As a contract employee of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Dr. Josiah Rich, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Brown University, is particularly qualified to assess ICE’s COVID-19 response. Rich and Dr. Scott Allen, an expert medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights and fellow DHS contract employee, came forward as whistleblowers last month, warning in a letter to Congress of a “tinderbox scenario” if the new coronavirus started spreading in immigration detention centers. (Rich spoke to us in his capacity as a whistleblower being represented by the Government Accountability Project; not on behalf of DHS.)
ICE’s group quarantine approach is similar to what happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, Rich said. In that case, passengers were removed from the ship as they got sick. More than 700 out of 3,711 people onboard ended up becoming infected with COVID-19. Nine had died as of late March.
Rich contrasted that with an Italian town where mass testing quickly halted an outbreak. When testing began in early March, at least 90 out of 3,300 residents were infected. Testing everyone led to the isolation of six people who were infected but asymptomatic. Without the testing, those individuals would have likely kept spreading the virus.
ICE has refused to say how many people it’s testing. Last week, Mother Jones reported that a detainee at the LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana, had tested positive for COVID-19. Cox, the ICE spokesperson, declined to say how many people had shared a dorm with that man or whether they will now be tested.
A detainee at ICE’s Pine Prairie detention center said in an interview that new people were brought in from LaSalle Correctional after the confirmed infection. The new arrivals, he said, were being held apart from his unit as part of a roughly 70-person group quarantine. On their way to Pine Prairie, he added, the LaSalle detainees now under quarantine passed through ICE’s Alexandria Staging Facility, a coronavirus hot spot where at least eleven ICE employees have tested positive. (Cox would neither confirm nor deny that detainees exposed at LaSalle were sent to Pine Prairie, citing unspecified “operational security” concerns.)
At San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center, at least 12 detainees and five CoreCivic employees have tested positive. Multiple housing units are under lockdown, according to Dorien Ediger-Seto, a senior attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center. “That is an absolutely inadequate response,” she said. “It’s saying that the 70 people who were in that pod are fair game for the virus….Just letting large groups of people contract COVID-19 can’t be the solution.”
Margaret Cargioli, an attorney with Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said on a call with reporters on Thursday that the question shouldn’t be how many people ICE can release or should release, but rather “Who in ICE custody should be subjected to death? And the answer is no one.”
For the past month, public health experts, activists, and lawyers have called on ICE to release people who are not a threat to public safety, but the agency has largely refused to do so. When human rights groups have sued for the release of small numbers of at-risk detainees, the Justice Department has fought to keep those people in detention. Some detainees with medical conditions have been allowed out, but release remains the exception.
For Beyrer, it’s essential that the public understand that most ICE detainees could be released without threatening public safety. In criticizing ICE’s coronavirus response, he described in stark terms the conditions for people forced to remain in group quarantines. “Cruel and usual punishment,” he said. “That level of anxiety, that level of stress…It’s a form of torture, you might say. A new form of torture. You could call it COVID-19 torture.”