Asylum-seeking families still jailed by ICE face double threats of virus, deportation

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday December 15, 2020 · 12:06 PM PST

2020/12/15 · 12:06

Relatives of detained individuals attend a press conference calling on Congress to cut funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to defund border detention facilities, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, February 7, 2019. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) — Relatives of detained individuals attend a press conference calling on Congress to cut funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to defund border detention facilities, outside the Capitol Feb. 7, 2019.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had every power and ability to release detained immigrants—including parents and their children—amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the government agency has refused. Inside one migrant family jail in Texas, like at other adult detention camps across the U.S., it has continued to result in the inevitable (and preventable): outbreaks.

Among them are “Margarita” and her 8-year-old son “Sal,” Tanvi Misra reports for The Fuller Project. They’ve been detained at South Texas Family Residential Center, or Dilley, for over 420 days, and since Nov. 25 both have been in medical isolation after the boy tested positive. “I am very worried about the other families here, but also about the officers,” Margarita tells Misra. “There is one woman I have seen here in the medical annex who is quite old and very nice ... I think about her a lot and hope that she is okay.”

Margarita, who is seeking asylum in the U.S. after fleeing Guatemala, compared the medical annex at Dilley to the freezing cold, inhumane border facilities where migrants are initially held after crossing the border. “Even while I am freezing, and feeling like I was back in the hielera, [Sal] is burning up with fever,” she told The Fuller Project. And the medical annex appears to be in name only. “I keep asking for medicine and no one will bring it to us,” she continued.

Dilley already has a history of abuse against children: next May will mark three years since a toddler died after being detained at the jail. In testimony to Congress in July 2019, asylum-seeker Yazmin Juárez described how officials consistently failed to provide proper medical treatment when her nearly 2-year-old daughter Mariee became sick while in custody. “I noticed immediately how many sick kids there were—and no effort was made to separate the sick from the healthy,” she said.

Juárez and Mariee were eventually released, but it was already too late for the girl, and she died in a hospital after they joined family in New Jersey. “I’m here today because I don’t want another little angel to suffer like my Mariee,” she told legislators. “I don’t want other mothers and fathers to lose their children. It can’t be that hard in this great country to make sure that the little children you lock up don’t die from abuse and neglect.”

“The prolonged detention, the constant risk of getting sick with COVID-19, and the probability of dying there, is something that affects these women a lot,” Margarita and Sal’s attorney, Nora Picasso, told The Fuller Project. “It’s not only their concern for themselves but … those they most love.”

Dozens of children and parents at Dilley and another migrant family jail in Pennsylvania are at continued risk not just because of COVID-19, but also because ICE has been trying to deport them even though the cruel ban that initially blocked them from seeking asylum has been thrown out in court. “On Thanksgiving eve, a D.C. appeals court issued a temporary stay of removal for 28 children and their parents at Dilley and the Pennsylvania facilities until a final decision is rendered in their case,” the report continued.

But on Monday, Amy Maldonado, an attorney in litigation against the federal government, tweeted “[t]he Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has vacated the stay of removal for our families. There is no #SafetyForThe28. They can be removed immediately,” as early as Dec. 15. As of publishing date, the families still appear to be in the U.S. Remember, and keep repeating, that none of this has to be happening. ICE has always had every power to release families together as they pursue their cases.

Asylum-seeking families still jailed by ICE face double threats of virus, deportation

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