Islip OKs contract extension for ICE at town shooting range

Islip extended a contract Tuesday to allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to use the town’s shooting range until at least 2028, a decision that follows nearly a year of local activists pushing town leaders to terminate the arrangement. 

The contract has been in place for at least the past two decades. It allows dozens of agencies, including Amtrak, the U.S. Secret Service and ICE, to train at the town-owned Freeman Avenue shooting range.

Activists with groups such as Islip Forward started urging Islip Town to terminate the deal last July, amid reports federal immigration agents had detained immigrants without criminal records. The opposition included a protest of more than 100 people at Town Hall last summer and continued into this year, when activists showed up at multiple town board meetings to speak against the deal.

Only a handful of activists showed up at Tuesday's meeting and even fewer spoke.

Islip's town board voted 4-1 to renew the contract until June 30, 2028, with an option to extend it for another three years. The contract includes new language and a statement from ICE clarifying that the range can only be used for training.

It specified that "the town’s training facility shall not be used for detention, confinement, processing, transportation, housing, administrative operations, or any other non-training governmental purpose," Supervisor Angie Carpenter wrote in a statement.

Those conditions were added at the request of Councilman Jorge Guadrón, the board's only Democrat, who cast the only vote against renewing the contract. 

He explained that the new language "might guarantee the right use of the rifle range. However, the community feels it is not enough."

Ahmad Perez, the founder Islip Forward who led protests against the contract, attended Tuesday's meeting but did not speak. He told Newsday afterward that the new language "was kind of a Band-Aid for a much larger issue the town still has to address at a deeper level. Although they can't use it for deportation, they were never using it for deportation in the first place."

By Sam Kmack

sam.kmack@newsday.com

Sam Kmack covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and previously worked as a city watchdog reporter in the Phoenix metro area, as well as an investigative journalist at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.