Texas immigrant advocates are calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to release detainees, especially medically vulnerable immigrants, from detention facilities to await their hearings in a safe place as the new coronavirus continues to spread.
“These detention facilities often provide substandard medical care, and that’s under the best of circumstances,” said Rebecca Lightsey, executive director of American Gateways, which provides legal help to low-income immigrants throughout Central Texas. “To keep vulnerable people, most of whom have no criminal history, locked up in close quarters without access to treatment or testing for the virus is inhumane.”
She said she hopes the government moves soon to release at-risk detainees to family members or others who can maintain social distance until the crisis passes.
ICE officials last week said there are no detainees with confirmed cases of COVID-19; however, a medical staffer at Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey on Thursday tested positive for the coronavirus. The agency has temporarily suspended social visitation in all of its detention facilities, including the 31 in Texas.
It also said it would scale back enforcement operations to focus on detaining “public safety risks and individuals subject to mandatory detention based on criminal grounds.”
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The agency said detention centers are following its guidelines on COVID-19, which include housing detainees separately if they meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria for epidemiologic risk of exposure to COVID-19. Detainees with fever and/or respiratory symptoms, the agency said, are placed in a “single medical housing room or in a medical airborne infection isolation room specifically designed to contain biological agents such as COVID-19.”
Those who do not have fever or symptoms but still meet the CDC criteria for epidemiologic risk “are housed separately in a single cell, or as a group, depending on available space.”
But considering a mumps outbreak between September 2018 and August 2019 at U.S. detention facilities, including across Texas, as well as reported overcrowding at some facilities, immigrant advocates say releasing detainees can help mitigate the spread of the virus.
“We are concerned about the health and safety of our clients who, with their liberty restricted in detention, cannot practice recommended social distancing from other detained persons or from detention center staff,” wrote Jonathan D. Ryan, CEO at RAICES, the largest immigration legal services nonprofit in Texas.
Last week the group sent a letter, which is now getting a push from other supporters, to the ICE field office in San Antonio urging the agency to release immigrants to their families and communities while they complete their cases.
The letter says that at the Karnes family detention center in South Texas, detainees include multiple pregnant women and infants, as well as several children exhibiting flulike symptoms.
“We believe that families should never be detained, and the current conditions at Karnes are no place for families, women, and children in compromised states of health during a global pandemic,” the letter says. The nonprofit asks Texans to fill out a note of support on its website to send to ICE.
The Austin-based nonprofit Grassroots Leadership also has issued a public call to action asking Texans to contact Williamson County health and city leaders, as well as the San Antonio ICE field office, to demand that women held at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor be released to safe places while they await their hearings. It also is calling for a moratorium on detentions and detention transfers.
“No one should be forgotten during this crisis, least of all those who have already faced extraordinary risk in search of safety and protection in the United States,” said Lightsey of American Gateways.
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