The president’s extremist approach to immigration enforcement has created a 'tinderbox,' putting thousands of detainees at risk. Here's a look at ICE in the age of COVID-19
Earlier that month, he says, a fellow ICE detainee abruptly disappeared from his dorm. A few days later he was back, saying he’d been tested for the coronavirus and briefly isolated. Then the man was gone again, released without explanation. “We’re like, ‘Hold on, the coronavirus is in here?’ ” Edwin recalls. “ ‘Why isn’t everybody getting tested? We’ve been interacting with this person.’ ”
Edwin was in custody at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in New Jersey, one of the first ICE facilities to report a COVID-19 outbreak, where detainees went on a three-day hunger strike for soap and cleaning supplies in March.They were right to be concerned. A few weeks after the hunger strike at Hudson County began, 41 staffers and 22 inmates and detainees at the jail tested positive for COVID-19.
“They are using those low numbers to make it seem like there is not a problem when there is obviously a problem,” says Andrea Saenz, attorney-in-charge of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project at Brooklyn Defender Services. “We’ve had so many clients call us either reporting symptoms or reporting their cellmate has symptoms, just scared.”
“It wasn’t this way not that long ago,” says Laura Rivera, director of the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s almost become normal to think about immigrants being confined against their will, waiting for their day in court, but as Americans we should really question the sense behind that.”
Mikhail Solomonov, in custody at a facility in Aurora, Colorado, wrote that there was no hand sanitizer or masks. At the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California, Faour Abdallah Fraihat said new detainees arrive regularly and procedures at the facility haven’t changed since the virus began. In Louisiana, a detainee with coronavirus symptoms was given ibuprofen, syrup, and salt instead of a test for COVID-19.
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