“There are a number of reasons Covid-19 has hit ICE detention centers particularly hard, including the spotty implementation of the agency’s own pandemic guidelines at their facilities,” the Times said on a number of food stalls. The analysis points to one in a Report of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month who found that arrested as an immigrant in Arizona The correctional center of La Palma protested peacefully against the lack of sufficient personal protective equipment. They were forcibly sprayed with chemicals by guards.
A letter signed by 182 LPCC inmates indicates that pepper spray, pepper balls and chemical agents have been used at the facility and that protesters who have been segregated for longer have been punished. We confirmed that LPCC used chemical agents to stop the protests, ”the report said said.
The Detention Watch Network advocacy group said in a blockbuster report last December that “cLandscapes and economic areas with multiple counties and ICE facilities were more likely to face serious COVID-19 outbreaks. “In that report, it was estimated that ICE’s failure to release more people during the pandemic actually contributed nearly 250,000 cases to the US numbers. In its analysis, The Times said: “[i]Infections in prisons have an impact on the surrounding communities. “
“Take Frio County, Texas, for example,” the analysis said. “In this rural district with around 20,000 inhabitants there are two large ICE facilities that are operated by private prison companies. As of May 5, 2020, there were 10 known cases in the county, all of which were related to the ICE Processing Center in South Texas. Three days later, the number of positive cases across the country tripled. “
The analysis also cites the agency’s actions in misleading the public about pandemic numbers in its facilities. Back in July Executives from private prisons told Congress that 900 of their employees had tested positive for the virus. Due to ICE’s policy of excluding third parties from the public case database, the agency gave the impression that there were only a few dozen cases of non-detainees in immigration facilities at the time.
“At a House hearing on the supervision of ICE prisons In July 2020, New York representative Kathleen Rice asked the managing directors of four private ICE contractors to release data on employee infections, ”the analysis continued. “All four said they would publish the information with the permission of ICE, but to date there is no system-wide data on infections among ICE contractors.”
ICE has always had the power to allow imprisoned immigrants to seek refuge at home, a fact proponents have repeated time and again since the beginning of the pandemic. “Detention of immigrants is civil detention, which means that people in custody are not there to serve time committing a crime but to wait for an immigration tribunal to decide whether they can stay in the United States, “said the Times at a fourth takeout. ICE reduced the prison population from a record of nearly 55,000 set by the previous government, but 14,000 people are still detained during the pandemic.
x
#FreeThemAll is an urgent public health imperative, but #CommunitiesNotCages is an urgent moral imperative. People can and should handle their cases in community. Nobody should suffer behind bars.
– SG (@setareh_june), April 26, 2021
The analysis finds that while the federal prison office has a system-wide vaccination schedule for its inmates, ICE does not. Even when lawyers tried to book outside appointments for detained immigrants, ICE refused to drive them, even though it does for certain other medical appointments. Mother Jones reported last month that the judge in a lawsuit over a facility in New York said officers “did nothing to get them the vaccine. Nothing. Zero.”
The agency has violated court orders resulting from legal proceedings aimed at the release of particularly vulnerable detained immigrants. “In April 2020, a federal judge in California ordered ICE to” identify and consider detainees at higher risk for complications from Covid-19, regardless of legal status, “the analysis continued. “Almost a year later, the same judge found that the agency ‘It is no surprise that the agency has found ways to ignore court orders calling for the release of children detained with parents.
“This report shows what lawyers and public health experts have warned about since the pandemic began: ICE and its contractors are fundamentally at risk to the lives of imprisoned immigrants and the surrounding communities,” the Cville Immigrant Freedom Fund tweeted in response to the analysis .
Comments are closed.