Judge orders virus testing for Bakersfield ICE detainees
A federal judge ordered immigration officials Thursday to test all detainees for the coronavirus at a Bakersfield facility where COVID19 has broken out and to report the test results quickly, saying the government’s inaction is endangering inmates, staff and the public.
The evidence suggests that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shown “deliberate indifference to the risk of an outbreak” at the Mesa Verde Detention Center and has “lost the right to be trusted” that it will take safety measures without a court order, said U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco.
Mesa Verde, owned and managed by the private firm GEO Group under contract with ICE, houses 121 adult men who are awaiting or challenging their deportation proceedings. Several federal judges have ordered ICE to release medically vulnerable detainees from Mesa Verde and other facilities during the COVID19 pandemic, and Chhabria has issued some bail
orders since April after finding that the agency was doing little to protect their health.
Since late June, 14 staff members have tested positive for the virus, said attorney Bree Bernwanger of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. She said a detainee tested positive last week and ICE then tested everyone in his dormitory, rejecting rapidresults procedures in favor of laboratory review that took several days to report.
Five more detainees in the dorm tested positive, and the total has now reached eight, Bernwanger said. She said one detainee in another dorm, a man in his 60s, was hospitalized with COVID19 over the weekend, but ICE did not tell his family where he was and took two or three more days to test others in his dorm.
Emails between ICE and GEO, obtained by the detainees’ lawyers, showed that the agency refused universal testing because of fears that it could not adequately house or separate all those who tested positive.
“Due to constraints that the (ICE housing) guidelines would put on our housing resources we will be limiting the scope of testing as much as possible,” Alexander Pham, an ICE assistant field office director in San Francisco, said in a May 21 message.
When the agency’s national office suggested Mesa Verde as one of four sites to begin a pilot project of universal testing, David Jennings, director of the San Francisco office, said he had “some concerns about being a test place — in short we have no place to cohort anyone who refuses, is positive, etc.” Cohort is a type of quarantine.
Chhabria said the evidence shows that officials “have avoided widespread testing of staff and detainees at the facility, not for lack of tests, but for fear that positive test results would require them to implement safety measures that they apparently felt were not worth the trouble.”
He issued a temporary restraining order requiring Mesa Verde to conduct weekly tests of all detainees, using methods that provide “rapid results.” He also required ICE to maintain a separate dorm for detainees who tested positive, banned any new admissions to Mesa Verde and ordered its managers to file daily reports on conditions at the facility and their management of the outbreak.
Chhabria scheduled a hearing for Aug. 21 to decide whether to extend his order into a longerlasting preliminary injunction.
“In the face of ICE’s callous disregard for detainees in its custody, today’s court order provides essential safeguards necessary to protect the health and safety of detainees housed at Mesa Verde and residents of the surrounding community,” said Martin Schenker, another lawyer for the immigrants.
San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, whose office also represents the detainees, said ICE “continues to demonstrate its failure to act to prevent a COVID crisis, which has devastating consequences to those in its custody.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.