11/14/2025 – Just Talk (Bill Martin)
This week Newsday reports from Long Island that another Roosevelt High School teen has been captured by ICE. This time the teen was sent not to a Texas ICE detention center but to the Broome County Jail. He has actually been there for over two weeks now, far from his mom and school (he is a midfielder, #17, on the men’s soccer team). He sits alone, anxious, and in shock. He does not know what will happen to him.
Why is Broome County Jail caging Long Island teenagers for ICE? Is it because the Broome Sheriff and Nassau County Police Department have both signed 287g agreements with ICE? Or is because Broome is the official ICE detention center on the route from NYC to the over-capacity Buffalo ICE detention center?
It isn’t because he makes $ for the Sheriff: indeed by the Sheriff’s own admission it costs $274 to keep someone for one day (his estimate during the state correctional officers’ illegal strike that he supported). And yet the Federal Goverment only reimburses $110/day. And there are scores of Federal detainees held every day, some for months and months. How many ICE detainees are there, how long are they incarcerated here? We don’t know. But clearly $ millions are being spent to maintain for years a supersized jail.
In the face of three successive protests and much testimony in the Broome County Legislative chamber against ICE detention, 12 of 15 county legislators voted recentlly to endorse the Sheriff’s budget with $ for ICE. Did they really want out-of-town teens incarcerated at their, our expense?
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