Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to be at the center of civil rights complaints for failing to adequately treat detained immigrants facing a mental health crisis. The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) has filed a complaint on behalf of three immigrants who said officials across multiple facilities failed to act when they asked for help.
One man who has bipolar disorder and was repeatedly denied his medication said that he was instead thrown into solitary confinement (which is torture) numerous times throughout his detention at the Dodge County Detention Center in Wisconsin. Edwin Silva was also one of the tens of thousands of immigrants to contract COVID-19 while in a harmful detention facility.
“I want guards to be held accountable for their actions,” he said in the complaint. “It's not fair that I ended up in solitary confinement so many times for little reason. They need more supervision to know they can't be bad and indifferent toward people in detention.”
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“In the complaint, the previously detained individuals, who had pre-existing mental health diagnoses or began experiencing symptoms soon after they were taken into custody, describe delayed care or unanswered requests for care,” NIJC said in a statement. “When ICE did respond to requests for mental health care, the care was poor and neglectful, resulting in grievous consequences, including attempts of self-harm.”
Angela Osorio was given just a few moments with a mental health care provider while detained at McHenry County Adult Correctional Facility in Illinois. “The practitioner did not make eye contact with Angela during their two-minute meeting and failed to explain Angela’s diagnosis or side effects of prescribed medication.” Angela then attempted suicide, but told no one out of fear she would also be thrown into solitary confinement.
“I was already in a bad place, mentally, and I knew that if they confined me without any contact, it would be a million times worse,” she said in the complaint.
“The United Nations Special Rapporteur considers placement of people with psychosocial disabilities in solitary confinement to be ‘cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment,’” the complaint said. But two Asylum Network of Physicians for Human Rights doctors say in the complaint that “ICE uses solitary confinement regularly across detention facilities both as punishment and also as a short-term and long-term approach to managing mental health and illness in detention facilities.” The DHS watchdog has previously found that ICE has held immigrants in solitary for months at a time.
“The complaint calls for DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate not only ICE’s failure to provide adequate mental health care and its misuse of solitary confinement for the three complainants, but also for every immigration detention facility in the system,” NIJC said.
It is a fact that medical neglect is pervasive throughout ICE detention. In another civil rights complaint this past March, immigrants who asked for care while jailed at California’s Otay Mesa Detention Facility were instead mocked, belittled, and further traumatized by a contracted psychologist who already has a disturbing history of mistreatment.
But Dr. Altaf Saadi and Dr. James Recht, the two Asylum Network of Physicians for Human Rights experts, also say “it may in fact be impossible to deliver good medical care in a structure that is designed to punish.” The fact is that mass immigration detention is expensive, cruel, and simply unnecessary because the vast majority of immigrants currently in detention have no criminal record at all. ”Many more have only minor offenses, including traffic violations,” says TRAC Immigration.
“Decades of research and testimony from the three doctors in the complaint confirm that the experiences of these three individuals represent system-wide failures that require immediate action including ending the use of immigration detention,” NIJC said.
”Months after her release from detention, Angela continues to struggle with depression,” NIJC continued. “She says, ‘... my mental health has improved, but sometimes I still hear that voice in my head. The same voice telling me that life is not worth living and I will end up in detention again, or worse, deported.’”
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