A McHenry County coalition continues the fight for immigration rights as the McHenry County Board moves to keep ICE contract

Patrick Murfin and other members of the McHenry County coalition to cancel the ICE contract rallied at Deicke Park on May 15

MCHENRY COUNTY – On Tuesday, May 18, the McHenry County Board discussed a resolution in potentially terminating a month-to-month agreement between McHenry County and the U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Essentially these kinds of agreements or contracts with ICE, task local jails to house and transport federal immigration detainees as they go through the immigration hearing process until they receive a final decision from an immigration court on whether they can remain in the United States or not. ICE then pays a daily fee for each detainee a jail holds. Detainees can remain in immigration detention centers for months to years.

McHenry County has held a contract with ICE since 2005, but in 2015, the county modified the contract to remove any long-term commitments.

After discussions of revenue loss and possible higher expenses for the county due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, board members were given the opportunity to vote on the matter.

However, despite the strong response from some board members in favor of cancelling the ICE contract, the motion failed to pass in a 15-8 vote against the resolution.

Patrick Murfin, a member of the Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County, told My Huntley News that there was quite some pressure put on Republican members of the board from their constituents against cancelling the contract, so the coalition expected the vote to be narrow.

Despite the resolution being shot down, Murfin explained that the coalition’s work would continue on.

“Even if this is voted down, we’ve really brought this issue to the board and we can turn our attention to the resolutions that have been brought to the General Assembly which would call for ending all contracts with county jails in the state so that we have a sort of a fall back, and we’re going to support that state resolution anyway,” Murfin said. “A lot of what we’ve done has helped build support even for the state resolution. We’ve done a lot to bring the issue to the [forefront] in the whole region.”

When asked why this movement was so important to the coalition, Murfin responded in stating that not only is the contract not profitable to the county, but is largely a moral issue.

“For us here in McHenry County and for the state and for the nation as a whole, most of the people in detention are in for supposed violations of [not] reporting for court dates or something like that. For minor offenses, sometimes for minor traffic offenses or minor offenses dating back years or decades sometimes. The sheriff would have you believe that they’re all mostly hardened criminals who if they were released, were going to rampage through the county. It’s not true. They’re ordinary working people,” Murfin said.

“It’s cruel and unusual and the impact goes far beyond the people who are incarcerated. It goes to their families who lose income, who lose support, who lose parents. Often times these families end up losing their housing. It adversely affects the emotional well-being of their children. It’s just a horrible situation. So, it’s a humanitarian disaster. We don’t think that the county should be complicit in that. The county says, ‘If we don’t hold them, somebody else will,’ but we don’t think the citizens of this county should be complicit in that system as a moral issue.”

Murfin states that he has been doing social justice for over 50 years in Chicago and for 30 years in McHenry County being involved in various campaigns. Though he says he has never seen a more effectively run campaign than that of the coalition. Win or lose, Murfin explained that the coalition’s goal would have not changed.

“On a greater scale, we want to end this kind of preventative detention on a broader scale, because there are people who are actual criminals. There are ways to detain them. That’s what we want to discuss. We want to get people to acknowledge not just the financial conditions of the jail, but also the moral implications of this extremely broken immigration system we have in this country…We would continue to work and pivot towards support of the state laws that are coming before Springfield and also to bring our support to national reform,” he said.

The coalition features a large array of other social justice organizations who also do their share of supporting various causes for human rights. Murfin expects individuals in the different groups to remain committed and strong.

“It’s really been a remarkable experience for me just to participate and see how effective and how dedicated the leadership [and] volunteers are. There are people from the indigenous Latinx community. There are a lot of young people. It’s just inspiring to see how dedicated they’ve been and how hard people have worked to spread this campaign and really build it up to something that is now getting national attention,” Murfin said.

The coalition primarily relays information through their Facebook page that can be found by searching: Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County.