Federal choose condemns ICE for “doing nothing” to guard detained immigrants from a pandemic

ICE’s excuses were extremely questionable, but this is ICE too. The Buffalo News reports that an attorney representing the agency alleged officials requested vaccination doses from the state. “He didn’t explain why the facility couldn’t get cans from the federal government to ship to the states.You might think that ICE, which you know is part of the government, might be able to.

But ICE’s plan to vaccinate people in its care is confusing because there really is no plan. “ICE often has implies that it is up to states to provide vaccines for immigrant detainees, ”said Mother Jones. “The states can find out” is an interesting flex of ICE, considering that it has also threatened states very consistently. “Compared to ICE, the Bureau of Prisons worked closely with the federal government’s vaccination team to obtain doses,” the report continued. As of last month, more than 50,000 people in custody at the Bureau of Prisons have been vaccinated.

However, ICE does not appear to be able to treat around 50 authorized persons in one facility while in custody. If that sounds like total bullshit to you, it’s because it is. ICE could easily use its discretion and simply choose to release immigrants. ICE might say we can’t get the vaccines, find out for yourself. But it won’t work with Richter Vilardo agrees Prisoners’ Legal Services in New York reported that inmates “have been deprived of their constitutional rights by being incarcerated without access to a vaccine to which they are entitled under New York guidelines,” the report continued.

While Unfortunately, Vilardo did not release any prisoners; he was planning a court hearing for next week in which he told the lawyers about it to schedule outside of vaccination appointments. However, it is unclear whether ICE is actually being forced to bring immigrants to these dates. The Buffalo News reports that Vilardo also left open the option of ordering the federal government to provide cans. “These people deserve a chance to get the vaccine,” he said, according to the report. “I will not let the United States ignore them.”

But worse than ignoring the inmates, ICE has actively endangered them. Do you remember the early outbreak at Batavia last year? It came just days after a group of imprisoned immigrants there desperately wrote an open letter asking for their release.

“Many of us have come to beg for asylum at the doors in order to avoid being tortured, raped and murdered by various regimes or those that the regime prefers,” said the prisoners in their March letter, describing the persecution in their home countries , including El Salvador, Venezuela and India. But to remain incarcerated in Batavia amid a pandemic, “we are like the proverbial lamb waiting to be slaughtered,” they wrote. Unfortunately, Vilardo did not publish them either, but instructed ICE to work on the implementation of the CDC guidelines.

What ICE did as an agency instead was literally making the pandemic worse by refusing to release inmates to seek refuge in their own homes and communities. “In the United States, the number of COVID-19 cases rose sharply in the summer of 2020. ICE exacerbated the pandemic,” according to the Detention Watch Network (DWN). said in as a devastating report last year.

“We estimate that the ICE detention activities from May 1 to August 1 were linked to an additional 245,581 cases,” the report said. In a press release from Daily Kos, DWN said: “[t]These cases were concentrated in multi-county economic areas with ICE facilities. If the ICE-related cases were a country’s reported number of cases, that country would have ranked 16th in the world in terms of total cases, surpassing Germany, France and Canada. “

The Times Union reports that a number of inmates have been on hunger strike in Batavia, one man for 19 days. “I’m doing this because I suffer from depression,” Raul said in the report. “I can’t stand being here any longer. I’m afraid I’ll get infected with the virus … Here in the unit I’m in … only the guards use masks, the detainees don’t use masks. “As the report shows, the internment camp is currently facing the worst case load of any ICE facility.

“Right now it seems that no one is taking responsibility for vaccinating both those detained and those who work there,” Amy Belsher, attorney for the New York Civil Liberties, told the Times Union that prisons are particularly vulnerable to virus outbreaks. “