Racist attacks have surged following Donald Trump’s placement into the White House. In California, recent data from the state’s attorney general’s office showed that hate crimes involving “anti-Latino bias” surged 52 percent. But these attacks aren’t just happening out in public. They’re also happening in detention facilities where immigrants have been sent to as a result of mass deportation policies.
Freedom for Immigrants, a national non-profit that has been documenting abuses in immigration detention since 2012, has reported “at least 800 complaints of abuse motivated by hate or bias in 34 immigration detention jails and prisons” since Trump’s inauguration, including facilities run by private prison profiteers like CoreCivic and GEO Group, which are contracted by the government to detain immigrants.
At CoreCivic’s Otay Mesa Detention Center in California—where some parents of separated migrant children are also being imprisoned—one “individual suffered medical neglect as a result of the prison’s medical staff stated dislike of ‘illegals [that] only come to the US to steal jobs from White people.’ This person was denied pain medication and an X-ray.”
Guards at Otay Mesa also reportedly destroyed the asylum paperwork of a transgender detainee, before throwing “her to the floor with force. Afterwards, she spent months in segregation. This complaint was lodged with [Department of Homeland Security] DHS, but DHS referred it with no further action taken.”
Detainees at GEO Group’s Adelanto Detention Facility, also in California, said they were verbally abused by guards, including being called “fucking blacks” and “Haitian trash.” Additionally, the report continues, ‘one Muslim man who has been in immigration detention for 17 months has been refused access to halal and kosher meals. He also has never been allowed to attend a religious service while in detention.”
Three immigrants died within the span of three months at Adelanto last year. In March 2017, Osmar Epifanio Gonzalez-Gadba, a Nicaraguan national, died six days after attempting suicide. Gonzalez-Gadba was found hanging in his cell and after efforts to resuscitate him, was transferred to a hospital and placed on life support. “He never regained consciousness.”
This past March in Texas, the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic reported that as many as 80 African detainees were being abused at the West Texas Detention Facility in Sierra Blanca. “In addition to abuses such as physical and sexual assault, medical neglect, pepper spray, and solitary confinement,” they were called “animal”—sound familiar?—the n-word, “monkey,” and told that “you belong at the back of that cage.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claimed that “every allegation of misconduct is taken seriously,” but according to Freedom for Immigrants last year, “Homeland Security received a total of 33,126 complaints of sexual and/or physical abuse from January 2010 to July 2016. Of those, only 225—.07 percent—have been investigated.”
As the group and advocates note, abuses under immigration custody aren’t new. Immigration agents were “monstrous” under Barack Obama despite attempts to rein them in, and under Trump, his racism and white supremacist policies have given them permission to be as inhumane as possible. “The president’s vile rhetoric,” Freedom for Immigrants writes, “encourages ICE officers and immigrant prison guards to respond to immigrants in their custody with the same type of hateful behavior.”