At least 15 immigrant women who launched a hunger strike in protest of their ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention won their freedom this week, and were released from a California detention facility that has been the target of a recent class-action lawsuit over dangerous conditions amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, advocates told the San Francisco Chronicle.
”The release follows weeks of protests and a hunger strike among the women in the facility who said they were unable to follow health guidelines like physical distancing, putting them at risk of COVID-19,” the report said. Still, far too many continue to remain jailed and at risk of harm at Mesa Verde Detention Facility. Donovant Grant, a person still detained at the facility, told the Chronicle, “We could die here. We cannot do social distancing, and people are coming in and out every day. I see so many different faces.”
A lawsuit filed by advocates last month demanding the release of detainees from Mesa Verde and the Yuba County Jail said conditions there make practicing safety guidelines like social distancing just about impossible. “Immigrants at both of these facilities generally sleep in packed dormitory rooms on bunk beds bolted to the floor only a few feet from each other,” advocates said. “We are crammed together,” Brenda, a detainee who won her case but remains jailed at Yuba because the government is appealing her case, said in a statement. “If there is an outbreak here, we will all catch it.”
”At Mesa Verde, conditions have become so dire that a group of detainees engaged in a hunger strike to call attention to the hazardous condition sin the facility and Defendants’ refusal to adequately protect them from contracting COVID-19,” court documents stated. But, “As participation grew, and the media became aware of Plaintiffs’ protest, Defendants retaliated against the protesters. GEO and its employees threatened to cut access to commissary items—food, shampoo, soap, and other personal hygiene products Plaintiffs purchase with their own money—if the hunger strike continued.”
“As a result of Defendants’ retaliation, many Plaintiffs stopped their hunger strike,” the document continues, though clearly, others persisted. Detainees elsewhere have similarly launched hunger strikes that come at great risk, and not just because they’re forgoing nutrition. Officials last year force-fed hunger-striking asylum-seekers in Texas in a horrific process that “can be cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” Human Rights Watch said. “Debilitating risks of force-feeding include major infections, pneumonia, collapsed lungs, heart failure, post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological trauma.”
The group of women at Mesa Verde may be safer now, but far too many others continue to remain at risk because ICE won’t release them, as experts have recommended. “The litigation led to release of some women detained at Mesa Verde, but despite the urgent risk to their lives, many were still being denied release,” Centro Legal de la Raza attorney Susan Beaty told the Chronicle. “The persistency of the hunger strikers on the inside and the mounting public pressure coming from the outside is what pushed ICE to use its authority to release them.”