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The sign outside the building at the Bristol County Jail and House of Correction in North Dartmouth no longer says the C. Carlos Carreiro Immigration Detention Center, and the man inside, who runs the place, is drawing a line on how he’ll help the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement.
Sheriff Paul Heroux on Monday made it official that the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office Training Academy is established in the former detention center, and made clear that he won’t house immigration detainees in North Dartmouth, nor assign officers for immigration enforcement.
“The federal government has an important job to do,” Heroux told reporters gathered at the training center, but “we’re not going to do their job for them.”
Heroux said he would be willing to help federal authorities with information, for instance, on inmates in pre-trial detention or serving sentences.
He said about 61 of the 664 inmates now held in North Dartmouth and at the Ash Street Jail and Regional Lockup in New Bedford are foreign-born. He did not know their immigration status.
As President-elect Donald Trump promises to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally, Heroux said he has neither the inclination nor the resources to go further than help with information.
“Not interested,” said Heroux, who campaigned for the job in 2022 in part on breaking from his predecessor’s involvement in immigration enforcement. “We have our own inmates. We’ve stretched our own resources too thin.”
Trump and his advisers have said that he would use the military, National Guard and cooperative local law enforcement to pursue deportations. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has said she would not allow the state police to help with deportations.
Former Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson established the immigration detention center in 2007 and had a small number of officers working under agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The Biden administration severed those agreements and shut down the detention center in 2021, about a year after 25 immigration detainees staged an uprising at the center, causing several minor injuries and some $25,000 worth of damage to bathroom fixtures, walls, and furniture.
A Massachusetts Attorney General’s report found that in responding to the incident, sheriff’s officers used excessive force and violated the civil rights of several detainees.
Sixteen former detainees filed a $10 million civil suit in 2022 against Hodgson, the Sheriff’s Office and two federal agencies. Heroux said on Monday that his agency is seeking guidance from the state attorney general on how to settle the suit.
That backdrop, he told reporters on Monday, does not whet his appetite for further immigration activity.
“Our organization was involved” before, he said. “It didn’t go so well.”
What is going well so far is the operation of the new training academy, which also houses the K-9 unit, with seven officers, and an office for a crew of 20 officers who work as part of the Special Response Team. Heroux said the SRT works as a “SWAT” team that might be called to re-take control of a housing unit or respond to an inmate who is resisting being taken out of their cell.
The building renovation converted it from an open space built to accommodate some 128 people held under civil detention in a dormitory setting with bunk beds. Heroux said his staff, rather than a private contractor, did the renovation, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The new academy space includes classrooms, a large gym-like space for tactical defense training, and two mock-up cells so recruits can practice moving inmates in and out, and responding to emergencies.
The academy, K-9 and SRT had been housed in a rented garage-like building across Faunce Corner Road, and in two mobile trailers on the Jail and House of Correction campus.
The new academy is about four times the size of the rented space, said Capt. Robert Matos, the training director.
Matos said the new building’s heating system will spare instructors having to shout to be heard over the noisy old equipment in the drafty garage.
The new academy is a part of Heroux’s effort to step up recruitment to solve a chronic staff shortage, which has forced correctional officers to take overtime shifts, a major source of job stress.
The effort has included raising the signing bonus for new correctional officers from $1,500 to $5,000. Once the recruit completes the 10-week academy, the bonus pays out in two $2,500 payments: the first after three months on the job, the next after another nine months.
Heroux also assigned a captain as a recruitment officer. To retain officers, he now allows vacations in the first year after hiring and has new hires work several different shifts, rather than automatically starting on the overnight crew.
At the moment, 28 recruits are preparing to graduate from the 10-week academy this month. That’s about the typical number for each of the four academies that have graduated under Heroux. He said that’s about three times the number under Hodgson, but that time included the pandemic, which stifled recruitment.
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
The New Bedford/ Fall River area is going to be ground zero for these deportation efforts if they happen.
I hope that the Fall River voters who voted for Trump remember who they picked when their communities start getting hollowed out by mass deportations, and I hope the 49% of voters for Trump in New Bedford don’t complain when they get what they voted for.
No worries Roderick!
Clearly an attempt against Trump’s initiative
Is it a good initiative?
Will it hollow out some of our communities?
The city’s long history of welcoming immigration.
How will Trump’s initiative impact our fishing industry?
What percentage of fish cutters are immigrants.
Will native English speakers cut fish?