Originally published in the Summer/Fall 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 77, printed December 11. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Summer/Fall 2025 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

By Fern Diaz-Castro

Virginia has two detention centers used solely to hold people kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Farmville Detention Center in Farmville, Va., can hold more than 700 men and has averaged 718 daily from January through November of this year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data-gathering, research and distribution organization at Syracuse University.

That same data indicates that, during the same period, the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Va., averaged 353 men and women daily.

Farmville has faced accusations of human rights violations, including racially motivated abuse, brutality, and medical neglect. In October, people detained there reported worms in their food and threats of losing commissary access for speaking out.

Farmville had been operated by Abyon LLC. This July, the facility was sold for $67 million to CoreCivic, Inc., one of the country’s largest for-profit prison, jail and detention contractors. The company has faced accusations of forced labor practices, inhuman conditions in their facilities and human and civil rights violations.

Apart from Farmville and Caroline, various jails in Virginia also have volunteered to hold people for ICE. For example, a contract obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and ABC News 8 shows that in May 2025 the Riverside Regional Jail in Prince George’s County agreed to hold people detained by ICE. The facility will receive federal funding for this purpose and will be reimbursed daily for each person detained.

The payment amounts and other details were redacted from the document.

Since November 2024, Riverside’s superintendent has been Jeffrey N. Dillman, the former Chief of Health Services Operations for the Virginia Department of Corrections. VADOC has been a frequent target of accusations of providing poor health care for Virginia prisoners.

Due to a rapid increase this year in ICE kidnappings in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, detention centers and jails aren’t the only facilities holding people captive. An ICE field office in Chantilly, Va., faced public scrutiny after reports of mistreatment. According to the ACLU, ICE was “… holding up to 80 people in a single room for more than a week at a time with no access to a lawyer, medical care, or even basic hygiene.”

The increase in detentions has also led to discussions about expanding ICE facilities. For example, the ACLU is currently suing ICE for withholding records of potential expansion of immigration detention centers in Virginia following ICE’s failure to respond to their FOIA request.

This came after ICE submitted a Request of Information (ROF) regarding facilities for single adults with a capacity of 1,000 to 1,500 beds, located within a two-hour drive of Richmond International Airport.