Protestors gather to demand freedom and due process for Fabian Schmidt — a German-born New Hampshire man being held at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls on Tuesday, March 18, 2025.
Left foreground, Zack Mezera of Working Families Party speaks to the crowd with Fr. Jarrett Kerbel of Saint Luke’s in East Greenwich at bottom right. (Photo by Michael Salerno/Rhode Island Current)
Imagine being detained for days in a federal prison facility without knowing why.
That’s what is happening to Fabian Schmidt. And it’s happening in Rhode Island.
Once again, a detention facility in the smallest city in the smallest state is involved in a federal immigration enforcement nightmare. And, once again, we have a moment for all Rhode Islanders to ask what kind of government activity we want in our backyard.
Schmidt, a German-born, U.S. permanent resident who lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, was stopped at Boston’s Logan Airport on March 7 upon returning from a vacation in Europe. His mother told WGBH that, at the airport, her son was stripped naked by agents and placed in a cold shower. He was also placed on a mat in a bright room, given little water or food, and denied access to mental health medication. He collapsed and was taken to a local hospital.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol disputes this account. “These claims are blatantly false with respect to CBP,” said Assistant Commissioner of Public Affairs Hilton Beckham Tuesday in a statement. “When an individual is found with drug related charges and tries to reenter the country, officers will take proper action.” U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has declined requests for comment about the case from multiple news organizations, including Rhode Island Current.
Schmidt had a prior marijuana-related misdemeanor from California that his lawyer, David Keller, says had been resolved. What law Schmidt may have violated to prompt his arrest and detention remains unclear. Neither he nor his lawyer have been informed of any charges, Keller told reporters, including journalist Steve Ahlquist, at a protest outside the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls Tuesday night. Schmidt was transported to Wyatt after his arrest at Logan, and remains detained there more than a week later.
“It’s seriously a horrible, horrible thing that he’s being held here,” Keller said.
Protestors gathered outside the facility to express their outrage over Schmidt’s treatment and the broader actions of ICE under President Donald Trump. But this moment also refocuses attention on the future of Wyatt itself.
The facility opened in 1993, when the cash-strapped former manufacturing city needed money, and a private prison was seen as a solution. Ensuing years did indeed bring a windfall: Between 1994 and 2009, Central Falls received millions in host fees. They also brought scandal.
Wyatt has faced lawsuits alleging “malicious and sadistic” treatment of detainees and a lack of treatment for prisoners in withdrawal from opiates. In 2019, a guard who worked at Wyatt drove a truck into a crowd of protestors at the prison’s gate. A few years later, the facility’s warden resigned after facing charges of multiple felonies for domestic abuse. The most notorious incident occurred in 2008, when 34-year immigration detainee Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng died from illnesses and injuries that were neglected (and actively exacerbated) at the facility. Ng’s death prompted a lawsuit from the Rhode Island ACLU and a multimillion dollar settlement. In the aftermath, ICE pulled detainees from Wyatt — but it resumed housing them there during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Once again, we have a moment for all Rhode Islanders to ask what kind of government activity we want in our backyard.
Now that Trump is back in office, Wyatt remains in heavy use by ICE. At one point last month, the facility reportedly held more than 100 ICE detainees. And so we have an unrestrained federal approach to immigration being used at, among other places, a Rhode Island facility with an abysmal track record. The situation is dangerous — and it demands swift action.
In the short term, first, we can ask our federal delegation to demand that the Wyatt (and all federal detention facilities) abide by basic principles of humane treatment, including the Bill of Rights’ prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” We can ask the same of the facility’s five-member, publicly appointed board of directors. And given the recent track record of ICE, and Director Tom Homan’s statement that “I don’t care what the judges think,” Rhode Islanders ought to demand another pause on ICE detention at Wyatt. We know from past experience that the stakes are life and death.
The only way to ensure an end to Wyatt’s cruelty and dysfunction would be to shut it down.
The arguments for this are especially compelling.
- The people of Central Falls don’t like it. In 2019, a survey of city residents found that 98% of respondents had negative feelings about the facility. That same year, the city’s then-Mayor James Diossa, now general treasurer, called the Wyatt “a massive brick and barbed wire monument to out-of-control capitalism, corporate greed, and social injustice” and called for its closure. In the years since, lawmakers from Central Falls have repeatedly introduced legislation that would shut the facility down.
- The facility is a moral stain on our state. The concept of a privately-run prison facility with a profit motive was objectionable from the start. And these perverse incentives were aptly, if grotesquely, summarized in 2009, when, in the wake of Ng’s death, the jail’s chairman told the Providence Journal, “Frankly, I’m looking at it like I’m running a Motel 6… I don’t care if it’s Guantanamo Bay. We want to fill the beds.” (He was fired shortly thereafter.) A lengthy 2008 New York Times article captured the moral costs of the facility, which persist and are likely to get worse during Trump 2.0.
- The financial justifications for Wyatt no longer apply. Following the removal of ICE detainees after Ng’s death, impact payments to Central Falls from the facility have been sporadic. When discussing the financial relationship between Wyatt and Central Falls, former mayor Lee Matthews has said the city was sold a “bill of goods.” In 2019, Diossa said “from 2010 to 2014, the city received zero payments from the Wyatt.” Lately it’s been bondholders, rather than local citizens, who are fighting hardest to keep Wyatt operational.
And then there is the fact it could be something so much better. The federal criminal justice system could adapt to Wyatt’s closure. The upside for Central Falls could be massive. Central Falls is famously small, with an area of less than 1.3 square miles, and the Wyatt occupies a 3-acre space large enough to house 770 detainees near the Blackstone River.
Instead of a prison, this could be a great site for affordable housing in a state that desperately needs it. Or, in light of Central Falls’s dearth of green space, a park for picnics, concerts, and food trucks. Or even a performing arts venue in honor of the Oscar-winning Central Falls native Viola Davis.
For now, it remains the setting of the detention of Fabian Schmidt and countless others who, as Rhode Island Sen. Jonathan Acosta, a Central Falls Democrat, said in 2021, “are being treated as though they are among the worst of our criminals, when their only crime is their desire to become Americans.”
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