off, nine inning 4-3 win over Pacifica Christian in the Division 6 quarterfinals. The CIF quarterfinals, semifinals and title game all ended with the same 4-3 score and Estancia on top. On Saturday, Estancia immediately put pressure on Marshall in the bottom of the seventh. No. 2 hitter Jacob Ramirez led off with a single to right and Atkinson walked. Cleanup hitter Nico Viramontes, who had previously been hit by a pitch twice in the game, poked a single to shallow right-center to load the bases with nobody out. Callaway, the Marshall relief pitcher, quickly got to an 0-and-2 count on Humphries. But Humphries battled back with the walk-off triple over the right-fielder's head on a 2-and-2 count four pitches later. The ball rolled to the base of the wall. 'I knew the wind was blowing out all game, and I saw him running in and I thought this might have a chance,' said Humphries, who also had the walk-off hit against Pacifica Christian. 'I was screaming, 'Get over his head,' and what do you know, it went over his head. Having the boys rally was amazing.' Viramontes slid across the plate with the winning run, setting off a wild celebration. Estancia had clinched the title in dramatic fashion, as it did when it edged Anaheim 2-1 in 11 innings for the Division 6 crown in 2022. 'It's been amazing,' said Viramontes, who is also 9-0 on the mound. 'I don't think I could ask for any better ride than this. We fought hard for this, and I feel like we deserve it by the way we played. This group of guys is special. We never back down to anyone … I feel like when we have pressure on us is when we're most powerful, and we just showed it right there.' Dodge finished with a pair of hits for Estancia, which earned its second CIF title in four years in Goellrich's second stint as head coach. He was also head coach from 2011-2017, before returning in 2021, turning a fifth-place in league team from the year before into the program's first CIF titlist. Now Estancia has doubled up. Goellrich said each championship was special in its own right, and that he's proud that Estancia did it with neighborhood kids. 'We've got the private schools around us that try to take our best players, and we've got the public schools that act like private schools that try to take our best players,' Goellrich said. 'My first stint as head coach and now, I want people that want to be here. These guys are here, and we work hard with what we've got. We've got a successful program, and that's all we can ask for. 'If you don't want to win CIF championships, then don't come to Estancia, right?' Estancia will now compete in the CIF State Southern California Regional Playoffs, which begins with games on Tuesday, June 3. When the Eagles won their first CIF Southern Section title in 2022, they also earned a regional crown. 'We've got our banquet [Sunday], practice Monday and we'll get ready for Tuesday,' Goellrich said.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Estancia baseball back in CIF final after another one-run victory
Everything has fallen into place at the best moment imaginable for Estancia's baseball team, which heads into this weekend's CIF Southern Section finals on a six-game roll and a second title in four seasons in sight. The Eagles, a most uncertain prospect back in February, have emerged from a roller coaster campaign that hadn't gone as desired before the playoffs began two Fridays ago steeled by missed opportunities, fused as championship teams should be, and filled with expectation. Estancia (19-13) rode Nico Viramontes' outside fastball and a growing knack for two-out heroics in Tuesday afternoon's semifinal victory over Rancho Mirage, pulling out another tense 4-3 triumph to set up Saturday's 1 p.m. Division 6 title-game showdown with Marshall (20-6-1) at Cal State Fullerton's Goodwin Field. Viramontes (9-0) surrendered two hits and one unearned run while working out of several jams over six innings and the Eagles twice responded quickly to the visitors' forays to go ahead. 'Our stats are not pretty,' head coach Nate Goellrich said. 'Our batting average is the second-worst batting average in my [14-year] history here. Our team ERA is the second-worst. But we've come together as a group. The chemistry works. We respond when we're down, and all that is is heart. And the ability to understand that they can do it and have faith in themselves, have faith in each other. That's the big thing. 'They've come together at the right time. And that's what you need in the playoffs is that. And can't ask for anything else out of the guys.' Estancia turned a two-run deficit into a 3-2 advantage behind back-to-back run-scoring doubles from Sawyer Atkinson and Viramontes, then Vaughn McCrea's two-out RBI single in the the third. The Eagles answered the Rattlers' audacious tying run in the fifth with a two-out rally in the bottom half of the inning, bringing home Sean Sweeney on Carlos Hauser's single to right field. McCrea got the save with the tying run at third on Jacob Ramirez's racing, diving catch on a dipping fly to shallow left field. 'I'm at a loss of words right now,' said Viramontes, who fell behind after an error gifted Rancho Mirage (18-13) two runs in the top of the third but twice escaped innings unscathed with runners in scoring position. 'We've always dreamed for this, and we worked really hard for it, so it's a great feeling.' This run, one marked by a first-round stand as Alhambra rallied and last week's down-to-the-last-out, extra-inning quarterfinal thriller with Pacifica Christian, followed back-to-back, one-run, late-inning losses a month ago to Coast League champion Century, the first with a piece of the league title within reach. That was, Atkinson noted, 'not the outcome we wanted.' 'It made us want to win this even more,' Viramontes said. 'That's what we're doing right now, showing that we deserve to win this.' Said Atkinson: 'I don't think any of us thought it would go this far. But here we are.' It came down to a series of battles with Rattlers talisman Kobee Finnikin, their only All-CIF honoree after reaching the semifinals last year. He went two for three, was on base four times, scored twice and stole three bases: second, third and home in succession, the last 90 feet for a sixth-inning tie with a two-out dart as Atkinson, Estancia's catcher, tossed the ball back to Viramontes. The Eagles twice duped Finnikin into taking off early, both times from second base, with Viramontes in the first inning and McCrea in the seventh delaying their motions and catching the Cal Baptist-bound shortstop on the basepath. Rancho Mirage had two on with one out the second time. 'We knew coming in their leadoff guy was a little bit undisciplined on the bases,' Goellrich said. 'We knew we could take advantage of that. And that was huge for us. Two spaghetti moves, picking him off, taking that away. That's a lot of their offense.' Rattlers head coach David Shaw had no regrets. 'We live with his energy and his reads,' he said. 'It's something we will definitely learn from, but I don't ever second-guess that kid. He's our fire.' Estancia's two-out acumen was pivotal. The Eagles put seven runners on base after the second out, five into scoring position, and, with McCrea's and Hauser's singles, brought two of them home. 'It's something coaches pounded in on us, working with two outs, finding a way on,' Atkinson said. 'That's been a thing all year. We just keep finding our way on with two outs, and that's what makes our team. That's what gets us the wins, you know?' Goellrich said he's 'pretty sure about 80% our runs in the playoffs are with two outs.' 'That just shows the heart, the character of these guys,' he said. 'We have that next-guy mentality, and they really bought into that philosophy. So an inning's never over.' The Eagles will take that approach into Saturday's final. 'Baseball is the toughest championship to win, right?' Goellrich said. 'We told our guys, even coming into the playoffs, you're here, go out and win. See what happens. And so for us to be there the second time in four years is huge. But we're not satisfied. We'll go out and give us our best shot. And, you know, the goal will be [to go] 1-0. 'Just go 1-0 that day. Doesn't matter how. Doesn't need to be pretty. A win's a win.'
Los Angeles Times
25-05-2025
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Estancia baseball walks off against Pacifica Christian, advances to CIF semifinals
Estancia High baseball senior Jake Humphries is the last remaining player on the roster from the Eagles' 2022 CIF championship team. Humphries was a bench guy as a freshman on that squad; his older brother Tyler playing a bigger role. Still, there is something to be said for having that kind of experience when making one last run. When he saw a 2-and-0 hanging curveball in the bottom of the ninth inning Friday, Humphries knew exactly what to do with it. 'You've got runners at the corners,' he said after the game. 'All you've got to do is just poke something, get something to the outfield, allow your team to have a fighting chance really.' Humphries laced a single over the shortstop and into the outfield, scoring junior teammate Sawyer Atkinson from third base and starting a wild celebration on the Estancia baseball diamond. The Eagles had rallied for a 4-3 win over next-door neighbor Pacifica Christian Orange County in the quarterfinals of the CIF Southern Section Division 6 playoffs. Estancia (18-13) will stay at home to face Rancho Mirage in a Division 6 semifinal game on Tuesday. The team graduated a senior-laden squad a year ago, and Humphries is one of just four seniors this year, but Estancia again finds itself in the final four. 'We're not going to rebuild,' said Eagles coach Nate Goellrich, whose team finished second in the Coast League. 'People were saying that around us, but we were just saying that we were retooling all year. So for us to qualify for playoffs and now being in the semifinals, credit to the seniors, credit to the kids for just buying in. Our expectation is that we're going to win, and we've been fortunate to do that so far.' Pacifica Christian (14-12), in just its fourth varsity year, has also gotten used to winning. The Tritons made the Division 8 title game a year ago. They were close to knocking out the Eagles on Friday. The visitors took a 3-0 lead in the third inning, with Taisen Morishita, Blake Hayes and Scout Escobedo all crossing the plate. Morishita scored on a wild pitch, while John Coopman's sacrifice fly and a single to center by Luke Miller plated the other runs. Tritons starting pitcher Jon Stone was cruising, but Estancia answered with a pair of unearned runs in the fourth, as Atkinson and Nico Viramontes both walked to lead off the inning and came around to score. Jon Stone went four innings for Pacifica Christian, allowing just one hit, and he was followed by Josiah Miller and Carter Canada on the mound. 'Josiah hasn't pitched in weeks, and he came out and battled for us,' said first-year Pacifica Christian head coach Beau Amaral, a former Huntington Beach High and UCLA standout who played six seasons in the Cincinnati Reds organization. 'I was really proud of him for that. Carter coming in, he's a freshman. I couldn't be more proud of our guys. It's not the outcome we wanted, but they battled.' Amaral's father Rich went to Estancia before a 10-year career in Major League Baseball. He had his Estancia jersey retired and currently works as a scout for the Baltimore Orioles. 'He couldn't make it today,' Beau Amaral said. 'He's out in North Carolina right now.' Dad's alma mater ended up with the victory. Down to its last out, Estancia evened the score at 3-3 in the bottom of the seventh, with Atkinson's two-out double off the left-field wall scoring Athan Perez. Goellrich said as Atkinson goes, so Estancia's offense goes. 'I thought it was out,' the Eagles junior said of the seventh-inning smash. 'I was seeing the ball well all day long, I just was having trouble sitting back on my back leg. I was kind of lunging forward. The pitcher had some [velocity] on him, so I was just thinking sit back and drive from there.' The clutch hit set the stage for the ninth inning heroics for Estancia. Senior pitcher Vaughn McCrea went eight innings for the Eagles before junior Lincoln Silva got the win in relief, throwing a scoreless ninth inning. Humphries said he's glad Estancia will be back at home Tuesday for the semifinals. 'We grew up our whole life in Costa Mesa, and we didn't transfer out or go to any special school,' he said of himself and his teammates. 'We stayed at our hometown school, and it's really cool to see everyone who watched us from T-ball all the way up just stay in the same environment. I feel like it's just a really cool thing to see the community come together.' Fountain Valley 5, Torrance 2: Senior Logan Hunt pitched five shutout innings for the Barons in Friday's Division 2 playoff quarterfinal game on the road. Tyler Peshke, Drake Robinson and Josh Grack each had a pair of hits for Fountain Valley (18-13), which took a 5-0 lead into the seventh inning. Anthony Zamora and Isaac Lomeli each drove in a run. Fountain Valley will play at Mater Dei in a Division 2 semifinal game Tuesday. The Barons will be attempting to advance to their first CIF title game since 1996. Glendora 2, Costa Mesa 1: The Mustangs' season ended in the quarterfinals of the Division 3 playoffs Friday at Costa Mesa High. Pitchers Troy Simmonds and Will Morales combined to yield no earned runs for Costa Mesa, while Wylan Rottschafer was one for three with a double and run batted in. Golden West League champion Costa Mesa finished the season 24-7, the 24 wins representing a single-season program record.
Bloomberg
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Like a growing number of US communities, Torrance County, New Mexico, is convinced its financial survival depends on locking up immigrants.
