* Update: The testing of all detainees in a housing unit at the Federal Detention Facility at Batavia, in upstate New York, showed a dramatic increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases there. This facility now has forty-six cases—almost twice as many as any other ICE detention facility—according to court papers filed by the Trump Administration in a lawsuit seeking the release of medically vulnerable detainees.
The test results came back April 20. “They tested everybody in one of the units, regardless of their symptoms,” says Joseph Moravec, a lawyer with Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, the group that brought the lawsuit on behalf of twenty-three detainees.
In late March, as COVID-19 began to spread across the state, Ventura Quintanar-Rico made a call from the Stewart Detention Center, a private prison in Lumpkin, Georgia.
It’s difficult to assess how widespread the coronavirus could be for detainees, because ICE lists only the number of confirmed cases on its COVID-19 website. It doesn’t say how many guards have been infected from the private companies that operate most of the larger centers.
“We are waiting to get infected,” he told his friend, Ana Maria Reichenbach, a member of the immigrant rights group Siembra NC. She met Quintanar, who is thirty-two and from Mexico, when he was a construction worker in North Carolina.
Before her phone connection was blocked—she suspects by officials at the Stewart facility—Reichenbach talked to seven other detainees. They explained why they were staging a hunger strike to draw attention to their concerns.
“We don’t know when we will be infected by people coming from outside,” said one detainee. “At any moment, we could become infected. Going outside. Going out to the yard. Going to eat.”
Nationwide, as of early April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding more than 32,000 people in detention in more than 200 facilities including Stewart, which can hold about 1,900 detainees. Many of the larger facilities are run by government contractors. Stewart is operated by the Nashville-based CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America.
While some states and localities have begun to release inmates from jails and prisons, ICE has lagged behind. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf has said that decisions about the release of detainees must be made on a “case-by-case” basis.
As of March 30, ICE had released only about 160 of the 600 detainees it had identified as eligible.
But there is nothing to preclude a much larger immediate release, especially since the immigration detention system is based on civil—not criminal—law.
“ICE has the authority to release anyone, at any time, under any conditions,” says Mich Gonzalez, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The health concerns regarding detainees at Stewart and other detention facilities are well founded.
“The track record of the facility is a deadly one,” says Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, an Atlanta-based group that is representing Stewart detainees and alleging that they were subjected to forced labor by CoreCivic.
Over the past two years, she notes, four Stewart detainees have died—two from suicide and two from illnesses.
It’s difficult to assess how widespread the coronavirus could be for detainees, because ICE lists only the number of confirmed cases on its COVID-19 website. It doesn’t say how many guards have been infected from the private companies that operate most of the larger centers.
As of April 15, the website listed seven confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the Stewart facility.
When social distancing rules were implemented, they were impossible to follow. Even their beds were not six feet apart.
But this is not the whole story. In an affidavit filed in another lawsuit, the ICE officer in charge of Stewart, John Bretz, states that in addition to the confirmed COVID-19 cases, thirty detainees at Stewart were suspected of being infected as of April 9. The affidavit was part of the Trump Administration’s response to a Southern Poverty Law Center’s lawsuit seeking the release of vulnerable detainees at Georgia facilities.
Although Bretz depicted the facility as carefully screening and taking preventive measures, immigration lawyer Marty Rosenbluth paints another picture.
“One of my clients . . . went to the medical unit because he was running a fever. He had chills and a sore throat,” Rosenbluth says. “They gave him a mask and told him he had to wait. They did not say wait for what.”
Rosenbluth, who lives about five minutes from the facility, represents about twenty detainees at Stewart. Not until April 9 did he hear about guards wearing protective masks and gloves.
The Stewart Immigration Court is located at the site of the detention facility. Rosenbluth says that when he went into the facility for court appearances three times in early April, “None of the guards—zero—had any equipment at all.”
And while Rosenbluth wore goggles, a mask, and gloves, the guards objected when he tried to give a mask and gloves to his client.
“They said, ‘You know the rules, Mr. Rosenbluth.You are not allowed to give your client anything.’ ”
Some of these guards are now wearing protective gear.
Gonzalez, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reports the same thing happening at other detention facilities. “For a long time,” they say, “ICE officers and the guards had not been providing COVID-19 education, and they were not taking precautions, like wearing masks.”
And when social distancing rules were implemented, they were impossible to follow. Even their beds were not six feet apart.
On March 25, when detainees at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana, realized they could not be properly protected from COVID-19, they became upset and, in response, were pepper sprayed.
While ICE claimed the use of pepper spray against four detainees was justified because detainees had become “disruptive and confrontational,” a LaSalle detainee told Gonzalez that “the women in that dorm were chanting for their release and saying they do not want to be left to die in this facility.”
As of April 15, ICE listed fifteen detainees with COVID-19 at its Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, the highest total for any facility in its network.
Immigration lawyer Anna Hysell tells of an incident on April 10 in an affidavit for an ACLU lawsuit seeking release of four Otay detainees who have underlying medical conditions. The affidavit says a pod unit manager offered facial masks to detainees on condition that they sign a document releasing the facility of liability if the masks didn’t work. The document, she says, was in English with no Spanish version provided.
Upset and refusing to sign, detainees were threatened with pepper spray, Hysell says. Three of them were then placed in confinement but later returned to their units, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. The detainees were ultimately given masks without having to sign the document.
CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin tells The Progressive, “It is true that face masks were issued to every individual in our care at Otay Mesa. The temporary removal of three detainees from one of the pods was in direct response to their being disruptive during the issuance of the face masks.” He calls pepper spray allegations “patently false.”
KPBS, a public radio and TV station in San Diego, reported that the “company says its guards asked a group of female detainees to sign contracts in English that it called ‘acknowledgement forms,’ ” which could free CoreCivic from “any complications from wearing the masks.”
On April 13, the ACLU dismissed its lawsuit because all four of the plaintiffs—immigration detainees—had been released.
But Monika Langarica, a lawyer with the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, warns that dangers to detainees persist.
“ICE’s decision to release the plaintiffs does not resolve the situation, or the growing urgency at Otay Mesa,” she says.