ICE'd

A frozen prison project, an ICE detention center, and a democracy chilling special election.

When I first volunteered to help the community organize against the prison, I planned on having to wear many different hats—that’s part of the nature of grassroots work. What I did not anticipate is that, sitting here almost a year later, the project would be stalled out in the legislature while the district is staring down the barrel of a threatened ICE deportation facility as the Governor slow rolls a special election to fill its vacant Senate seat.

To say there’s a lot going on is a massive understatement, but let’s try to break it all down and get everyone up to speed. You’ll have to forgive us for glossing over the Joint Performance Review hearing from September 9th—we’ll get to it, eventually. On to more pressing matters.

The Frozen Prison Project

The State’s progress on the prison has been stuck in limbo for the last four months—and with their staunch refusal to answer questions (or even show up to do so) without first securing their desired design contract, it appears that stalemate isn’t going to break anytime soon. This is a $57m game of chicken the Governor is playing with the legislature—her tactic being to consistently post boogeyman videos on X, we assume with the weird hope of tugging enough heart strings that the legislature cedes its death grip on the State’s purse strings and demands for a fiscally responsible plan.

However, expensive children’s game aside, this begs a bigger question of the Governor’s heretofore unchallenged ability to whip votes behind whatever her project du jour happens to be. You see, the subcommittee required to approve the design contract is the Legislative Council-Review subcommittee, consisting of only 20 members. So, if the stall is caused by what we presume it to be, a persistent lack of affirmative votes due a lack of transparency surrounding a faulty underlying plan, this means that she’s been unable to convince even 11 lawmakers that it’s reasonable to spend $57m to buy more answers about the site’s feasibility. And if she can’t do that, how’s she going to convince the 31 votes needed to pass the full Legislative Council?

What we do know is that the longer it takes to approve, the more the Governor continues to prove one of our points: Forcing a build on this site will invite so many delays that it will not solve any of the overcrowding problems anytime soon. Moreover, if it’s a 4+ month delay just to get an architect, there’s a real danger that this new prison is full to the brim before the ground is even broken.

The ICE Detention Center Threat

We hear consistent phrasing from the Governor that we need to give people a “hand up not a hand out” (sic) and her promises to ensure that “the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington DC will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River.” Tough talk for a state that “generates” 36.8% of its total revenue from daddy fed.

Despite all of that talk, it appears that we were right in our Joint Performance Review presentation (clip below) in surmising that her plan to right this self-capsized ship is to turn to federal welfare for a bailout.

That bailout appears to be coming in the form of a prospective ICE detention facility at the same site intended for the Franklin County prison. Now, given the manner in which this information was discovered (a Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy happening upon ICE agents, and Joe Profiri, at the site), we’re light on details of how the Governor and Joe intend to finagle this ill-advised additional usurpation of local control into funding for their pet prison project, but we’re have no doubt that the schemes are cooking up. And likely on overdrive since their intention of further secrecy was spoiled.

So, as if one bad project weren’t enough, now the community is looking at the possibility of an ICE detention center (likely in addition to a state penitentiary). Federal dollars, state politics, and private contractors often come together in these deals and it’s always rural towns left holding the bag. For the district, that means more than just traffic, noise, safety concerns, and the like—it means taxpayer-funded infrastructure stretched thin, local control further stripped away, and our towns tied to a national deportation system that none of us had any say in inviting here.

ICE facilities don’t spring up in wealthy suburbs. They land in rural counties where state officials assume the people won’t push back. But we’ve proven those assumptions wrong before, and we will again. And it’s already started from our Sheriff:

The Special Election Slow-Roll

Overarching these underlying concerns is the district’s current lack of representation in the upper chamber of the legislature. The late Senator Gary Stubblefield’s seat has been vacant since his untimely passing on September 2, 2025. On September 26th, the Governor issued a proclamation setting the special election to fill his seat for June 9, 2026. There are numerous problems with this.

First and foremost, the legislature’s fiscal session will be held through April and May of 2026. A June special election leaves the district, ~82,000 Arkansans, without representation in all of those decisions. It also leaves us without a voice in the Senate, anyone to call with questions, a vote in committee meetings, and representation through all of the other functions lawmakers perform for 280 days.

Second, the statutory time frame for a special election to be called is a maximum of 150 days from the date of vacancy barring, at the Governor’s discretion, impracticality or undue burden—which of course she has cited. There’s some legal nuance here that we won’t get into (both because it’s boring and because it will likely be litigated) but, to simplify matters, 130 days past the statutory requirement, especially when party primaries are being held in the spring, in no way meets the statutory requirement of “as soon as practicable after the 150th day” after vacancy, which is the standard if an undue burden is declared.

We have plenty of thoughts to convey the district’s feeling about this, but we really aren’t capable of writing it any better than how the Senator’s daughter, Amber Sullivan, summed it up in a press conference the morning of September 30th:

What It All Means

All of these actions must be taken together because nothing in Franklin County or our Senate District is happening in a vacuum. From the perspective of the community, this is tantamount to political retribution and retaliation for the district’s overwhelming resistance to a faultily planned prison.

It may be in hushed voices but, listen carefully, and across the state you’ll hear stories of similar tit for tat political horse trading and strongarming to carry out an agenda seemingly only dictated by the Governor’s whim. A tactic that Senator Stubblefield not so subtly decried as “extortion.”

Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Green, Constitutionalist, or otherwise—you have to ask yourself:

Is this the kind of government to which we consent?

Iced Tea

So, forward we march into the consequences of our actions—however just those actions may be—the long arm of the Federal government now reaching across the Mississippi to have its way with Senate District 26 in Arkansas while the citizens repeat the cries of our Revolutionary ancestors.

However unjust the consequences may be, we’ve been advocating for the future of this district and this state since Day 1 and have zero intention of stopping. Though, as ever, we cannot do it alone and implore you to keep showing up, keep asking questions, keep pressing for transparency.

At present, it may feel like the district is iced—frozen out of decisions about our own future and left to watch while politicians and consultants carve up our lives—but the Arkansas sun sure burns hot in June. And it won’t be a slow melt; it will be a flash flood that’s no longer theirs to control.

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