Graphics by Elena Mejia Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli Photos & video by Adam Golfer and TJ Proechel The sun is still beating down on the scrubby New Mexico dirt when an army-green bus pulls into the parking lot of the Torrance County Detention Facility in the small town of Estancia. Behind barred windows, the silhouettes of dozens of men are just visible. Many of them have never been to New Mexico before. It's March, and New Mexico is cooler, drier, browner than Florida, where they were this morning before being forced onto a plane, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and flown here. They're in New Mexico because US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running out of space. In the wake of President Donald Trump 's promise to pursue the biggest immigration crackdown in US history, men such as the ones on this bus are being targeted by ICE and local law enforcement in unprecedented ways. The detention facilities closer to home are overflowing. So ICE brings them here, to an ICE town. John, who's from the Tampa area, sits on the other side of those bars, watching the bus crawl closer to the sand-colored detention compound jutting out of the flat earth. His vision isn't good right now; someone fell on him and broke his glasses while he was sleeping on the floor at an ICE facility in Miami. John, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation for talking to the press, was picked up at a regular check-in for a special program typically reserved for first-time offenders of nonviolent crimes. Now he's almost 2,000 miles from home, from his grandmother, from his two dogs. He knew it was a bad sign when he overheard ICE officers talking about his impending transfer, but he didn't know where he was going until the plane was ready for takeoff. Over the next few weeks, John will spend sleepless nights shivering in his cell. He'll join an impromptu Bible study with other guys in his unit and watch the younger ones share their coats with older men during recreation time. He'll eat in a room with a floor covered in feces. He'll ask, many times, for supplies to clean it up. He'll see a nurse for his back and his vision and his climbing blood pressure. He'll receive nothing but Tylenol. He'll participate in a hunger strike. He'll watch men drink water out of a trash can brought in when the facility's water is shut off. And he'll gradually start to long to be deported to El Salvador, a country he barely knows, where he hasn't lived since he was a child. He'll want this but won't get it, because this is an ICE jail with hardly any ICE officers. Maybe things could have been different. While John's plane sat on the tarmac at the Miami airport, Linda Jaramillo sat in a jailhouse turned government building in Estancia, the county seat, discussing the private detention center that would soon detain him. Torrance County's more than $2 million-a-month contract with ICE was set to expire unless Jaramillo and her two fellow county commissioners voted to extend it. Immigration lawyers and advocates were there to beg them not to. The Torrance County Detention Facility is one of the system's most troubled, they argued. It has a long history of failures that at one point led a federal watchdog to demand an immediate evacuation, something ICE declined to do after disputing the findings. At the meeting, an activist read testimony from a man detained at the facility who said he had to wait almost four hours for an ambulance to take him to get treatment for a third-degree burn he got while working in the kitchen to make money to call his family. 'Please, truly, we need help from people outside,' the advocate read. 'We're human beings. Please. We're not prisoners, we're not animals. We're human beings. I urge you to not extend the contract.' No one spoke in favor of extending the county's ICE agreement. No one had to. Since signing the contract six years ago, the Torrance County Commission has voted to approve regular extensions without much hand-wringing over its role in US immigration policy. Jaramillo is the newest commissioner, the only woman and the only Spanish speaker. A Republican, she came to her current job with a quarter century of experience as the county clerk under her belt, but serving as commissioner is different—she has more power now, she says. On that day she pledged to use her authority to visit the facility, to see for herself what it was really like inside. And then she voted to extend the ICE contract. This is an ICE town, after all: a community convinced that its financial survival depends on locking people up. It's not a new phenomenon. In this iteration of the classic prison town, though, many of the people behind bars haven't been convicted of crimes. Estancia's economic engine is fueled by a growing supply of immigrants in ICE custody. These aren't people who've recently entered the US; border crossings have slowed dramatically. In a lot of cases, the people detained in Torrance County had been living in the US for years when they were picked up in the raids sweeping the country as Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. More Immigrants Are Getting Arrested Across the US Number of people in ICE detention centers by arrest type Trump needs these towns, and he needs local officials who are willing—and sometimes eager—to sign deals that keep private detention facilities open no matter the conditions inside. The Trump administration has sought to