Protesters gathered outside of a Great Lakes Water Authority Board of Directors meeting in Detroit to ask the board to decline to supply water to a proposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Romulus.
Coalition to Shut the Camps organized the protest at 735 Randolph Street on Wednesday, April 22, after it sent a letter to GLWA in March asking to meet with leaders and for those leaders to decline to service the proposed Romulus facility. About 20 people held signs like “ICE out of Michigan” and chanted “no water for ICE” after the meeting.
Chris Boyd, a member of the coalition, said GLWA has “many tools and many options to evaluate how a large-scale detention camp might impact their infrastructure” and that of the cities they work with. He said he wants the water authority to think deeper about the types of developments it is willing to service.
“When somebody proposes a development that will scale violence and harm into multiple communities, the regional authority has both a moral and ethical responsibility to represent the interests of the elected officials that appoint them and to say, ‘What is our role to support bad things not happening?’” Boyd said.
About 40 minutes into Wednesday’s board meeting, the board addressed the letter, saying it provides water to partner communities like Romulus, not individual sites within the city.
“The Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) is a wholesale water provider to 88 member partners across 115 communities in southeast Michigan,” according to a GLWA statement sent to the Free Press on Wednesday evening. “GLWA does not directly contract with any private entity for water service.”
Boyd said if the authority can manage, build out and repair a regional water system, it has a choice of whether it services the ICE facility.
“So when they sit in that room and cloak themselves in anonymity and say, ‘We’ve got nothing we can do,’ ‘We’re just a regional water authority. There’s nothing we can do, it’s up to Romulus,’ that’s them jettisoning their significant technical, administrative, engineering, legal authorities,” Boyd said.
Boyd said neutrality to facilities in the areas GLWA serves is not in the interest of the communities.
“What we saw in the boardroom was an attempt to claim an administrative neutrality that doesn’t allow the Great Lakes Water Authority to act with any ethical or moral intention. … That is not how government works,” Boyd said. “That is used by governmental entities like this one as a way of avoiding having to contemplate behaving in ways that are ethical and moral.”
In February, the federal government announced it purchased the property and planned to put a detention facility there. In March, Romulus and the State of Michigan sued the Department of Homeland security over the detention facility. ICE acknowledged the site sits on a historic floodplain and signaled it planned to go forward with the construction.
The Free Press reported DHS officials previously said the facility’s construction and operation would lead to more than 1,400 jobs and create millions in tax revenue. There currently isn’t a clear timeline for the detention center’s construction.
George Washington, of Detroit, said a facility that would need water for 500 or more people could change other customers’ water.
“They’ve got the right to do that (not service the ICE facility) because it affects everybody,” Washington said.
Coalition to Shut the Camps protests at the planned detention site in Romulus every Saturday at 3 p.m.
Contact Natalie Davies at ndavies@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Protesters ask GLWA to not work with ICE on Romulus detention facility
Reporting by Natalie Davies, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
