OTTAWA — Through a U.S. joint venture, Canadian engineering giant Stantec signed two multimillion-dollar contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year to work on the agency’s detention centres.

The agreements so horrified Stantec’s partner in the venture, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, that the tribal government swiftly fired the board of the cluster of engineering, science and construction companies involved, replaced the group’s chief executive, and set about cancelling the deals.

Stantec is a vast engineering, architecture and environmental consulting empire, claiming 34,000 workers at over 450 locations on six continents. It is headquartered in Edmonton and does extensive business with the U.S. government.

The ICE contracts were through an entity called Oneida-Stantec JV. Its address is in Milwaukee, about 190 kilometres south of the Oneida Nation’s reservation on the edge of Green Bay, Wis. 

The joint venture has also received contracts in the last few years for an archeological survey at a U.S. army base on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, asbestos-related work at an Army Corps of Engineers hydro dam in Arkansas, and remediation at a decommissioned ammunition plant in Illinois.

The Logic sent questions to Stantec by email about its dealings with ICE, including how it thinks about the ethics of that business and whether it’s continuing with the contracted work.

“Stantec has no active contracts with ICE, as part of the Oneida-Stantec joint venture or otherwise,” spokesperson Danny Craig responded, in an email that did not mention the now-cancelled deals or address enquiries about them. “We also have no intention of pursuing work with ICE.”

The first deal was a US$2.6-million, three-year contract for “facility condition assessments” that began Sept. 16. It started well into ICE’s campaign against migrants in U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, but seemed to have gone unnoticed by the tribal government.

The second contract was for up to US$4 million and was to last eight months. By the time it started on Dec. 29, ICE had moved into Portland and Chicago and had begun its “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis.

The Oneida Nation’s companies benefit from preferential treatment under U.S. federal contracting rules that allow sole-sourcing to businesses considered “disadvantaged,” including ones owned by Indigenous nations. Both contracts were let without competitions.

The Oneida Nation government found out about both deals on Dec. 29, it said in a statement on Dec. 31. They were incompatible with Oneida values, and the nation’s government was hurrying to get to the bottom of them.

“Looking forward, and to provide clarity of the Nation’s position, the Oneida Business Committee adopted a resolution indicating the Nation requires its divisions, entities, and tribal corporations to disengage from grants, agreements, or contracts that involve Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the statement said.

Before he was replaced, the CEO of the Oneida engineering and construction group, Jeff House, said in a virtual public meeting on Jan. 2 that although the U.S. government’s immigration crackdown is “despicable,” he saw the contracted work as helping protect migrants.

House said Native people were once confined to reservations and given “diseased blankets and empty promises” instead of food and shelter, and went on to suggest detainees in ICE’s custody aren’t that different.

“Who’s going to make sure these are humane facilities?” he said, describing his motive in agreeing to the contracts.

He didn’t think the decision all the way through, he said. “I’m really disappointed in myself that I allowed this to happen.”

Depending how the U.S. government treats the breaking of either contract, the result could be the end of one or more of the Oneida Nation’s companies, he said.

“That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll figure that out, and we’ll live for another day.”

House’s interim successor Matt Kunstman, from the Oneida Nation’s economic development department, was named a few days later. The Logic was unable to reach a spokesperson for the Oneida Nation with questions about how the disengagement from ICE has progressed.

Multiple Canadian companies are dealing with repercussions of business dealings with ICE. After a public outcry, Vancouver’s Jim Pattison Developments said Friday it’s halting the sale of a Virginia warehouse to ICE that the agency planned to use as a detainee processing facility.

Vancouver’s Hootsuite is sticking with a social media monitoring contract, even as CEO Irina Novoselsky acknowledges that “the loss of life and the fear being felt in communities as a result of recent enforcement actions are devastating.”

Ottawa’s JSI has declined to comment on its sales of wiretapping technology to ICE. Federal minister Evan Solomon, who delivered JSI a $1-million subsidy in December, repeated on Thursday that the government’s only concern is whether companies it funds are obeying the law.

“Obviously we don’t have any control of their customers,” he told The Logic.

Thomson Reuters has remained silent on longstanding contracts to supply ICE with reams of personal data compiled in commercial databases.

With files from Laura Osman