On April 9, a rumor spread through several units at Stewart Detention Center, the for-profit federal immigration prison camp run by CoreCivic in Lumpkin, Georgia, that some of the facility’s 1,211 detainees would be released to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Activists had been calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release Stewart’s most vulnerable detainees for weeks, claiming that an outbreak was inevitable.
But they weren’t going anywhere.
The men pounded on the cell doors, becoming “disruptive and confrontational” with the guards, according to ICE. About 70 detainees barricaded a door within their housing area. The guards flooded the housing area with pepper spray, then entered in riot gear and gas masks. The detainees were, in ICE’s terminology, “compliant.”
Until a week ago, the detention center’s use of personal protective equipment was “haphazard” at best, says immigration attorney Marty Rosenbluth, who currently represents almost two dozen clients detained at the facility in their fights against deportation and has helped four secure their release during the pandemic.
Rosenbluth lives a few minutes from Stewart, a remote facility in rural southern Georgia, and visits almost every day. Until last week, he says, detainees weren’t given masks and were scolded when they tried to construct their own from towels.
“Nobody down here has the slightest idea what they are doing,” Rosenbluth says. “It’s just chaos.”
Stewart is where undocumented immigrants from the Triangle often find themselves after falling into ICE custody. Samuel Oliver-Bruno, who sought sanctuary at a Durham church, was held at Stewart for 11 months before being deported last year. Wildin Acosta, a student at Riverside High School who was detained by ICE in 2016, spent six months at Stewart before being released.
“Nobody down here has the slightest idea what they are doing. It’s just chaos.”
As of Tuesday, nine detainees at Stewart had tested positive for the virus. Nationwide, 375 immigrant detainees have tested positive for COVID-19, according to ICE. The largest outbreak is at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, where 75 detainees tested positive. Forty-nine cases were reported at Buffalo Federal Detention Center in upstate New York.
In response to the pandemic, ICE agreed to release about 700 low-risk detainees throughout the country after “evaluating their immigration history, criminal record, potential threat to public safety, flight risk, and national security concerns.” They are currently being monitored with ankle bracelets.
New arrests have also slowed, ICE says. There are 4,000 fewer detainees in custody since March 1, with a “60 percent decrease in book-ins” compared to March 2019.
Stewart, meanwhile, has decreased its population by about 500 people (the facility normally contains about 2,000 beds), and while some of those detainees may have been deported, Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Gracie Willis believes ICE is transferring detainees to “artificially deflate the number at certain detention centers,” making it seem like they’re following federal guidelines on social distancing.
ICE says that deportations have slowed, but the U.S. has still deported thousands of people in April. One hundred deportees arrive at the Mexico border each day, according to The Washington Post, which has led to at least one outbreak at a migrant border camp. Fifty people deported to Guatemala tested positive for the virus, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s coronavirus cases, the Post reported. ICE doesn’t test deportees for the virus before putting them on a plane.
Without adequate testing or facilities capable of practicing social distancing, the SPLC says the only way to keep vulnerable prisoners safe is to get them out of the detention camps.
On April 9—the day of the quickly subdued riot at Stewart—the SPLC filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of several vulnerable Stewart detainees, arguing that the facility failed to comply with federal safety guidelines and conditions there put them at risk of serious illness or death.
Social distancing at the facilities is impossible, the lawsuit says, as “detained people live in extremely close quarters, often in shared dorms with dozens of people sleeping feet apart from each other, or in small shared cells.”
Immigration officials argued that releasing the prisoners would not improve their chances of avoiding COVID-19. “Even assuming a concentrated detainee population, crowding in and of itself does not cause COVID-19 infection,” the federal government said in its reply.
CoreCivic, the largest for-profit prison company in the U.S., has every incentive to keep as many detainees behind bars as possible. It is paid by the detainee, according to a deal the company, which earned nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2019, worked out with ICE and Stewart County in 2006.
Although Stewart has taken steps to curtail the spread of the virus, including ceasing group activities outside of housing units, the lawsuit says the facilities simply aren’t built to handle an outbreak of this nature, and neither are the area hospitals: “If they remain detained in southern Georgia, where hospitals are wholly unprepared to treat the impending volume of COVID-19 patients, there is also an unreasonably high risk that Petitioners will be unable to access life-saving medical treatment.”
A day after the SPLC filed its case in Georgia, a federal judge dismissed it, though on somewhat narrow grounds.
The SPLC had better luck in California last week, when a federal judge required ICE to conduct assessments of all detainees with COVID-19 risk factors, ruling that the agency had exhibited “callous indifference to the safety and well-being” of the detained immigrants.
Martín Muñoz, a plaintiff in that case, was in ICE custody for three years at Adelanto Detention Center in California. He suffers from type-2 diabetes and high blood pressure and says he lived in fear of the coronavirus.
“I was always very worried for my health in ICE custody for the three years I was detained,” Muñoz said in a statement. “When the pandemic arrived, I felt even worse; I was resigned that something bad was going to happen, and I felt lost. ICE never responded to me, they never took steps to protect me. I am so happy the judge is forcing ICE to take steps to protect others.”
The SPLC amended its complaint in the Stewart case on April 24, calling for the release of more prisoners. Aristoteles Sanchez Martinez, a 47-year-old with type-2 diabetes who recently underwent hernia surgery, was recently released from custody, Willis says, but the four other plaintiffs remain at Stewart.
“I met so many people inside who were in really poor conditions and really need to be released,” Sanchez-Martinez said in a statement. “I used to tell people, ‘what you see in here from ICE is the worst of America.’ Now that I am out, I have it on my heart to continue to help the others still inside.”
For the detainees left behind, routine labor has been stretched thin with social distancing protocols. NPR has reported that detainees in many immigration facilities are locked in their cells up to 23 hours a day, disrupting regular jobs like cooking meals. Without people to cook meals, prisoners say they are getting less food than they used to—sometimes only a third of a normal meal, Willis says. In response, one unit staged a hunger strike, Rosenbluth says.
Rosenbluth says he worries not only about his clients but about the hundreds of employees who work in the facility who could bring the virus home.
If the prisoners aren’t safe, the guards aren’t either.
“People are so cheek-by-jowl that there’s no way social distancing is even a remote possibility,” he says. “It is a ticking time bomb not just for the people inside the detention center but for the surrounding communities. It’s just a disaster waiting to happen.”
Contact Raleigh news editor Leigh Tauss at ltauss@indyweek.com.
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