The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee sent a letter last week to Mason, Tennessee, officials asking them to halt all actions related to their contracts with CoreCivic and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Last Tuesday, the West Tennessee town voted to reopen its abandoned prison as an ICE detention facility. CoreCivic will run the facility.
At the meeting discussing the prison reopening, protesters kept shouting at town officials.
Despite the public outrage, the Town of Mason Board of Mayor and Aldermen approved a contract with ICE by a 3-2 vote and the Corecivic contract by a 4-1 vote. For each vote, two aldermen abstained from voting.
The prison, which was closed in 2021, is set to provide between 250 and 300 jobs, Mayor Eddie Noeman stated.
Mason is a town of around 1,400 people.
In the letter the ACLU of Tennessee sent the town officials, it said Mason did not follow its own charter. The letter stated for the town to pass any action, a “majority of the members” need to be present.
With the ICE contract, due to it only having three votes, ACLU of Tennessee argued this contract was not legally approved.
“This is a simple matter of following the rules: those in favor of the ICE contract needed a majority of votes to win — and they didn’t have it,” said Stella Yarbrough, legal director for the ACLU of Tennessee.
Yarbrough added that Mason officials can’t ignore their “own laws to push through a harmful contract that will generate $30 million in corporate profits for a for-profit prison company.”
“An abstention is not a ‘yes’ vote. We are demanding that Mayor Noeman and the Board acknowledge this vote failed and immediately halt this illegal arrangement,” she stated.
To end its letter, the left-wing nonprofit asked the town officials to confirm its contract with ICE was not legally approved, stop all activities related to these two contracts, and respond to this letter within seven calendar days.
In addition to these demands, ACLU of Tennessee also filed a public records request about all communications between Mason officials and representatives of CoreCivic and ICE.
“Tennesseans deserve transparency and accountability from their elected officials, not illegitimate deals that endanger our communities. That transparency was completely absent in Mason, where the contract was kept from the public and even from the aldermen themselves until the moment of the vote,” said Phyllida Burlingame, interim executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee.
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at [email protected].
ACLU, we’re gonna build more, tough luck.