Leading House Democrats who inspected two privately run immigration detention facilities on Monday said they were horrified by conditions inside—including the ongoing jailing of children as young as one years old at one migrant family jail—and called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to quickly release detained people amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Detention facilities have never been suitable for anyone, much less children. But now that at least three immigrants have died from COVID-19 after being held in ICE custody, the dangers have only been heightened. “The conditions are bad,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Joaquin Castro said, according to The Texas Tribune. “These people are living in a petri dish.”
According to the latest data released by ICE, nearly 2,500 detainees have tested positive for COVID-19, with the largest outbreaks located at facilities like the notorious Otay Mesa Detention Center in California, which has seen at least 165 confirmed cases so far. But because thousands of ICE detainees remain untested, numbers are likely higher.
“Unlike other hot spots like nursing homes and prisons, ICE has yet to conduct comprehensive testing for staff and detainees,” the report continued, “nor does it have a directive to do so from the White House, Castro said. One of the detention centers has a rapid COVID-19 testing machine, but it’s constantly passed around among centers, Castro said. He argued that by now, the immigration detention centers should each have at least one machine so they can test detainees, ICE employees and anyone else who enters the facility.”
Legislators also said they don’t believe at all that ICE has been following proper safety protocols. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who was among the Congressional Hispanic Caucus leaders who traveled to the Texas facilities, tweeted: “Some detainees told us that many of them did not get masks until April,” weeks after officials said they had given masks to detained people. Garcia further told San Antonio Current that she believes some mask distribution and “enforcement of the masks just started last week in anticipation of our arrival. It looked like window-dressing for our visit.”
Stuck in all this chaos and cruelty have been kids and their families at the South Texas Family Residential Center, a migrant family jail operated by CoreCivic. “There were multiple children who are 1, 2 years old. These are vulnerable folks," Castro said according to San Antonio Current. "We asked ICE to release these people, because they have family waiting for them. … We met with a woman and her 7-year-old son, who has been there almost 300 days in Dilley. She talked about the mental damage of her son [due to prolonged imprisonment].”
Castro said he also spoke to parents who confirmed warnings from immigrant rights advocates that ICE officials were attempting to separate detained families amid the pandemic:
ICE’s chaos and cruelty has always been intentional: Earlier this month, a federal judge criticized the agency’s response to the pandemic and ordered officials to do the bare minimum and give immigrants detained at three Florida facilities soap, cleaning supplies, and masks in order protect themselves. ICE even showed this intentional disregard during lawsuit proceedings— when Deivys Perez Valladares, jailed at the Krome Processing Center in Miami-Dade, testified in a virtual hearing, he said the guard standing next to him hadn’t bothered with putting on a mask.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Garcia said, according to San Antonio Current. “We have seen 15 of these centers. I can’t figure out why these children are here. I’m on the record to close down every detention center we can.”