I’ve been aware that guards at private detention prisons have pepper-sprayed detained immigrants protesting their ongoing detention amid the novel coronavirus pandemic because I’ve written about it. Many Daily Kos community members have been aware that guards at private detention prisons have pepper-sprayed detained immigrants because they’ve read about it here and elsewhere. It’s happened. We know this. It’s fact.
Yet Mother Jones reports that two executives from two private prisons where a number of incidents have been reported—and in at least one instance confirmed by the company itself—claimed to Congress that they had no knowledge about any of that. A third executive, meanwhile, massively downplayed the truth: “GEO Group CEO George Zoley said he was aware of one incident in California,” the report said. In reality, there’s been at least five.
The two executives, CoreCivic’s Damon Hininger and LaSalle Corrections’ Rodney Cooper, either have no idea about what’s happening at their companies—and that’s a very generous excuse—or misled Congress. Mother Jones reports that while both claimed “they were aware of no such incidents” involving the violent use of tear gas or pepper spray at facilities contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the record is clear.
“In reality, people at CoreCivic facilities have been pepper-sprayed on at least four occasions,” the report said. “At LaSalle, it’s happened on at least five occasions. And at GEO Group detention centers, the total is also at least five. Hundreds of immigrants and asylum seekers have been exposed to pepper spray during those uses of force.”
In Cooper’s case, he claimed no knowledge of violence against detained immigrants at LaSalle facilities, but just last month I wrote about asylum-seekers getting pepper-sprayed and violently restrained at the company’s Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana. Two asylum-seekers said detainees protesting their ongoing detention amid the pandemic were refusing to leave the recreation area when guards violently sprayed them as they were in a sitting position.
“Another Cameroonian asylum seeker who has been detained for nearly 18 months, whom I’ll call Wilfred because he did not give permission to use his name, reported that he still had bruises and trouble swallowing after guards ‘climbed’ onto his neck,” Mother Jones reported at the time.
When later confronted during Monday’s virtual hearing by New York Rep. Kathleen Rice with the fact that his company’s spokesperson had confirmed the use of pepper-spray against detainees at a New Mexico facility, Mother Jones reported Hininger claimed he’d “misunderstood” initial questioning, and conceded the use of force there. However, “[h]e didn’t mention other incidents in Arizona and Georgia,” the report continued.
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) had previously called on Hininger and Zoley to testify before legislators, citing the escalating number of COVID-19 cases among detainees and reports of abuses.
“As many public health experts have already pointed out, congregate settings like detention conditions do not allow individuals to observe safe social distancing guidelines, which, especially during a global health pandemic, increase the risk of accelerating transmission of the virus among detainees and facility staff,” legislators said. “Further, we are alarmed by reports that individuals held in detention with symptoms of COVID-19 have reported being denied necessary medical care; some have complained of being placed in solitary confinement; other have been ignored outright.”
These kinds of facilities should never exist in the first place, yet they’ve made massive profits under the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration. It’s vile and inhumane. Now some of these company executives are playing legislators—and us—for fools in downplaying or shrugging at abuses against people on their watch. The abuses must stop, and the contracts need to end.