Shreya Nuli: Inadequate COVID-19 Enforcement (ICE)
Mesa Verde: the striking name of a California ICE detention facility that adopted a head-in-the-sand approach to tracking COVID-19 cases in immigrants due to the unwillingness of private prison contractors. The striking name of a center in which more than half the detainees tested positive for the deadly virus after a federally ordered testing procedure.
Mesa Verde was not the exception, but rather the standard across the country when the historic pandemic shrouded the United States in uncertainty. America is home to the world’s largest immigration detention system, and the U.S. government’s incompetency in responding to COVID-19 has been significant. After the first person in an American immigration center contracted the deadly COVID-19 virus in March 2020, more than an astonishing 18% of 30,000 detainees have tested positive to date. This statistic is outrageously disproportionate to national and global case averages. However, this comes as no surprise in the context of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention system’s many longstanding concerns.
Facilities lack proper oversight with widespread medical neglect and abuse, coupled with limited access to sanitizing products and protective equipment. Due to limited spacing, social distancing and isolation are rendered impossible. Despite this, ICE has continued to detain immigrants, including use of inter-facility transport, at alarming rates. Transmission of COVID-19 given these conditions is practically inevitable, so it’s no surprise that the Vera Institute of Justice reports that FY-2020 had the highest ICE custody death toll in the past 15 years, with the virus as a leading cause.
Worsening the situation, under the existing law, many detainees cannot advocate for their release or access lawyers for legal proceedings.
These legal establishments and conditions are overlooked under the current polarized political landscape. It is increasingly difficult to shift the tide from the radical changes made under the last executive administration. Immigration policy was vastly reshaped after scores of proclamations, regulatory changes, and legal decisions. Migrant children were separated from their families by border agents, work visas were cut, and the notorious steel walls were erected to perpetuate all but an American rhetoric of a closed and restricted nation. With these pre-established expectations, ICE’s accountability to the public and immigrants has fallen short in the form of transparency recession and immigrant support.
ICE’s response to these conditions has been disappointing. The poorly implemented COVID-19 Pandemic Response Requirements attempts to provide detainees with multilingual educational signs, access to hand soap, face coverings, and de-densification policies. Yet the protocols are largely ineffective at the large scale and in practice. This was exemplified by their explicit statement that “strict social distancing may not be possible” in sleeping quarters where “head-to-feet” spatial arrangements were encouraged instead, all while maintaining the sentiment that detainees should be distanced at six feet.
ICE has also failed to effectively report on their handling of positive cases. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the limited data and statistics that ICE publishes on its website is overwritten on a daily basis, making it difficult to accurately gauge how many detainees have been impacted by the virus. This also hinders the formation of analytical trends and patterns to track the progression of the virus. This ambiguity leaves many questions about the effectiveness of ICE and its enforcement unanswered.
Ultimately, while the pandemic ravages our community, it also opens the wounds in immigration detention and policy further, exposing the nation’s shortcomings. Thus, the New York based Brennan Center for Justice recommends the following to alleviate the damage being inflicting:
1) “ICE and CBP should suspend all immigration-related arrests unless the person to be arrested presents a serious risk to public safety independent of their immigration status. The Department of Justice should not initiate any new prosecutions for immigration offenses absent a threat to public safety.”
2) “ICE and CBP should release all individuals who are not a “credible threat” to public safety on parole/bond, including all people without a criminal record or with only a minor violation as their most serious criminal conviction. This would encompass most of the detained population.”
3) “Immigration detention authorities should make public their quarantine/emergency plans, both to the public and to those in immigrant detention, and their success in executing those plans.”
However, until such reforms can be implemented, the vaccine rollout offers a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. It is an opportunity for ICE to take accountability and prioritize their detainee’s health. To date, a vaccine strategy for detainees has not been publicly communicated at a federal level. Rather, the agency is relying on state and local health departments to procure vaccine doses. Individuals in these congregate living facilities should be fully prioritized as the political and social climate shifts.
As the pandemic continues to grow and lace the seams of both immigration detentions and our community as a whole, so should our moral awareness and legal measures.
Shreya Nuli is a first year in Grace Hopper College