An empty prison’s fate
More questions and than answers … Think (water) positively … And that’s not a poll.
Happy Monday, readers!
A shuttered Marana prison once employed 200 people and housed 500 low-security inmates. Now it may reopen as an ICE detention center.
A packed town hall last week revealed that residents are desperate for answers even as local officials remain in the dark.
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Hundreds of Marana residents crowded into an elementary school on Thursday night to find out whether a shuttered private prison nearby will reopen as an ICE detention center.
And although the town hall drew passionate residents and concerned elected officials, it didn’t offer many answers about what comes next for the 500-bed Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility, which the state recently sold back to a private company, the Utah-based Management & Training Corporation (MTC).
By the end of the evening, one thing was clear: The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.
The Town of Marana, Pima County, the State of Arizona, and the federal government — with whom MTC would contract to run an ICE facility — are decidedly not on the same page about the project.
Thursday night’s forum was a textbook example of how communication with the federal government has reached an all-time low — local, county, and state officials have no idea what is coming next for an empty facility that once housed 500 minimum-security inmates and employed 200 people full-time.
Six weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was looking to sizably increase the number of individuals that could be housed in detention centers — specifically identifying Marana as a potential site for a 500-bed facility.
The former low-security jail may have been on the Trump administration’s radar for a while now, considering the state Legislature discussed — but eventually shot down — an effort to lease it to the federal government for $1 a year. Specifically, State Sen. John Kavanagh wanted to lease the site to the feds to house individuals being held for “immigration violations.”
Instead, the state sold the facility to MTC — the company that ran the private prison before the state closed it in 2023 — for $15 million. However, since buying the property, MTC has submitted no plans to reopen the site.
Built in the early 1990s during the Fife Symington administration as Arizona’s first privately-run prison, the facility is already zoned and built for a minimum security prison, so it isn’t clear what permits they would submit prior to re-opening the facility.
For the moment, MTC won’t talk about who the end user will be, noting they are in discussions with multiple agencies.
“We are in discussions with several public agencies that may have a need for additional bed space. The facility’s capacity and configuration would ultimately depend on the specific needs and requirements of each agency,” spokesperson Emily Lawhead told the Republic.
Marana Town Manager Terry Rozema said earlier this summer that MTC informed him that one use of the facility could be as a detention facility.
And ICE isn’t exactly talking either.
Meanwhile, residents are concerned about the prospect of an ICE detention facility opening in their neighborhoods, or excited about the idea of bringing back jobs to the region. They want answers to basic questions like:
When will it open?
Who will staff it?
Will nearby airports — like Pinal Airpark — become a hub for ICE Air Operations?
Will the facility generate traffic 24/7?
One person told the crowd they were so desperate for answers that they’ve been monitoring MTC’s job board to see if any jobs had popped up for the Marana site.
Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen organized the town hall and brought experts to address the crowd and answer questions, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, Just Communities Arizona, and immigration attorney Mo Goldman.
Panelists said they are concerned about oversight of the detention facilities — noting two people have died this year in federal custody here in Arizona — as legal access to inspect such facilities has been curtailed.
Another panelist reminded the audience that a recent report from ProPublica found more than 170 American citizens have been detained by ICE this year.
While Allen organized the town hall and is in close contact with town officials, she said even she doesn’t know if there’s a timeline for next steps for the facility.
Allen invited the hundreds of people seeking answers to submit questions, but she tempered expectations, noting there were questions she didn’t have the answers to, at least not on Thursday night.
On Friday, Allen told us she believes there will be more public forums about the prison’s future, but she still isn’t sure what roles local and county officials will play if MCT contracts with ICE to turn it into a detention center.
We’re not saying the world’s largest retailer invented the phrase “water positive.” But as the Guardian revealed this weekend, Amazon has been pushing the buzzword for years as it attempted to obscure how much water its data centers really use.
So it shouldn’t have shocked anyone when Project Blue boosters rolled out the same talking point this summer: The massive data center complex would be “water positive.”
Yes, the plan promised to rely solely on reclaimed water systems and provide enough money to patch Tucson’s leaky pipes, thus saving water.
But we never loved the phrase “water positive” — and only used it when we had to. The whole concept always sounded a little too good to be true.