remove the discretion used by prior administrations to release detained people before immigration hearings, prompting a rush for detention space that could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Already, some 30 new counties have started using their jails for immigration detention via arrangements with the federal government. And if the administration has its way, the government will soon be doling out as much as $45 billion more in detention contracts. Torrance County gets paid by ICE to detain immigrants, but it doesn't keep the money. That flows to CoreCivic Inc., a behemoth in the private prison industry and the owner and operator of the detention facility. As much as Estancia is an ICE town, it's a CoreCivic town too. The company provides jobs—about 93 of them in a county with a population of about 16,000—and a lot of tax revenue, plus beds the county can use, for a price, to hold locals. ICE Relies Heavily on Private Detention Centers ICE facilities by type of ownership and average population Across its two ICE detention facilities in New Mexico, CoreCivic provides more than 300 jobs, with most staff living near or within the counties, a company spokesperson said in an email. The company pays more than $40 million annually in impact fees, salaries and benefits, utilities and tax revenue, he said. CoreCivic doesn't enforce immigration laws and has no say over whether someone is deported, released or transferred, Brian Todd, the spokesperson, wrote in an email. 'CoreCivic is committed to providing safe, humane and appropriate care for the people in our facilities,' he said. 'Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to.' Jaramillo, like pretty much everyone else here, knows a lot of the people who work for CoreCivic. Her brother spent 20 years as a guard at the detention facility. And CoreCivic is always hiring; a sign along the main drag in Estancia advertises a wage of $22.50 an hour and openings for detention officers and 'medical/essential staff.' 'So that's my dilemma,' Jaramillo says. 'I don't want it to close down, because it's a great place for people to work there. But I don't want anybody to be treated cruelly.' Then again, she adds, 'I don't even know if that's true or not.' For more than a hundred years, through the early part of the last century, Torrance County was an agricultural powerhouse: alfalfa, pumpkins, corn and a lot of beans. Mountainair, about 25 minutes from Estancia, proudly called itself the pinto bean capital of the world. The New Mexico Central Railroad and later Route 66 brought Americans from all over to small Torrance towns. Estancia became a destination, boasting a well-regarded newspaper, restaurants, bars and a movie theater. But drought decimated local farms in the 1930s. Crops died, and property values plunged. By the 1970s, Estancia had been dealt another blow, this one human-made. Interstate 40 was built just north of town, and all the travelers and business the town had come to depend on started going elsewhere. If this sounds familiar, that's because it's the plot of the Pixar movie Cars, which Estancia's mayor, Nathan Dial, likes to say is more documentary than fiction. In the movie the town is revitalized when Lightning McQueen, the lead anthropomorphized car, moves his racing headquarters to the area. Estancia has a different savior. CoreCivic was founded as Corrections Corp. of America (CCA) in 1983 by Terrell Don Hutto, Doctor Robert Crants and Tom Beasley. Hutto headed up corrections for the state of Arkansas, Crants was a real estate executive, and Beasley was the chief of the Tennessee Republican Party. The goal was efficiency: Costs would be low, returns high. 'You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers,' Beasley said in a 1988 article in Inc. magazine. They had something else going for them: demand. Ronald Reagan 's war on drugs had created a surge in criminal cases. Then Congress passed the Bail Reform Act of 1984, massively expanding pretrial detention by allowing judges to cite community safety when denying bail. CCA and others in this nascent industry saw an opportunity in New Mexico. Land was cheap, and state politicians were eager. 'At the rate that the federal government needs jail space, we will have plenty of prisoners to fill up all available jail space,' a chief deputy for the US Marshals Service told the Albuquerque Journal in 1990. In November of that year, CCA opened the Torrance County Detention Facility on a patch of then-unincorporated land outside Estancia. News reports put the cost at about $7 million. From 1985 to 1997 the US jail population doubled, and the number of people detained in private facilities worldwide jumped from 3,100 to more than 132,000, the vast majority in the US. CCA captured a chunk of that growth, and New Mexico was at the heart of it. By 2016 the state led the nation in the percentage of its people held by private prison companies. But those trends were starting to change. The Obama administration revised sentencing guidelines for low-level drug offenses. A 2016 Department of Justice memo went a step further, ordering the federal Bureau of Prisons not to renew its contracts with private prison companies. That October, CCA changed its name to CoreCivic, part of a pivot the company said it was making toward the 'real estate solutions business.' The first signs that CoreCivic's business in New Mexico was hurting came in Cibola County, about a two-hour drive west of Estancia, at a