Immigrant Detainees Are Sitting On A COVID-19 Time Bomb – First Infection Reported – Forbes

EL CENTRO, CA - MARCH 1: (NEWSWEEK AND US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT OUT) A man sleeps in a dormitory for ... [+] Mexican and foreign nationals convicted of a felony or deportable offense at a federal detention center on March 1, 2006 in El Centro, California. The federal issue of not having enough beds or detention centers is scheduled to be rectified in 2006 with increased Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding. Mexican nationals caught illegally crossing the border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are sent back immediately if there is no outstanding criminal case on record. Those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following a criminal conviction are sent to detention centers like El Centro prior to their federal immigration court hearing. Many appeal the judgement to deport and stay at the El Centro facility until they win or lose. California was the first state in 1987 to implement a program where foreign nationals convicted of a crime were eligible for deportation. Many violators of immigration laws flee before their cases come to trial. It is estimated that some 6.3 million illegal Mexican immigrants live in the U.S. and some 485,000 undocumented Mexican immigrants enter the U.S. annually. The U.S. government estimates 11 million illegal immigrants reside in the U.S. In 2005, San Diego and Imperial counties of southern California deported 40,335 Mexican and Central American immigrants. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Immigrant detainees, prisoners, and the homeless are at huge risk for coronavirus (COVID-19) infections. Sadly, scant attention has been paid to them as some seem to feel that they deserve their plight and dehumanize them, calling them illegals.

The immigrant detainees live in closed spaces, much like the cruise shipswhere COVID-19 spread so rapidly, Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney for ACLU, described. They are not readily able to practice the level of good hygiene and social distancing that are recommended.

Now, just as predicted, the first detainee has tested positivefor coronavirus infection. He was being held at the Bergen County Jail, and was tested after becoming ill. This is the same center where an officer tested positive last week.

Conditions in an ICE facility in the Hudson County Correctional Facility in New Jersey have gotten so bad that inmates are going on a hunger strike over access to soap and toilet paper.

At the nearby privately operated Elizabeth Detention Center, inmates complained of not having even hand sanitizer in their close quarters, and that guards were not using masks or gloves. One medical worker there had a positive test last week.

Most of the almost 40,000 detainees in ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody are refugees seeking asylumsomething which is perfectly legal. Yet they have been separated from family and held in crowded, unsanitary conditions. Many have never been convicted of any criminal offense.

As I wrote last fall, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is responsible for the deaths of at least eight children, several from influenza. Nonetheless, not only have they refused to provide flu vaccinations to those in their custody, but they have refused to allow volunteer physicians and nurses to administer them either.

As Dr. Mark Travassos, of the University of Marylands Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, observed, Under the present administration, detainment centers have become a black box what happens in them has not been open for review byeven elected officials.

We have an urgency with COVID-19 to have people practice social distancing, which actually means being physically separated from others by at least six feetpreferably more.

Coronavirus can also be spread by touching contaminated surfaces. This is why frequent, careful hand washing is recommended. Yet last fall, the US government went to court arguing that children in detention are not entitled to basic sanitation, clean clothes, bathing, and toothbrushes.

This is why detainees are at huge risk and feel like they are sitting on a time bomb. Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, described them as sitting ducks.

She emphasized to me that despite the ruling that those incarcerated need to be provided supplies for hygiene, that is still not happening. Many are malnourished; some are given rotting food. Private prisons, where most are held, are profit-driven.

ICE has a history of responding poorly to public health threats. For example, unvaccinated employees were responsible for fueling a measles outbreak at Eloy detention center.

ProPublica reports that ICE has repeatedly failed to follow rules meant to contain communicable diseases. For example, the detention center in Aurora, Colorado, had multiple outbreaks, including mumps and chickenpox, which they failed to report. They also refused to vaccinate detainees to try to protect them until forced to after the fact. A private contractor for ICE, the GEO Group, runs this facility. During an inspection of the center in February, 68 people were found to be quarantined with the flu and 70 others hadmumps. Ten inmates are under observation for COVID-19 after an exposure though none are reportedly ill.

Cho told me that conditions at the centers have deteriorated from their baseline, which the Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported as being unsafe. She also stressed the ACLUs similar report, Code Red, which exposed the failure of the camps to provide adequate care in a timely manner, and how that has led to inmate deaths. In fact, over one-third of deaths that have happened under the Trump administration are suicides in ICE custody and there is a mental health crisis happening in ICE detention.

Last week, the ACLU (national andWashington State), and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) sued ICE to release the vulnerable detainees at Tacoma Northwest Detention Centerwho are at risk of death or serious illness from COVID-19. That center is near Seattle, the first city to be hard-hit by the virus.

Physicians Scott Allen and Josiah Rich gave urgent recommendations to Congress that there be a process in place to identify potentially infected detainees, test them, then isolate or quarantine; limit transfers of detainees; and have alternatives to detaining them. He warned that the current situation was a tinderbox scenario.

Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International USA are among other groups calling for the release of detainees. More than 3000 doctors also wrote a letter, stressing the devastating risks infection posed, particularly to vulnerable individuals.

John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE, has warned about the danger of COVID-19 in detention, saying it would spread like wildfire. He noted that the close quarters in which detainees are held is the opposite of the social distancing that is being recommended. He therefore called last week for the release the thousands of nonviolent, low-flight-risk detainees currently in ICE custody.

Importantly, Sandweg stressed that infected detainees also pose a significant risk to the hundreds of people who work at each ICE facility, and that this will enhance community spread, as the workers take the infection home to their families. What happens then? Local communities that house the mostly private detention centers will have their hospitals overwhelmed by the sudden influx of COVID-19 patients.

Given that more than 90% of the immigrants who are released to their communities pending court proceedings return for their hearing dates, one might ask why the administration has not heeded the warnings of so many medical specialists about how devastating and uncontrollable outbreaks of coronavirus will be in detentions centers.

Perhaps one reason detainees are not being released is that over70 percentof detainees are held in private, for-profit facilities. Two of the largest of those,GEO Group and CoreCivic (Corrections Corporation of America). Despite their failure to provide safe conditions for detainees, the GEOearned $2.3 billion in 2018, mostly from U.S. government contracts, which is more than any other ICE contractor.

With infections now in a detainee and more in ICE employees, the crisis of COVID-19 infections clearly has arrived in our detention centers.The urgency to address the safety of immigrants in our detention camps and of prisoners in our jails grows exponentially every day along with the coronavirus epidemic.

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Immigrant Detainees Are Sitting On A COVID-19 Time Bomb - First Infection Reported - Forbes