Brandon Thibodeaux. Until , three generations of Garcias lived on these couple of acres. Sadrac, soft-spoken but direct, is tall and solidly built, with a rough goatee and a white cowboy hat.
He shows me a photo of his father on this late August afternoon; they look nearly identical. Sadrac has moved to Odessa, about 20 minutes away. Yesenia Garcia, his mother, is living in Fort Worth with her daughter, Arely. But moving has not helped with moving on. The officer purportedly found open bottles of alcohol and two tiny bags of cocaine. Border officials had placed an immigration hold on him and referred him to federal prosecutors.
In fiscal year , the Marshals held nearly , people facing federal criminal charges. On any given day, the Marshals hold more people than Immigration and Customs Enforcement , and more than all the county jails of any state except California and Texas.
The Marshals run this vast pretrial detention system without owning or operating any jails. Instead, the agency houses its detainees in about 1, jails and private facilities around the country.
Almost two-thirds of these federal pretrial detaineesβwho have not been convicted of any crimesβare held in local lockups like Tom Green, typically run by sheriffs. The remainder are held in either privately run jails under contract with the Marshals or federal detention centers run by the Bureau of Prisons, mostly in a handful of large cities. The Garcia family takes shade beneath a tree as Sadrac and his brother, Juan, prepare to grill a goat dinner at their home.
