While rumors continue to swirl that the East Bay’s shuttered Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin could be turned into a migrant detention facility, numerous officers are embroiled in a messy eviction from homes they own on the property.

The former Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin (FCI Dublin) was shut down out of the blue in April 2024 after a laundry list of sexual abuse scandals by guards, the warden, and even the chapain at the women’s prison. Some 600 women prisoners were moved elsewhere in a chaotic process after that closure, and then when Trump came back to power, there have been rumors that the shuttered facility could become a migrant detention center for all the ICE detainees the administration is trying to round up.

But not much has been happening at the facility lately. A Bay Area News Group report from this week says there have been “sightings of plumbers and other crews showing up at the Dublin complex within the past few weeks.” And a Monday KTVU report adds that “Last week, incarcerated men at another prison came to pull weeds from the front lawn.”

But the facility still has an acting warden, about two dozen former employees still live on employee housing there, and they now face lengthy commutes to other prisons. But the KTVU report about the pulling weeds is a larger investigation into how acting warden Charles Hubbard sent eviction notices to former employees still living on the property, a notice that said that if they’re not gone come Labor Day, their homes will be demolished — and that the officers would be personally billed for the cost of that demolition.

These are all mobile homes, and they were not free to the officers who bought them. Each paid about $130,000 each for these mobile homes, a fine price by Bay Area housing standards, and for decades the custom had been that buyers would simply sell them to new incoming FCI Dublin staff. But according to a new legal complaint from the officers against the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the mobile homes cannot be moved, and the officers who bought them are simply being thrown out at great personal cost, and with no compensation.

These mobile homes are not directly on the FCI Dublin campus, but they’re very close by on a street called Goodfellow Avenue. And while the officers themselves own the mobile homes, the federal government owns the land they sit on, and is booting the officers out.

"I have nowhere to go," former FCI Dublin correctional officer Armando Sandoval told KTVU. "We feel it's punishment."

Sandoval still lives at the Dublin mobile home he purchased, but he no longer works there. He’s bussed every day from Dublin to the high-security prison USP Atwater (in Merced, CA) a nearly four-hour round trip each workday. Meanwhile, his family lives, works, and goes to school in Dublin.

These "mobile" homes are not on wheels. They were mostly built in the 1990s, and are no longer up to code. New mobile home parks will not take these older homes. So the officers may just lose out entirely on their investment in these homes, unless their legal complaint buys them some relief.

Meanwhile on the Trump front, the Bay Area News Group reports that many are still concerned that the administration will try to reopen the facility as an ICE migrant detention center. As seen above, East Bay congressional Representative Mark DeSaulnier toured the facility last week, and was assured by federal officials it would not be used again. But as DeSaulnier said of the Trump administration, “they don’t seem to be rational when it comes to bankrupting the federal budget for political purposes.”

As we learned last week, the administration is going around Congress and renewing or reviving existing contracts with private prison operators — at great expense — to reopen shuttered private prisons in multiple states to serve as migrant detention centers. One of those is a 2,560-bed facility in Kern County, east of Bakersfield, and is being renovated under an initial $10 million contract with prison contractor CoreCivic.

The adminstration reportedly wants ICE to increase its detention capacity to 100,000 beds, from its current funding level of 41,500 beds.

Related: ICE Might Be Looking to Use Shuttered Dublin Women's Prison as Immigrant Detention Center [SFist]

Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons