Keeping immigrants locked up in COVID-19 infected detention centers is inhumane | Opinion
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, blatantly lies on its website about the agency’s efforts to address the coronavirus pandemic, giving the public the perception it gives a damn about people in their custody.
ICE claims its staff is “keeping everyone safe, and helping detect and slow the spread of the virus.”
Nothing can be further from the truth, as the Miami Herald confirmed this week during the testimony of an attorney representing ICE in federal court in Miami.
Dexter Lee, an assistant U.S. attorney representing ICE in a lawsuit seeking the release of detainees at three South Florida detention centers, admitted that they’re not conducting COVID-19 testing on every inmate transferred from one facility
to another.
Only immigrants with symptoms get tested, he said.
The excuse: They don’t have enough tests to go around.
The careless practice of shuttling prisoners in lieu of release has sent asymptomatic infected detainees to spread the virus from one facility to another.
As the Herald’s immigration writer, Monique O. Madan reported, COVID-19 cases at ICE’s Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach skyrocketed after 33 detainees were transferred there from Miami-Dade’s Krome Detention Center.
Sixteen of the detainees tested positive for the disease hours after arriving in Pompano Beach.
How can inmates not be infected when they live in close quarters with others — and without access to masks, gloves, social distancing, and testing? They have been saying for months that they’ve been given no protective gear.
People serving sentences in U.S. prisons also are suffering and dying for the same reasons of neglect, and that, too, is wrong. Particularly so, in a state and a country that have turned incarceration into profitable ventures that reward political donors.
But a fact to keep in mind: Immigrants aren’t criminals. They’re people fleeing for their lives from circumstances unimaginable to most Americans.
And, in the exceptional time of a world pandemic, they’re being knowingly harmed by the U.S. government.
How low can we fall?
Have Americans become so desensitized to human rights violations in their own country that they fail to take stock of their own conduct?
U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke said she was left feeling “perplexed” by the admission that possibly infected people were shuttled from one facility to another, spreading the disease.
She was only minding her court manners.
What became clear as Cooke continued to address the government’s attorney was that what she may have been feeling comes closer to outrage.
“Meaning that you are merely moving people from one side of the ledger to the other and never really doing what the purpose was [of my order], which is to lower the population, limit the risk and encourage social distancing, along with other things,” she said. “By keeping spreading this around, ICE is just basically going through — as the petitioners say — ‘a shell game’ of detainees.”
Exactly.
ICE violated basic guidelines
ICE violated basic COVID-19 guidelines: If you come in contact with someone who has symptoms, you must quarantine and be tested. You certainly don’t go infecting a whole other new population.
What ICE was doing was trying to get around her order — with not a care in the world about the health of people whose only breach, until proven guilty of criminal activity, is crossing a border or overstaying a visa.
What concerned ICE was to appear to comply with Cooke’s order that ICE thin the populations in light of the pandemic.
Call it the ICE farce, the COVID-19 dog and pony show.
Just like the claim on the agency’s website its decisions are guided by “a working group of medical professionals, disease control specialists, detention experts, and field operators to identify additional enhanced steps to minimize the spread of the virus.”
I know you can find any kind of expert in this country to say things that suit your political point of view, but given what we’ve seen in South Florida, the ICE team needs COVID 101 lessons.
Immigrants fearful of COVID
The immigrants affected are so fearful for their lives that they’ve resorted to something people fighting for a chance to stay in this country don’t often do for fear of reprisals: They’re speaking out from their confinement.
Their pleas can be heard on the video obtained by Madan.
“There are so many people we can’t social distance,” one says.
Another man begs: Deport me or release me, but don’t leave me here to die of coronavirus.
“Coronavirus could finish everyone here,” says another.
The lack of care for the lives of immigrants is a national disgrace.
Asylum seekers detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego with Salvadorean Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, the first immigrant in detention to die of the coronavirus on May 6, told journalists that the 57-year-old was neglected, his illness not taken seriously.
The for-profit facility run by CoreCivic has the largest outbreak in the country of the immigrant detention centers with 155 confirmed cases.
Another for-profit facility, the recently opened Bluebonnet Detention Center in rural West Texas, has the second highest coronavirus infection in a community with little of it, another indicator that transfers are likely causing spread.
The second immigrant to die, a 34-year-old Guatemalan who died Wednesday in ICE custody in Georgia, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, was waiting to return home voluntarily.
Florida judges like Cooke should insist ICE do better — or this community, too, will be sending immigrants to the grave.
Keeping immigrants locked up in COVID-19 infected detention centers is inhumane.
It’s conduct unbecoming a nation built and sustained by the labor of people from other lands.
