Editor:

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we were assured by our county commissioners and by CoreCivic that all due diligence had been done to prepare Uinta County for the safety of having up to 1,000 unrelated people housed in dormitory style in the proposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility.

What a difference a few months makes! Colleges across the country have emptied their dorms and have sent students home. Missionaries around the world are returning. In California, New York and many communities around the country, prisons are releasing inmates because of the dangers of close proximity and the inability of prisons to care for potential serious and complex medical problems associated with this or other similar viruses.

Communities with large healthcare systems are currently stressed beyond their limits. Towns and cities of all sizes are restricting travel and mandatory shelter-in-place orders are enforced. Travel across borders is limited.

Now imagine 1,000 undocumented people, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years, who once did have homes and businesses in America, having lost their homes and locked up in limbo. Their new home is the Evanston ICE facility. Have we seen a plan from CoreCivic about how a potential health disaster like COVID-19 would be managed? It appears that we might not be able to count on hospitals on the Wasatch Front to support a flood of potential patients, and if existing smaller detention facilities are decommissioned, there would be no place for these people to go.

So far in Uinta County, we have watched as other communities with far greater resources than we have struggle to manage this outbreak. We hadn’t seen it coming, but it was always a possibility. If we can reconsider the full picture of a 1,000-bed detention facility in our community with the insight of recent global experience, will we?

Catherine deVries

Evanston