Cases of the virus in facilities housing migrants called ‘pretty inevitable’
As the coronavirus continues its inexorable spread, doctors and humanitarian aid officials are growing concerned that tens of thousands of immigrants in U.S. detention are at high risk of contracting the virus.
“It’s pretty inevitable that they’re going to have cases of COVID-19 within detention facilities,” said Dr. Ranit Mishori, a professor of family medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and a senior adviser for the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights.
Public health officials are urging people to avoid crowds and follow strict personal hygiene — safeguards largely unavailable to asylum-seekers held in federal detention facilities or camped out on the Mexican side of the border under President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
The thousands in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities live in close quarters — they eat in the same dining halls, share bathrooms and sleep clustered in common rooms. There are 32 immigrant detention facilities in Texas, not including county jails and federal prisons that temporarily detain immigrants.
“Nobody has come from the administration and told us about coronavirus. Nobody,” said Steve Tendo, a Ugandan
asylum-seeker held at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville. “There’s been no communication.”
No immigrant in detention had been diagnosed with the coronavirus as of Friday, ICE said.
The agency said it had suspended visits to its detention centers and had begun medically screening new arrivals, placing some in isolation for further testing if they met criteria established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
ICE said it has isolation rooms for quarantine, but it is unclear how many.
“ICE is actively working with state and local health partners to determine if any detainee requires additional testing or monitoring to combat the spread of the virus,” the agency said.
Tendo said federal authorities have not posted informational flyers about coronavirus or provided additional hand sanitizers at Port Isabel. He said he found out about the coronavirus after he paid to access the internet on a tablet.
He said he sleeps in a room with 75 others in bunk beds.
“If we get one case, most of the people will get it. Because we are in one place, locked up like chickens,” Tendo said.
The U.S. immigrant detention system is the largest in the world and has been criticized for overcrowding and inadequate medical care, in some cases leading to migrant deaths.
“This is definitely giving us very, very huge red flags, and it’s extremely concerning when you consider that one of the main mitigation recommendations by the CDC at the moment is either self-quarantine or social distancing,” Mishori said.
Last week, House Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf urging the federal government to take extra precautions at detention centers to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
In 2018, the CDC recommended that the government administer flu vaccines to migrants, but Customs and Border Protection rejected the proposal. Three children in CBP custody died from the flu that winter.
Last year, thousands of immigrants were placed in quarantine after outbreaks of various diseases, including mumps, measles and chickenpox. ICE struggled to contain the mumps outbreak, and nearly 900 cases were identified in detention facilities across the country.
“I am scared about the virus because it’s something that can kill if not properly administered to,” Tendo said.
Tens of thousands of asylumseekers, meanwhile, are living in squalid conditions on the Mexican side of the border — in a tent camp in the city of Matamoros, located across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, or in barebones shelters in Nuevo Laredo, Juárez and other border cities.
With limited access to sanitation and hygiene, these migrants are especially susceptible to the virus, said Helen Perry, executive director of Global Response Management, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical care and humanitarian aid.
The organization has been assisting the more than 2,500 migrants stranded in Matamoros while they await asylum hearings in the U.S.
“We’re all worried about the worst-case scenario, which is it gets into the camp and it spreads like wildfire,” Perry said. “If one case gets in, we’re going to see epidemic spread, at a bare minimum.”
Global Response Management is hoping to isolate the migrants most at risk — the elderly, the disabled and pregnant women — on one side of the camp. The volunteers also want to install about 40 additional hand-washing stations, Perry said. But in both cases, they need approval from Mexico’s National Institute of Migration.
They’ve requested approval and are awaiting a reply, Perry said.
“Quarantine at a camp like that is a dream,” she said. “It’s never going to happen.”