Advocacy group reports COVID outbreak at Yuba County Jail
At least 70 detainees at Yuba County Jail and at least 13 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 over the past few weeks, according to the advocacy group “Freedom for Yuba Detainees.”
Yuba County Sheriff ’s Office public information officer Leslie Carbah said Monday that positive cases had grown in the jail over the past several weeks and several inmates had recovered.
“We continue to follow all medical recommendations from our Public Health Officer Dr.
Luu and sick inmates are housed accordingly,” Carbah said in an email.
In a press release issued Dec.
23, the group said detained individuals have reported to them that there is an inability to socially distance, inmates are being forced to use the same cloth mask for months, and are being denied access to cleaning and hygiene supplies.
Jose Darwin Quintanilla is a 21-year-old man from El Salvador who is seeking asylum in the United
States and has been an ICE detainee at Yuba County Jail since June 2019.
“My family hasn’t been able to come visit me since I’ve been here,” Quintanilla said. (Katie Kavanagh, a senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice relayed the Appeal’s questions for Quintanilla and interpreted his answers from Spanish.)
Quintanilla received his positive COVID-19 test on Dec. 25 and had started feeling sick a few days before. He would wake up sweating, shivering, he had headaches, was weak, and had trouble breathing, he said. He was moved to medical segregation but the room wasn’t clean and he had to clean it himself. Quintanilla said it is difficult to breathe and hot in medical isolation because of a broken vent.
“From the way they’ve treated us all the time I’ve been here, it’s clear we’re not important to them,” Quintanilla said. “What matters to them is to maintain their contract with ICE to detain us, but not our wellbeing.”
Quintanilla said Yuba County should recognize that there isn’t the capacity to hold people in immigration detention. He said this was a problem even before the pandemic.
“I think about giving up my case because I’m tired, and now with this coronavirus situation,” Quintanilla said. “I don’t want to die here.”
Carbah did not provide the number of inmates currently sick as of late Monday and said medical care and records for inmates are handled by the sheriff ’s department’s contracted healthcare provider Wellpath.
“I was advised that approximately 61 percent of our COVID cases in the jail have already recovered,” Carbah said.
On Dec. 17, the jail temporarily suspended in-person visitation due to COVID-19 concerns and said in a press release that there were seven COVIDpositive county inmates in isolated treatment.
Freedom for Yuba Detainees is a coalition
of detained community members, attorneys, advocates, and affected families, according to Kavanagh.
“We were so named by our most directly impacted members -- those in ICE detention at Yuba County Jail,” Kavanagh said in an email.
According to the release, the first immigrants in ICE custody to contract the virus reported that their medical isolation cells had not been cleaned prior to arrival. The two in isolation requested cleaning supplies and were then forced to clean their own cells and shared a bathroom. One inmate was not informed of his own Covid-positive status for almost 48 hours.
Yuba County Jail includes 21 individuals in ICE custody, some of whom are elderly and or medically vulnerable, according to the group. Those in ICE custody have eight demands that have been shared with jail leadership. Some of the demands include, providing N-95 masks to everyone in custody, promptly communicating updates about virus spread to people in ICE custody, ceasing transfers between housing units, and reducing populations to allow for social distancing, according to the release.
Kavanagh said the group has not received any information or response
from the jail, the county or ICE. She said the only information it is getting is what the jail reports to ICE, which is included in daily status reports filed by the defendants in the case Zepeda Rivas v. Jennings.
In April 2020, immigrants detained at Mesa Verde Detention Facility and Yuba County Jail filed a class action lawsuit against ICE, alleging that conditions and confinement at the facilities violated their constitutional rights by exposing them to unreasonable risks of infection from COVID-19, according to the American Civil Liberties Union Northern California.
On Dec. 23, Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order in the Rivas case. Chhabria ordered that no additional immigration detainees should be placed into Yuba County Jail for the duration of the outbreak. The outbreak will be considered over by the court when there are no new positive tests among any staff or detainees for two consecutive weeks.
The suit is pending in the district court, according to the ACLU.
“We get much more detailed, timely, and frankly more accurate information directly from those detained inside,” Kavanagh said.
One example of that was
on Christmas night when detainees from the jail reported that two people in ICE custody had tested positive and were moved from A pod to medical segregation, he said. The next morning, at least five county inmates in A pod tested positive the night before, too. That same day,
at least three new men were moved into A pod.
“This constant shuffling of both county and ICE detainees is not captured in the status reports,” Kavanagh said. “Neither are the dirty, unsanitary conditions of confinement at the jail for all those detained.”
The 2019-2020 Yuba County Grand Jury toured the jail on Sept. 5, 2019, and Jan. 23, 2020, and determined that the jail was clean, orderly and operating effectively. The jurors did not offer any recommendations for the Yuba County Board of Supervisors or sheriff.