ICE FAILING TO KEEP DETAINEES SAFE AS DISEASE SPREADS
By the time Carlos Ernesto Escobar-Mejía was finally admitted to the hospital, it was too late. The 57-year-old was intubated in the intensive care unit when he died of COVID-19 at Paradise Valley Hospital in National City.
But Mr. Escobar-Mejía’s fate was entirely preventable.
He contracted the coronavirus while under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. Amid loose or unimplemented COVID protocols and staff members who brought the virus with them as they entered the immigrant prison each day, an outbreak of COVID-19 had predictably infected hundreds, including those with medical vulnerabilities, like Escobar-Mejía. His death marked the first of many in ICE custody.
Now, as the Omicron variant tears through the immigration detention system at unprecedented speed, the federal government is no more prepared to ensure the safety of immigrants inside detention than it was two years ago. As of yesterday, a new outbreak has infected at least 52 people — likely an undercount — at Otay Mesa.
The story is the same at dozens of other immigrant prisons across the country. Halfway through January, COVID-19 cases had spiked in detention since the start of 2022 by a staggering 520 percent, according to ICE’s own figures.
The data is shocking, but not surprising. Medical experts have repeatedly warned that social distancing is impossible in prison settings where people are three times more likely to die of COVID-19 due to overcrowding and poor conditions. This reality is undoubtedly made even more dire by the highly transmissible nature of the Omicron variant.
If this simple fact weren’t enough to compel the Biden administration to heed the advice of medical experts and release people, ICE’s super-spreading practices, like cross-country transfers, contribute to the rise of COVID-19 at home and across the globe.
COVID-19 exacerbates the already unconscionable, life-endangering medical neglect immigrants face in detention. What’s more, those in detention are more isolated than ever as visitation from family members and loved ones remains cut off, all the while oft-maskless prison guards continue to introduce COVID-19 into prisons.
As could only be expected, ICE has failed to implement even the most basic COVID-19 safety protocols, let alone adhere to the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the multitude of court-ordered releases. As a result, ICE bears responsibility for the loss of at least 11 lives, more than 34,000 positive cases and an incalculable toll on the public health of communities surrounding immigrant detention centers across the country.
While numbers can only go so far in expressing the true harm inflicted upon loved ones of those who have died and those who remain isolated, we may never know the complete toll of the government’s negligence.
Through the monitoring work of Freedom for Immigrants’ national network of visitation groups, we have deduced that the number of deaths is far higher than publicly reported. ICE’s deliberate practice of releasing people who are on the brink of death, allowing the agency to evade its responsibility to report these fatalities, has been well-documented here in Southern California and elsewhere.
Two years into this pandemic, immigrant communities continue to pay the price for this agency’s callous indifference toward the health and safety of Black and Brown immigrants.
In recent weeks, immigrants detained around the country have called our National Immigration Detention Hotline to report unsanitary and uninhabitable living conditions, denial of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), and lack of access to vaccine boosters.
The pandemic has further unveiled the dehumanizing and arbitrary basis behind the system of locking up immigrants en masse, in which nearly 80 percent of those in ICE custody are held in prisons operated by for-profit companies. Over the course of the past two years, people in detention, public health experts and advocates have consistently pleaded for mass releases.
Instead, the Biden administration has moved in the opposite direction, increasing the number of people in detention by a whopping 56 percent since taking office, well beyond the detention rate he inherited from his predecessor. This is a far cry from the rhetoric used on the campaign trail, where Biden repeatedly promised his administration would honor the human rights and dignity of immigrants.
It’s past time for this administration to reverse course and begin to release immigrants back to the safety of their families and communities.
A year later, our communities are still waiting. For many, it’s too late.
Razavi is the interim co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a national nonprofit devoted to abolishing immigration detention. The organization monitors human rights abuses in detention, including COVID-19 conditions. She lives in Del Mar.