Families and attorneys for people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Miami Herald that their loved ones and clients have essentially gone missing for weeks at a time while in custody, notified of their location only after the media outlet reported on their disappearances or pressed officials for information. Detainees, they eventually found out, had been hospitalized after becoming sick with COVID-19, with no notification to relatives or advocates.
Maria Carolina Moros-Rodriguez told Miami Herald she had no idea about her dad’s location since May 30. “My phone just stopped ringing with calls from my dad. He just disappeared without a trace.” She found out he’d been hospitalized with pneumonia and COVID-19 only after the outlet pressed ICE this week. “I told [the employee] that ‘the only reason my father would ever not want us to know about his health is either because he is in a coma or dead, which one is it? Do I have to wait to be told that I have to pick up his ashes?’” she said according to the report.
“ICE’s withholding of detainee location and medical information from lawyers has become very common, attorneys say, despite federal regulations that require that a detainee’s lawyer of record be notified at the time of a transfer,” Miami Herald said. “None of ICE’s guidelines on medical care explicitly address notifications to family or attorneys,” the report continued. But guideline or no guideline, even a former ICE head said the agency should be informing families their loved ones are extremely sick—and especially during a pandemic that has killed 120,000 people here.
“Maybe there is some security reason, perhaps they are worried about someone’s effort to help the individual escape civil detention from a hospital, but you have to balance the humanitarian factors,” former acting ICE director John Sandweg told Miami Herald. “It’s a basic human right to be able to notify family members and let them know that their loved ones are OK, or not OK. This is a transparency issue.”
Immigration officials could do this in a phone call, but Moros-Rodriguez said she heard nothing about her dad, 67-year-old Juan Moros-Ramirez, until a few hours after Miami Herald contacted ICE. Only then did the agency contact Moros-Ramirez’s attorney to inform them he’d been hospitalized. “We are relieved because the deportation officer finally called our attorney saying my dad is at a hospital,” Moros-Rodriguez told Miami Herald. “But that doesn’t change the heartache we endured thinking that the worst happened to my dad. It was more than two weeks without hearing from him. We thought he could be dead.”
This isn’t even the first time the Trump administration has recently been accused of disappearing immigrants and migrants. Last year, Physicians for Human Rights said the family separation policy that resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of migrant children at the southern border was a form of enforced disappearance, “which is prohibited under international law in all circumstances,” they wrote. “In all cases documented by PHR, there was a period where parents were unaware of their children’s whereabouts … parents who asked U.S. officials about the wellbeing and whereabouts of their children were not given answers for weeks and months at a time. The concealment and lack of contact points to the crime of enforced disappearance.”
ICE’s secrecy is all the more terrifying considering it has been forced by the courts just to do the bare minimum to protect detained people amid the pandemic. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered officials to provide detained people at a number of Florida facilities with soap, cleaning supplies, and masks to protect them against the virus. But even with those supplies, conditions are simply just dangerous. “There are too many people here, you can’t follow social distance,” one detainee said in Spanish in a video from Miami Herald. “Do we need to die in here for people to realize that coronavirus can kill us all?” a second man pleaded.
Why are we still giving these mass deportation agencies money to fund their ongoing abuses again? Enough.