Leading advocacy groups have filed a complaint against the Trump administration saying that poor medical care at three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) migrant family jails is endangering the well-being of children and parents. "From the beginning, medical care at Dilley, Karnes and Berks has been substandard at best, and negligent at worst," the complaint said, according to NBC News.
The complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office comes as advocates and administration officials are set to go to court today for an ongoing lawsuit that could decide whether federal immigration officials must release children and their parents together amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, or whether they will be able to continue to separate even more families.
NBC News reports that lawyers from Proyecto Dilley, RAICES, ALDEA-The People's Justice Center, and CLINIC say there are parents and children jailed at Pennsylvania’s Berks County Residential Center, Texas’ Karnes County Residential Center, and South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley who are at particularly high risk for COVID-19 due medical conditions like chronic respiratory disease, while others have been in dire need of urgent medical attention.
One mother, jailed with her son at Dilley for nearly 140 days, “survived ‘repeated incidents of blunt trauma’ to her head and developed a ‘mass on the back of her head,’” NBC News reported. "An independent medical expert who reviewed M.P.A.'s medical records determined that additional testing is urgently needed to determine whether her tumor is cancerous.” Another mother detained at Berks has a lump in her breast, but officials have yet to get to her a specialist. She and her child have been jailed at Berks for nearly 120 days.
Following Judge Dolly Gee’s ruling last month that detained children must now be released from these facilities by this Friday at the latest, advocates have been in fear that ICE would use her ruling to separate these families since detained parents are not under her jurisdiction. A decision covering parents could come as soon as today from a judge in a separate case, NBC News said: “If District Judge James Boasberg decides that parents do not have to be released, Homeland Security could decide to release children without their parents, triggering family separations.”
“@ICEgov has ALWAYS been able to release both parents AND children,” RAICES tweeted last week, but has so far voluntarily refused to even though Gee said in her ruling that these migrant family jails were “on fire” due COVID-19. Advocates used similar wording in their complaint to DHS, writing that officials have been “willfully imprisoning families inside a burning building,” Molly O’Toole of The Los Angeles Times tweeted. “Cruelty has been the point” in not releasing families together, RAICES continued in its tweet.
“Big court decision coming today that could set the stage for the Trump administration to attempt separating detained migrant families if judge does not order the release of the families together,” tweeted MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff. “Will be monitoring closely.”