Solitary confinement is torture, yet years’ worth of government records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, along with a whistleblower, reveal that federal immigration officials have thrown thousands of detainees into solitary for extended periods of time, many “for reasons that have nothing to do with violating any rules,” NBC News reports. This is intentional cruelty that has targeted the most vulnerable, including transgender people and people with mental illness.
Of the thousands of records received by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists spanning 2012 to 2017, “only half of the cases involved punishment for rule violations. The other half were unrelated to disciplinary concerns—they involve the mentally ill, the disabled or others who were sent to solitary largely for what [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] described as safety reasons.” But solitary nearly led to Dulce Rivera’s death.
Rivera, a transgender woman from Central America, was thrown into solitary after accusations—“later determined to be unfounded”—that she touched other detainees. For nearly four weeks she spend 23 hours a day in there until she became suicidal and hanged herself. She survived only because she was found in time, but when she was returned from the hospital, she was yet again placed in solitary.
Joselin Mendez, another transgender woman from Central America, was thrown into solitary after an argument instigated by an officer. “Mendez said he refused to speak Spanish to her, and she cannot speak English.” She said, "I felt afraid and anxious, and I would tremble and sweat and I would ask, 'Why is this happening?'" Another asylum-seeker, Karandeep Singh, was thrown into solitary after refusing to eat in protest of his detention. In solitary, he also tried to kill himself. “It was mental torture.”
"We have created and continue to support a system that involves widespread abuse of human beings," said Ellen Gallagher, an advisor with the Homeland Security inspector general. "People were being brutalized," she said. Immigrant and human rights advocates have been condemning the abusive tactics of ICE and deplorable conditions of immigration detention facilities for years now.
“In the summer of 2009,” states a Women’s Refugee Council report from several years ago, “investigations were pending involving four rapes at the Willacy detention facility in Texas. Earlier this year, a guard at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas was convicted of sexually assaulting three women. In each of these cases, the safety and well-being of the victims was jeopardized by ICE's feeble and secretive response.”
Abuse that continues as ICE and the agency’s agents have felt emboldened under the Trump administration’s racist, mass deportation policies. “DHS's inspector general in recent audits has raised concerns about ‘improper and overly restrictive’ isolation, ‘multiple violations’ of ICE policy leading to needless solitary confinements, and record keeping so sloppy that mentally ill detainees may be subjected to extended stays in isolation that would pose a threat to their health,” NBC News continued.
More recently, a 2018 report from Freedom for Immigrants found “at least 800 complaints of abuse motivated by hate or bias in 34 immigration detention jails and prisons” since Donald Trump’s inauguration, including facilities run by private prison profiteers like CoreCivic and GEO Group. One person from the report was denied medications and an x-ray because “the prison’s medical staff stated dislike of ‘illegals [that] only come to the US to steal jobs from White people.’”
"Solitary confinement,” Gallagher continued, “was being used as the first resort, not the last resort.” NBC New reports that “at least 13 detainees who later died in ICE detention have spent time in solitary, according to records dating back to 2011.” Rather than sending more of our tax dollars to continue this abuse, we need to be taking steps to clamp down on this and hold this agency accountable.