Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, published detention statistics for fiscal year 2025 last month. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reviewed the data relevant to the Farmville Detention Center and spoke with Bob Leweke about what she found.
RANDI B. HAGI: The Farmville Detention Center in Prince Edward County is one of two ICE detention facilities in the state. Farmville has more than 700 beds and only accepts male detainees. The other facility is in Caroline County and accepts both men and women. The detention statistics published in late June give a glimpse into how President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign is playing out in our area.
BOB LEWEKE: Randi, on Thursday, we heard a Virginia Public Radio report that roughly half of those being kept in these two facilities have no criminal records. So, what did you find from the numbers?
HAGI: The biggest takeaway from this data is that ICE appears to publish conflicting numbers about how many of the people they've detained have committed crimes. Each facility's average daily population is broken down into a number of categories. One is "criminality." Based on that tally, a slight majority of the men incarcerated at Farmville are classified as criminals – about 53%. But the spreadsheet doesn't include a definition of criminality.
However, more detail emerges under the category of "ICE threat level." In the footnotes of the spreadsheet is this statement: "If a detainee has no criminal convictions, he/she will be classified as 'No ICE Threat Level.'" That would mean over 75% of Farmville detainees – three quarters – fall under the category reserved for those with no criminal convictions.
Adding up all detention facilities' threat level data from across the country, nearly 84% of the entire detained population were categorized as having no criminal convictions.
That's in contrast to rhetoric from the Department of Homeland Security which touts President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's "victories … removing violent criminal illegal aliens from American communities."
Detainees who are deemed to pose some level of threat are sorted by "the recency of the criminal behavior and its severity," according to the data footnotes. About 13% of the men held at Farmville over the past year were classified as the highest threat level, which includes those convicted of violent crimes such as murder or kidnapping.
I reached out to ICE on June 24th and again July 1st to set up an interview or get questions answered via email. On the 1st, ICE's regional communications director responded that the field office director was away this week, and if I reach out next week, he “will see what we can work out."
LEWEKE: So, pending answers to those questions, what else do we know from the data?
HAGI: Another piece of information we can glean is the approximate number of total people who passed through the facility's doors in the past fiscal year. The average daily population at the facility was about 549 people, who had an average length of stay of 49 days. I ran these statistics by two local mathematicians who confirmed that, based on these numbers, around 4,000 individuals were held there over the course of the last fiscal year. That's more than two and a half times the number of people who were held there at some point in fiscal year 2024, based on analysis of last year's data.
Another figure that jumped up was the number of individuals who served at least one day in "segregation" each month. According to ICE's National Detainee Handbook, segregation means someone was put in separate housing away from the rest of the detainees, either for disciplinary reasons or what they call an "administrative" issue, like medical or mental health concerns. At Farmville, that number more than doubled from November to December 2024 – from 11 to 26 people – which was, notably, prior to Trump's inauguration. It's stayed up ever since then, peaking at 48 people in segregation in February.
The report does not provide outcome data broken down by facility, so we don't know what happened to the people who went through Farmville, whether they were released or removed. Across the country, more than 180,000 people left an ICE detention facility from October to June – about 72% by deportation.
LEWEKE: And many of these facilities, as you learned, are not federal facilities, but privately owned.
HAGI: Right. So the Farmville facility, while detaining people for the federal government, is privately owned – and it just changed hands.
According to State Corporation Commission records, it used to be overseen by the company Immigration Centers of America-Farmville, which rebranded as Abyon after a merger last January. Its former registered agent was a man named Russell Harper, a real estate developer who was still copied on correspondence between the company and the Farmville Town Council as recently as May. WMRA reached out to him multiple times through his attorney and has not heard back.
But as of July 1st, the detention center has been sold to CoreCivic, according to a company press release. As The Farmville Herald reported, CoreCivic, the second largest private corrections company in the country, acquired the facility for $67 million.
As of the facility's most recent ICE compliance inspection, in December, it passed 21 out of 27 standards. Inspectors found deficiencies in the areas of medical care, self-harm and suicide prevention, recreation, visitation, the grievance system, and staff training. The vast majority of deficiencies were in medical care. They included not providing a proper diet to a man with peanut and red meat allergies; not reporting diagnoses of communicable diseases to ICE including active tuberculosis; and not providing mental health evaluations within 72 hours of a referral. Some of the men referred for mental health treatment never received an evaluation. One of the deficiencies that the facility has been written up for more than once is administering psychotropic medications with [quote] "no documented informed consent."
The inspectors recommended that ICE officials in the Washington, D.C. office work with the facility to bring it into compliance.
LEWEKE: Randi, thank you for the detailed reporting, and we will continue to follow the story.
HAGI: Thank you, Bob.
