Wednesday, Sept. 30 marks the end of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) 2020 fiscal year. It also marks the end of ICE’s deadliest year since 2005. CNN reports that 21 immigrants died while in the custody of the out-of-control agency during the 2020 fiscal year, more than one-third of them after testing positive for COVID-19. Among them was 61-year-old Cipriano Chavez-Alvarez, who was ordered released from prison by a federal judge due to his underlying medical conditions, only to then be snatched up by ICE. He died from COVID-19 on Sept. 21.
“But advocates said the novel coronavirus isn't the only factor to blame for the growing number of deaths in ICE custody,” CNN continues. It’s ICE’s intentional negligence that’s also led to completely preventable in-custody deaths, the House Homeland Security Committee said in a one recent report. “With respect to the medical care provided to detainees, the committee found that ICE and its contracted facilities frequently demonstrate an indifference to the mental and physical care of the migrants in their custody,” investigators said.
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The poor treatment of detained immigrants by ICE and its private prison contractors isn’t an outlier: It’s the norm.
A second Congressional report from recent days, this time from the House Oversight Committee, revealed “a widespread failure to provide necessary medical care to detainees” so egregious it led to several deaths. In the case of Huy Chi Tran, a U.S. resident who was detained by ICE in 2018, staffers at CoreCivic’s Eloy Detention Center were supposed to be checking on him every 15 minutes but failed to do so. When staffers found him unconscious in his cell, they failed to immediately tend to him, “allegedly due to safety concerns,” an internal ICE report said.
“Instead, they waited for two additional officers to arrive before entering,” the report continued. “The lead nurse failed to adhere the automated external defibrillator (AED) pads correctly, rendering the AED ineffective in resuscitating Tran. He passed away in a local hospital seven days later.”
COVID-19 has also raged like wildfire at Eloy, with more than 250 confirmed cases among detainees and over 100 confirmed cases among staffers. Among these detainees who became sick was Marisol Mendoza, who earlier this year pleaded for release amid the pandemic due to her medical condition. Instead, a judge ordered ICE to improve conditions. She got sick anyway. “Ms Mendoza is no longer at risk of infection,” her attorney Matthew Green told The Guardian at the time in June. “She now fears something much greater. She fears the risk of imminent death.”
Calling the United States’ immigration detention system “inhumane to its core,” advocates in response to the record deaths called on Congress to pull funding from the mass detention agency, which saw it’s budget more than double from $3 billion during its first year in 2003 to over $7 billion in fiscal year 2018, the National Immigration Forum said. But ICE’s budget has continued to explode even past that number.
“Members of Congress must dramatically cut funding to ICE’s $8.4 billion dollar budget that only proves that more money does not fix a fundamentally broken and unjust system,” Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “Local officials must reject ICE detention in their community and instead invest in programs that support the collective well-being of their residents and not profit off of the suffering of immigrants. And lastly, we must, as a nation, heed the call to #FreeThemAll. Simply put, people navigating their immigration case should be able to do so with their families and in community not behind bars in immigration detention and for those that need support, they can access it through community-based groups.”
ICE is also using this funding to act as a political arm of the Trump administration, announcing that it has plans to soon terrorize immigrant families in blue areas of the country as we head to Election Day. “Two officials with knowledge of plans for the sanctuary op described it as more of a political messaging campaign than a major ICE operation,” The Washington Post reported. And remember that as ICE refuses to release even kids and their parents together from migrant family jails amid the pandemic, children have also gotten sick and died after being ICE’s watch.
“This tragic loss of life should not be reduced to just an ‘alarm bell,’ but rather a call to action—we must abolish immigration detention,” Shah continued in the statement.