correctional facility the company had acquired in the late 1990s. Cibola had also fallen on hard times: The mines that had fueled its economy closed, and people moved out. This prison, as well as a couple of others scattered across the county, became an economic driver. But in 2016, CoreCivic lost its contract with the Bureau of Prisons for the Cibola facility. Under the direction of then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the bureau had begun reducing its reliance on private prisons, with the goal of eliminating such contracts altogether. Cibola, where Bureau of Prisons monitors had documented poor medical care and an investigative report by The Nation detailed missteps relating to a series of deaths, was an obvious target. At the Torrance facility, the number of people in federal custody dropped so much that, in August 2017, CoreCivic told its investors it was idling the detention center. Three months after it closed, Torrance County sought emergency funding from the state government. If CoreCivic was the lifeline for these rural counties, ICE was CoreCivic's. In May 2019, ICE reached a deal with Torrance County that solved the company's problems there. ICE promised to pay for 714 beds every month, whether or not they were filled. CoreCivic had, in effect, guaranteed revenue for a facility in the middle of nowhere. The Torrance County Detention Facility reopened its doors. Immigrants Detained at Torrance Facility on the Rise Again Biweekly average of daily population Prison towns have long claimed that incarceration is their only means to survive. Research suggests that's not true. 'Prison construction impedes economic growth in rural counties, especially in counties that lag behind in educational attainment,' Gregory Hooks, a sociologist who studies prison towns, wrote in a 2010 study of the economic impact on those towns from 1976 to 2004. Maintaining these facilities can divert resources away from community services, Hooks found in another report. But what do you do when a town is already hooked? In New Mexico, local officials point to their counties' economic realities as proof they need these contracts and they need CoreCivic. 'They are better at this than we are,' says Kate Fletcher, Cibola's county manager. For years, the county spent some $5 million annually to detain people at a nearby jail, she says. In late 2016, CoreCivic cut a deal with ICE providing detention services for as many as 1,116 people at the Cibola facility. The next year, CoreCivic began managing the county's inmates, cutting the government's cost significantly. Plus, the county gets a small administrative fee for its role as a middleman. Cibola also hosts a second CoreCivic prison and a state-run detention facility. By rural standards, the area is bustling, and Fletcher says the prisons keep families rooted there. The county is considering selling its closed jail to CoreCivic or the state of New Mexico, she says. That would reopen a fourth facility for detention in Cibola County. In Estancia, CoreCivic provides the bulk of the city's tax revenue. In lieu of a sales tax, New Mexico has something called a gross receipts tax, which charges the seller of goods rather than the buyer. In 2024, 60% of the gross receipts taxes in Estancia were filed under a code for correctional institutions, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek review of state tax data. For CoreCivic it's the guaranteed monthly revenue, passed to it through the county, that makes the ICE contract so valuable. In turn the company must meet certain requirements, including maintaining enough staff to keep the facility running smoothly. If it doesn't, ICE can issue a contract discrepancy report that carries a financial penalty. The last time ICE issued a contract discrepancy report for understaffing was March 2022. CoreCivic's guaranteed monthly pay for the facility was docked 25%, and ICE lowered the minimum beds the agency promised to pay for from 714 to 505. Deportation Inc. A series investigating who's profiting from Trump's immigration crackdown Trump Mass-Deportation Push Overcrowds Miami Krome ICE Center April 24, 2025 The Rising Cost of ICE Flying Immigrants to Far-Flung Detention Centers May 1, 2025 Over time the rate ICE paid for each bed crept up. Last October it started paying $2.3 million a month for 505 beds, over $100,000 more than it paid for 714 beds before the company was penalized. When the ICE population exceeds 505, CoreCivic is paid more. Despite CoreCivic's prominence as a local employer, a big portion of the facility's staff comes from out of town. Many of them are temporary workers, flown in from Houston or elsewhere and put up in local hotels. That was particularly true before a scheduled inspection, according to Michael Sedgwick, who was the assistant warden at the Torrance County Detention Facility from 2020 to 2022. (Before that he held the same role at Cibola.) 'We needed people,' Sedgwick says. 'We just didn't have them. We always needed officers, and we always needed nurses.' Ask around, and locals will explain why. ICE requires that all detention staff pass a criminal history and credit check. 