The detained immigrant who testified in a virtual court hearing as part of an ongoing lawsuit demanding the release of detainees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody almost didn’t have to make the case for why he and others should be released amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, because the agency did a pretty good job of it for him. “The ICE officer standing next to him as he spoke was not wearing protective gear,” Miami Herald reports.
Deivys Perez Valladares, a 25-year-old diabetic man currently jailed at the Krome Processing Center in Miami-Dade, said during the virtual hearing that ICE’s practices—or lack thereof—during the pandemic are putting him and others at dire risk of infection. “Yes I am scared,” he said according to Miami Herald. “Like right now, the ICE official who is here with me, he doesn’t have a mask on.” According to the report, Perez Valladares said other guards at the facility have also worked without protective gear.
Miami Herald reports Perez Valladares told the court he was at one point “placed in a cramped hielera— Spanish for icebox—for 13 hours with 17 other detainees.” Immigrant and human rights advocates have for years condemned the use of hieleras, where there are no blankets or even access to a toothbrush. “We were one right next to the other because there wasn’t space for everyone,” Perez Valladares said in the report. “Lots of us slept on the floor.”
Another immigrant, Alejandro Ferrera Borges, testified that when detainees at Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach run out of the travel-sized shampoo they get once a week from ICE and its $8 billion annual budget, whether it gets replaced depends on whether the guard is having a good day or not. “If it runs out we try to ask for more,” he said according to the report. “Sometimes they give, sometimes they don’t. I am given some because I’m friendly with one of the officers.”
But ICE’s complete disregard for detainees’ ability to wash their hands and bodies to mitigate risk amid the pandemic is horrifically common. In an phone recording obtained by ProPublica earlier this year, a detained man at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in New Jersey complained that if they used up the one bar of soap they were given a week to wash both their hands and bodies, they’d have to buy more from the prison commissary. Without money in their accounts, they’d just have to go without basic daily items.
The detained man from the recording, Ronal Umaña, said that when detainees complained to guards that they could get sick and die, guards retorted, ‘Well, you’re going to have to die of something.’”
Perez Valladares and Ferrera Borges’ testimony on Wednesday comes as three immigrants have died from COVID-19 after being held in federal immigration custody. Their names were Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, Óscar López Acosta, and Santiago Baten-Oxla. But even as nearly 1,600 detainees have tested positive for COVID-19 as of June 4, ICE still has more than 25,000 people in custody—even though many of them, including asylum-seekers, could easily be released to their homes or sponsors right now.
So with ICE intentionally keeping detainees in danger by refusing to release them during a pandemic that is now closing in on 2 million infections and over 100,000 deaths across the U.S., advocates continue their fight in the courts to save detained people’s lives. “Mr. Valladares is in a room with an unmasked guard at a hearing where ICE is trying to show that they really are taking this seriously and that they are doing everything they can,” Scott Edson, an attorney in the case, said according to Miami Herald.
