ICE Detainees Face Long Wait In Youngstown Prison

The men arrested during the immigration raids at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center and a Fresh Mark meatpacking facility this month were sent to a medium security prison in Youngstown.

Brian Hoffman is an immigration attorney with the International Institute of Akron who was already working one day a week at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center when about 130 male detainees from this month’s raids arrived.

The women were sent to other facilities, including Geauga County Jail and a prison in Michigan.

Hoffman says no one from Corso’s has appeared in front of an immigration judge yet, two weeks after their arrest, partly because there was a conference for immigration judges the week of those raids.

“I think even absent the conference, it would be fair to say an inmate in Youngstown could wait three to four weeks for an initial hearing,” said Hoffman. “We have no reason to think that’s going to change in the short term.” 

Hoffman says there’s only one judge at the immigration court in Cleveland handling the Youngstown cases.

After the arrests this week at Fresh Mark’s meat processing plant in Salem, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released about 60 people who were sole parents or for health reasons.

Hoffman, who has worked at immigrant facilities in Texas and Georgia before coming to Ohio, said he was not aware of any detainees sent to Youngstown who have been released.