'If you have a small, local community that has no money, they're not going to have good credit,' says Dial, the Estancia mayor. The company has tried to adapt to these circumstances by hiring kids straight out of high school. Dial is in his 50s, carries a Ruger SP101 revolver on his hip and drives a blue Subaru Outback stuffed with old American flags people give him to retire for them. He's an Army vet who did a tour in Afghanistan and calls himself 'a red mayor in a red county in a blue state.' At the March county commission meeting, he'd listened as Sophia Genovese, an immigration lawyer with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, told the county commission that the detention facility is currently holding a group of Afghan men who'd been abandoned in the US's sudden and messy withdrawal. 'These men who saved US and Afghan lives were left behind in the evacuation effort, knowing full well that they'd be killed if they stayed in Afghanistan,' Genovese said during her plea for commissioners to vote against extending the ICE contract. 'These brave men fled to the United States thinking they'd be welcomed. Instead these men have been detained. And what's maddening is that their detention is not required under the law.' Dial says he hadn't heard there were Afghans at the detention facility, but he's not surprised. That's how war is, he says. 'It's nothing personal.' Dial has been an ardent supporter of the ICE contract. He says he's toured the facility as mayor and didn't find any major problems. 'Of all the things the government should be running, it should be prisons,' he says. 'That's my personal opinion. But as mayor, I understand it's the lifeblood of the town.' Federal inspectors have voiced numerous concerns about Torrance. In March 2022 the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security issued a management alert urging that all people in ICE custody be removed from the facility immediately. The alert described 'critical staffing shortages,' saying only 54% of the required positions were filled. CoreCivic disputed the findings and accused inspectors of intentionally misrepresenting evidence. ICE largely sided with CoreCivic and balked at the report. The agency said an inspector had 'acted unprofessionally' when they stated 'there's no way detainees should be housed here.' ICE also rejected the inspector general's staffing figures, arguing that CoreCivic was in compliance with its contract. In the summer of 2022, Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian man in ICE custody at the Torrance County Detention Facility, died after hanging himself from a shelf with a bedsheet. In a report published by ICE after his death, the agency's external reviews and analysis unit said it had found that eight staff members lacked documentation proving they'd completed required training, though the agency said this shouldn't be 'construed as contributory' to Vial's death. The company said in a statement that it was 'deeply saddened' by his death. A month after the death, the inspector general released a full report with several recommendations regarding staffing and other concerns. ICE and CoreCivic agreed to many of them. Do you have a tip? Bloomberg wants to hear from people who've had experience with immigration contractors. Share your story In February of this year, a group of whistleblowers who worked at the facility sent a letter to Congress accusing CoreCivic of regularly falsifying documents to cover up chronic understaffing. The letter urged Congress to investigate what it called 'likely fraud' and 'abusive conditions.' In response to the letter, CoreCivic said it 'vehemently' denied the allegations and that it had 'no evidence that would support that our staff at the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) falsified documents or colluded with inspectors during any federal inspection.' Sedgwick, the former assistant warden, and three other former CoreCivic employees in New Mexico say they raised repeated concerns about staffing shortages to management. They also say they were forced to do jobs for which they'd received little to no training. 'I wouldn't want my family members at that facility,' says one employee who left the company in December and asked not to be named for fear of retribution. 'I thought I could be the change. That wasn't the case.' In response to questions from Businessweek, CoreCivic pointed to recent audits by the ICE Office of Detention Oversight, which gave the Torrance County Detention Facility and the Cibola County Correctional Center overall 'good' ratings in the 2024 fiscal year, and 'superior' ratings in the 2025 fiscal year. Under Trump, detention oversight is being rolled back. In February border czar Tom Homan said the administration was working to reduce federal inspections of local jails and prisons that hold people for ICE. The Department of Homeland Security has since moved to dismantle the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, two branches that have documented past problems at the Torrance County Detention Facility. John's bus in late March wasn't the first one bringing men from Florida to Torrance County. It wasn't even the first one that week. More and more, the beds at the detention facility are being filled by men who, like John, were picked up in raids and crackdowns a cross the country. In Trump's first month in office, roughly a third of the people held at New Mexico detention centers were apprehended more than 500 miles away, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. That figure was less than 13% under President Joe Biden. ICE Transfers People to New Mexico From Longer Distances Four-week average of people sent to New Mexico by Trump or Biden By late April, the men at Torrance were dealing with a new crisis. A pump at one of Estancia's main water wells wasn't working, and water to the facility was being intermittently shut off, leaving CoreCivic to rely on its storage tanks. CoreCivic 'indicated that failing to meet the water needs of the facility could result in implications for the current ICE agreement,' according to notes from an April 29 meeting with local officials. The next evening, during an emergency gathering at the Estancia library, Ryan Schwebach, one of Jaramillo's fellow county commissioners, told the crowd that CoreCivic was the town's biggest water customer, accounting for about a fifth of Estancia's usage. 