Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) cruelty isn’t just illustrated by who agents are sweeping up in their racist mass deportation dragnet, it’s also shown in how they are deporting immigrants from the United States. According to a disturbing report from Newsweek, 92 detainees who were being deported back to Somalia alleged they were kept shackled, hungry, and deprived of restroom access for nearly two days aboard an ICE airplane ride from hell:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kept 92 Somali immigrants chained on an airplane for 46 hours in "slave ship" conditions during a botched attempt to deport them back to Somalia earlier this month, detainees and advocates say.
The plane carrying the Somalis—chartered by the ICE Air Operations division—made a pit stop in Dakar, Senegal, 10 hours after taking off from Louisiana on December 7. But the plane never made it to Mogadishu. Instead, after parking the plane on the tarmac for nearly a day, ICE turned it around and made the 4,600-mile flight back to the United States on December 9.
Interviewed by Newsweek, one of the men on the plane and an attorney for two others said ICE deprived the Somalis of adequate food and water, and access to a working bathroom, during their two-day detention on board, forcing them to urinate in empty water bottles or, when they ran out of the bottles, on themselves.
Others allege they were hit by agents as detainees languished due to the aircraft’s malfunctioning air conditioning system. An estimated 100,000 immigrants are torn from their families every year via “ICE Air” at an average cost of nearly $2,000 per person, and for nearly $2,000 a person, detainee Rahim Mohamed, a diabetic who has lived in the U.S. since 2002, said that “we weren't allowed to use the bathroom or get out of the plane. I was not given the medication I need. I peed into a bottle, and then I peed on myself. It was a horrible thing, man. I thought my life was pretty much over."
According to Newsweek, ICE didn’t dispute that the detainees were kept shackled for two days—the plane parked so that the relief crew could get some rest, how nice—but did deny that the air conditioning was malfunctioning and that detainees were denied access to food, water, and the restroom. ICE (being ICE) made sure to point out that many of the detainees have criminal records, like that’s somehow supposed to excuse them from allegedly treating human beings like cattle. What Newsweek’s report adds to is a pattern of abuse of detainees in immigration custody, and a pattern of abuse that ICE has literally tried to rip up:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.
ICE has asked for permission to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs; regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. ICE proposed various timelines for the destruction of these records ranging from 20 years for sexual assault and death records to three years for reports about solitary confinement.
“Recent reports by advocacy groups document sexual assaults in detention without adequate investigation or remedy, sub-standard medical care, the overuse of solitary confinement as well as threats and physical assault by custody staff,” noted the American Civil Liberties Union. “Since October 2016, there have been 10 deaths in immigration detention. Many of the records used in these reports and analyses would not have been made available without sustained public pressure to force ICE to maintain and divulge this information.”
According to Newsweek, “the 92 Somalis are currently being held in two detention centers in Florida. Their lawyers, along with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights group, are calling on the government to delay their clients' deportation for a month so they can receive legal counsel”:
For Rebecca Sharpless, an immigration law professor at the University of Miami who has been following the situation, it was a gross violation of basic decency.
"If you shackle someone to a chair for almost 46 hours with very little food and very little water with no access to a bathroom, it's a violation of their human rights. It's reminiscent of a slave ship experience," she said.