Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has resumed mass-scale sweeps in the middle of a pandemic, detaining more than 2,000 people during July and August, CBS News reports. “ICE said the operation targeted undocumented immigrants and others subject to deportation who had been charged or convicted of a crime involving a victim,” but some detained have legal status and others no criminal record at all.
The agency had claimed in March that it would “exercise discretion” and apprehend only certain individuals due to the novel coronavirus. But ICE hasn’t just let this virus fester in its inhumane facilities, it’s actively made the crisis there worse. That includes refusing to release larger numbers of detained people, including children and their parents. Now ICE has resumed terrorizing communities to send more people into these dangerous facilities, supposedly in the name of public safety. But whose safety exactly?
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“Already the 2020 fiscal year (which ends September 30) is tied with 2006 for the highest number of migrant deaths in ICE custody—the vast majority of whom have died of Covid-19 related complications,” mitú reported. “Just this week, a 50-year-old man from Honduras became the system’s latest victim and the 19th to die so far.” BuzzFeed News reports that 50 people have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Texas facility where he’d been detained.
ICE has always had every ability to release detained people to their communities to shelter in place at home, but instead more than 20,000 people as of now continue remain jailed in facilities all across the U.S., including many in private prisons and facilities hard-hit by Hurricane Laura, which has created another disaster on top of existing ones.
Mother Jones reported that Laura worsened life in a number of detention facilities in Louisiana, “creating such dire conditions at one facility that detainees reported relieving themselves on their dishes, covering up their waste with torn-up pieces of plastic bags to control odors, and sleeping near toilets filled with feces and menstrual blood.” When detained people at one facility protested, officials reported using force to shut them up.
Advocates are pushing ICE to release more detained people from other facilities before further storms hit, but ICE is doing the exact opposite and filling them back up. During a pandemic. “ICE’s large-scale arrests & failure to #FreeThemAll while COVID spreads in detention demonstrates ICE's complete disregard for immigrant lives,” tweeted Detention Watch. “It doesn’t have to be this way. A few decades ago, the US did not put immigrants in detention like it does now.”
Nor lie to us about it like it does now. Following an ICE raid targeting California in early 2018, impeached president Donald Trump, former U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and former acting ICE director Thomas Homan repeatedly lied about several aspects of the operation. When an ICE spokesperson wanted the agency to correct these lies, he was rebuffed. So he resigned.
As mitú also notes, the Trump administration is resuming these sweeps as Latino and Black communities in particular are being ravaged by COVID-19. “Black and Latino Americans are dying at a disproportionate rate,” Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner wrote in July. “Americans of color are both more likely to catch COVID-19 than white Americans, and more likely to die if they come down with the disease.” But this white supremacist administration quite literally doesn’t care.