'CoreCivic is changing what they're doing within the facility to cut back on water because they're aware of it,' he said. 'I'm very grateful that they're here.' On May 1, the daughter of a Honduran man detained at the facility emailed ICE and CoreCivic. 'Torrance Facility water has not been working for 3 days!! My father reports the smell of feces is intolerable!' the woman, Carol Barrios, wrote. 'This is a crisis!!!' Her father, who's 66 years old and has a history of heart trouble, had been brought to New Mexico from Florida, after he was taken into custody at the Miami airport. He has an unexpired green card but left the country for seven years and returned without applying for a reentry permit. Barrios was concerned enough that she flew to New Mexico that weekend to visit him. There, she says, she found the toilets in the lobby didn't flush, and her father said he had gone four days without a shower. Men detained at the facility said they had been limited to two water bottles a day until CoreCivic brought in coolers with water for them to drink. Trash cans full of water were set out so the men could flush toilets, which were full of waste, they said. The smell of sewage was overwhelming. In emails, CoreCivic said there were no sewage or plumbing issues at the facility, and that water pressure fluctuations had caused some toilets to overflow 'in a few rare occasions.' Showers were placed on a schedule, the company said, but were still available to everyone. ICE, the Marshals Service and the county 'have all been apprised of this situation and are aware of our contingency plans that have been established to manage this situation,' CoreCivic said. On May 8, an ICE official visited the detention facility and met with Barrios' father. 'I am taking all of the things you are reporting seriously,' Mary De Anda-Ybarra, the field office director for ICE's office in El Paso, Texas, wrote in an email to Barrios that night. 'I understand you are looking out for your father, and that is expected.' When reached by phone, De Anda-Ybarra said ICE would be providing comment for this story, but the agency hadn't done so by press time. New Mexico's role in the new detention regime makes some people in this blue state uncomfortable. Earlier this year, while the state legislature was still in session, lawmakers debated a bill that would forbid local governments from contracting with ICE for detention space. Similar efforts had failed in the past, but advocates hoped Trump's crackdown would spur a sense of urgency. The bill died in committee, with the panel's chair, Senator Joseph Cervantes, opting not to hear it. Cervantes, a Democrat, serves an area of the state that includes Otero County, where a 1,000-bed detention facility operates under a contract with ICE. Cervantes says he worried that ending county agreements with ICE risked unintended consequences: What if the federal government started sending more immigrants to states that were less kind to them, such as Texas? There's nothing to suggest they'd be treated any differently in New Mexico. 'It doesn't matter to the people inside that it's a blue state,' says Zoe Bowman, a lawyer with Las Americas, an immigration advocacy group based in El Paso. 'It's really well documented how horrific the conditions are inside New Mexico detention centers.' Absent action from the legislature, immigration advocates have turned their attention to local officials such as Jaramillo. In mid-April she made good on her promise to tour the Torrance County Detention Facility, something Schwebach, the commission chair, said he'd done in the past. She reached out to get clearance, and a couple of days later she was walking the halls alongside the warden. Jaramillo says she visited the library and the kitchen and met with a group of men while the warden waited in the doorway. The floors were clean, she says, and she didn't notice any odor. 'They did complain about the food,' she says. 'We didn't have the time to go into detail. They just said they didn't like the food.' This was before the worst of the overflowing toilets and the concerns with the water supply. Jaramillo has been getting emails from people in the Miami area whose loved ones were transferred to Torrance. She says they're voicing concern about the same types of issues she's been hearing from advocates at commission meetings. 'I saw what I saw, but I hear everybody, all the others, who are emailing me,' she says. As for how Jaramillo will vote in October, when the ICE contract is back on the agenda: 'I'm torn,' she says. Even if she votes against an extension, there'd need to be another no vote to end the contract. That's never happened. —With Catarina Saraiva, Michael Smith, Nacha Cattan, Kayla Shea, Leon Yin and Jason Kao Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Dan Ferrara Graphics editor: Chloe Whiteaker More On Bloomberg
