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Re: “Aurora’s ICE facility is a safe, clean and necessary facility,” Oct. 7 commentary

Steve House’s guest commentary on the GEO- run ICE detention facility in Aurora reads like a timeshare brochure, attempting to sell readers on what an incredible vacation immigrants will enjoy once detained inside. An “immaculately clean” facility with “first- rate” medical care and food so delicious that “most staff chooses to eat there each day because of the quality.” Only a tourist would fall for this fiction.

Those of us who know better understand that GEO’s Aurora facility is a dangerous cesspool beyond repair, because its foundation is rotten. No amount of paint or polish can ever cover up the years of abuse and neglect many people have endured in Aurora. Cruelty from which there is no recovery, like in the cases of EvalinAli Mandza and Kamyar Samimi, who died of medical neglect while in custody at the Aurora facility.

In September, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform issued a devastating report on for- profit immigration detention centers. It documented consistent and unchecked negligence regarding the mental and physical health of detained people. It cited the Aurora facility’s shockingly deficient medical care as one of the worst cases in the country of systemic health and safety failures at an immigration detention facility. Failures that only continue.

On the same day The Denver Post published House’s brochure, news media reported that the significant COVID- 19 outbreak at the Aurora facility had swelled from 19 to 37 cases.

Based on the facts, not the fiction, 2020 is on trend for more serious life and death issues at GEO’s Aurora facility.

Mark Silverstein, Denver Editor’s note: Silverstein is legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and is one of the attorneys representing the family of Kamyar Samimi in a wrongful death suit against GEO.