The novel coronavirus isn’t the only thing that’s surged inside immigration detention facilities in the past several months. A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that guards have used violent force against more than 600 detained people who have been protesting their ongoing detention amid the pandemic. In the months preceding, Hamed Aleaziz reports, “there were two use-of-force incidents against more than 10 detainees, according to a review of the documents BuzzFeed News obtained.”
Aleaziz reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) makes it harder to know what’s going inside these facilities because the agency “does not compile data from use-of-force incidents within detention centers nationwide.” The would require ICE keeping itself accountable, right? So instead, he had to review internal documents to get the answers himself.
“Since the end of March through the beginning of July, guards at detention centers across the country deployed force—pepper spray, pepper balls, pepper spray grenades—in incidents involving more than 10 immigrants at a time on a dozen occasions, according to a review of internal reports,” Aleaziz reported. “In total, more than 600 detainees have been subjected to these group uses of force.”
He writes that at the notorious ICE prison in Adelanto, California, guards shot pepper spray and pepper balls at over 150 detained people following one protest, sending several to the hospital and leaving Alejandro Ramirez blinded in one eye for three days. “One of the pepper balls used struck a table, Ramirez said, and a broken piece cut his eye,” the report said. In another instance, “detention guards pepper-sprayed underneath a door after some detainees protested being isolated due to potential COVID-19 exposure, according to an internal report.”
Adelanto, like many other ICE prisons, is privately operated. During testimony to Congress last month, CoreCivic and LaSalle Corrections executives claimed they had no knowledge of the use of violent force against people jailed at their facilities. When confronted by New York Rep. Kathleen Rice with the fact that his company’s spokesperson had actually confirmed the use of pepper spray against detainees at one New Mexico facility, the CoreCivic executive claimed he’d “misunderstood” initial questioning, and conceded the use of force there, Mother Jones reported at the time.
Meanwhile, a third executive from the private prison company that runs Adelanto massively downplayed the truth: “GEO Group CEO George Zoley said he was aware of one incident in California,” Mother Jones reported at the time. There have been at least five.
“ICE officials acknowledged the recent uptick,” Aleaziz reported, “which they attributed to disruptive detainees.” So pleading for their lives amid a pandemic is now being labeled “disruptive” by this agency, which has every power and ability to release larger numbers of people, including children and their parents detained at migrant family jails, but won’t. Nearly two weeks after a federal judge’s deadline to release kids from these facilities, they remain jailed because ICE won’t release them with their families together.
“We are numbers to them," Ramirez said in Aleaziz’s report. "We are not people. They are not going to listen to us. They are going to follow their rules. There is nothing we can do.”