Now we know why.
Leaked internal documents show the phrase was part of a whole playbook Amazon worked out to hide the true scale of its water use, which is massive.
Back in the saddle, again: Former Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb announced he will run for Andy Biggs’ seat in Congressional District 5, which stretches from the East Valley to Pinal County, Noah Cullen reports for Pinal Central. Lamb, last spotted running an unsuccessful 2024 primary election bid for U.S. Senate, announced his candidacy on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” He has a history of supporting “America First” border security and has been a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump.
As long as you're scared: A Tucson man got four years of probation for killing a visiting doctor thanks to Arizona’s “too forgiving” laws when it comes to violence in the name of self-defense, the Daily Star’s Tim Steller writes. After the local man and the doctor got into an argument, the doctor walked away toward his car and the man shot him, claiming he thought the doctor was going to get a gun. There was no “actual danger” — the doctor didn’t have a gun — but that doesn’t matter under Arizona law, which only requires the reasonable belief of actual danger to justify deadly force in self-defense.
The crime of homelessness: Eighty cops arrested 20 people along the Chuck Huckelberry Loop on Friday for nuisance crimes such as camping in washes, KVOA’s Jacob Owens reports. And that was just one deployment of many recent ones under the new Safe City Initiative, with more planned for the future.
Kafka-esque: A Syrian man who has been held in an Eloy immigration detention facility for two years got a brief trip to Venezuela courtesy of the U.S. government before Venezuelan officials sent him back because he’s not Venezuelan and they never agreed to take him, the Daily Star’s Emily Bregel reports. Kamel Maklad is an asylum seeker who can’t be deported to his home country, but the Trump administration is holding him indefinitely rather than giving him a work permit, as previous administrations have done with people in his position. DHS wouldn’t answer questions about him, other than to say he’s a “suspected terrorist” without providing any evidence.
“I escaped and left Syria in 2011 because I was afraid of being in prison,” Maklad told Bregel. “I came looking for my freedom in another country, and they imprisoned me. ... I’m 38 years old. I have never, never in my life been imprisoned. I have never known jail, neither in Syria nor in Venezuela. I know it here. What are they doing with me?”
All the cool stuff is endangered: The future of the Winterhaven Festival of Lights is in danger after the City of Tucson decided to cut in-kind support after this year, which organizers say will cost around $100,000 in traffic control and police, per Arizona Sonoran News’ Julia Mortarelli. Meanwhile, the critically endangered and native Sonoyta pupfish — which only exists in one Arizona spring — was introduced to a stream inside the Biosphere 2, KGUN’s Pat Parris reports.
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The federal government has been shut down for a month, leaving thousands of Southern Arizona families wondering when they will get their next paycheck.
The state of Arizona is suing Congress to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Adelita Grijalva more than a month after we elected her.
Marana wants answers on whether a controversial ICE detention center is going to open in their backyard.
So what does two-term Republican Juan Ciscomani’s campaign want to hear from residents about? Whether they should finish building the border wall.
This is almost a rhetorical question, given the vast amounts of money the Trump administration has pumped into walling off the southern border. Both the Build the Wall Act of 2025 and the One Big, Beautiful, Bill have funding for additional wall construction.
It's still so bizarre to me that conservatives will complain about the (essentially non-existent) benefits that immigrants are sucking out of the system, but then have no problem spending thousands of dollars to detain them.
I don't ever again want to hear that we don't have the resources to fix the problems in our country, because we absolutely do. Rather, it's that some people would rather spend money on cruelty than compassion.
Thanks for shining a light on Amazon's "playbook," perhaps more accurately referred to as Amazon's propaganda machine. "Water positive" is a misleading concept.
Amazon is also misleading the public regarding AI/Data Centers and electricity. After numerous articles reporting on the connection of rising electric costs to data centers, the Jeff Bezo owned Washington Post Oct.25 article, "There's a reason electricity prices are rising, And it's not data centers," now wants us to look the other way and not see data center's affect on the cost of electricity. When the oligarchs get their hands on the money, they don't want to just keep it, they want more money, even if that requires propaganda to get more money. Glad Amazon doesn't own the Tucson Agenda.