The U.S. deaths of 200,000 people isn’t the only grim COVID-19 milestone the federal government is choosing to ignore right now. Texas Observer reported last week that more than 5,000 people have now contracted the virus while under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) watch, with hundreds still in the mass detention agency’s custody. Then early Monday, a man died after contracting COVID-19 while in ICE custody, making this the agency’s deadliest fiscal year in 15 years.
“ICE confirmed the 20th person to die in its detention in Fiscal Year 2020 today,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement on Monday. “The death of Cipriano Chavez-Alvarez at Stewart Detention Facility in Georgia makes this year the deadliest for people in ICE detention since FY 2005, when 21 people died.” And a deadly time for this particular ICE facility: Chavez-Alvarez “was the third COVID-19 fatality among Stewart detainees this year,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
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At least seven immigrants have died after contracting COVID-19 in ICE detention, where federal immigration officials have steadily refused to release larger numbers of detained people as a preventative measure since the start of the pandemic. Lawsuits filed by organizations like the ACLU have won the release of hundreds of people, but more than 20,000 have continued to remain in detention as recent as last week in facilities like Stewart.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Chavez-Alvarez, who was originally from Mexico, had been hospitalized for nearly a week after becoming sick at the privately operated CoreCivic prison. “The death was confirmed by Stewart County Coroner Sybil Ammons, who said Chavez-Alvarez also had hypertension, gout and sleep apnea. He had been hospitalized since Aug. 15,” the report said. “’He had been in really bad shape for at least two weeks,’ Ammons said, ‘like at death’s door.’ Chavez-Alvarez’s death underscored the dangers posed by the coronavirus in closely congregated Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities.”
Dangers that aren’t remotely new. “In the constellation of detention centers across the country, Stewart has been a particular trouble spot for the agency,” The Daily Beast reported in 2019, “with federal investigators reporting last year that staff described a ‘chronic shortage’ of medical personnel, calling the facility’s inadequacies ‘a ticking time bomb.’” A year prior to that, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general found that one detainee complained about having to wait over two months “to get off site to receive a chest X-ray.”
Yet advocates continue to struggle to secure the release of even children detained with their parents at migrant family jails, because ICE is instead making an intentional decision to keep them in these inhumane and deadly conditions in the middle of a pandemic.
A year-long investigation of eight ICE facilities by the House Homeland Security Committee found that the mass detention agency and its private prison contractors commonly demonstrated “an indifference to the mental and physical care of the migrants in their custody,” including downplaying suicide attempts among detainees and threatening others with solitary confinement, which is torture, for daring to ask for medical assistance. And remember, legislators began these inspections before the pandemic even hit these facilities.
Chad Wolf, the unlawfully appointed acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, just so happens to be getting a hearing on his official nomination this week (after ten months on the job). He most certainly shouldn’t get the job—and he most certainly should be hounded for the abuses and deaths on his watch.
“For six months, advocates have been ringing alarm bells about the threat that COVID-19 poses to detained people, as well as staff who work at these facilities and their communities,” said Andrea Flores of the ACLU. “ICE’s handling of this crisis has highlighted the depth of its indifference to the lives of immigrants: from reckless and unnecessary transfers, refusals to provide masks or adequate cleaning supplies, failures to test detained people for COVID, and increased use of force.”
“This deadly pandemic has ushered in one of the deadliest periods in ICE’s 17-year history,” she continued, “but it’s sadly just a more egregious version of what we’ve seen for years.”