Mike Wriston (32:09)
Yeah, so Arizona was an interesting one. Arizona, the facility that they were looking at there in Marana, which is a suburb outside of Tucson, was previously owned and operated by the state and then it was sold to a company called mtc. MTC is a basically a for profit prison operator, the same as Corecivic or Geo Group. They have a pretty big facility down there in Marana. And so looking at this history, the people in that city have kind of long suspected that that facility was going to be turned back on in some capacity as a detention center. The question was always when and for how much? And, and the town council down there, that's their backyard, that's their bread and butter. The prison industry in that particular town funnels a lot of money in from federal grants and funding and all the other fun things. And so they weren't necessarily giving indications to the people that it was going to come back online. They were telling the citizens down there, we don't know. There's nothing formal. We can't say. You're worrying over nothing. And by watching SAM.gov you know, I think the last time that the public had gotten a statement from their town council was in November of last year that they were going to potentially look into something and then came back and told the folks there, nope, you have nothing to worry about. This is just a defunct prison. It's never going to be used for anything else. And then we went online and looked@sam.gov and found that there was a single source contract from the Department of Homeland Security for that specific detention center to mtc, basically saying, we intend to use this as a detention warehouse to hold upwards of 700 hundred people. And so the very next thing that we did with that, right, we write an article. The articles that we're writing are not necessarily written to be like a New York Times or a Washington Post or, you know, a journalistic type accounting of the story. It's more of a flash alert and an intelligence alert that basically says, here's the contract, here's the information that we've pulled out of it. And then, you know, we put it on the Internet as kind of a data point that folks can go and take and run with. And so, so we publish an article, we attach the contract to it. Again, it's publicly available. Anyone can download it. It is not like we sleuthed our way into their database and broke things out of the computer. It's just right there on SAM.gov so we pulled it off and archived it and shared it with folks. And then the next thing we do is we turn around and we talk to two folks. We talk to journalists that are on the ground in those communities that understand the context and understand what that story means for the people living there. So in this case it was Arizona Public Radio or Arizona Public Media. We reached out to them and sent the story along. And then we turn around to the folks that are on the ground that are doing the organizing and we provide it to them and we put the data in their hands. And the idea is that if they're going to go stand in front of a city council or a county council, or if they're going to pull in their congresspeople, then instead of saying, I am opposed to a detention center in my community, which I think is a sound enough argument on its own merits, but understanding that the audience that they're talking to, it matters a lot to be able to go in and say, I oppose a detention center in my neighborhood. Because this particular detention center is going to hold 700 people. It's not zoned for it, it doesn't have the resources for it. It's going to cost, you know, $250 million of taxpayer funding to get it online. And then once the people are inside of it, there's no water, there's no electricity, there's no X, Y, Z. And those very compelling arguments make it difficult, not, not always impossible, depending on the, you know, the, the moral integrity of the person you. But it makes it more difficult for those city council members or those county council members to push you away and ignore what you're saying when you back it up with facts. And so we are very much towards action driven data, data that drives action. And so that's what we did in Marana. And it was very funny because I reached out to the town council there for comment and they said, we don't know what you're talking about. And then I sent them a copy of the contract and their public affairs specialist came back and said, said, we still don't know what you're talking about. No one consulted with us. So it shows that even in friendly territory, right on ground that ICE is friendly with, they're still not communicating with the people that run those cities as much as they're not communicating with the communities there. So yeah, you find out a lot by pulling threads and asking questions.
