On May 6, Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, a 57-year-old man died at a San Diego hospital while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because of complications associated with COVID-19. He was the first person under ICE custody whose death could be attributed to the novel coronavirus. Advocates and detainees themselves had been sounding the alarm for months that any outbreak at the facility would be impossible to control. Now, the Otay Mesa Detention Center, run by the private corporation CoreCivic, is the immigration prison in the country with the highest number of coronavirus positive cases, currently ing over 200.
On May 24, Santiago Baten-Oxlag, a 34-year-old man from Guatemala died at a hospital in Columbus, Georgia, also because of having contracted the coronavirus. He had been detained at the Stewart Detention Center, another CoreCivic prison, and was waiting to be deported but was too ill to be removed from the country.
In a press release related to Baten-Oxlag’s death, ICE wrote that it “is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review of this incident…” Yet those detained at immigration prisons continuously have decried the conditions in which they are held.
In a letter signed by 43 migrants detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Center and addressed to California Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Juan Vargas, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the migrants described how they pleaded with CoreCivic staff about caring for Escobar Mejia. They noted how he was sick and was not leaving his room. They asserted in the letter that Escobar Mejia was only hospitalized after he could no longer breathe.
One problem with detention centers and prisons is that they are ill-equipped to respond to even basic preventive measures to stop the spread of any disease requiring proper physical distancing. In his most recent visit to the Otay Mesa Detention Center on May 8 following news of Escobar Mejia’s death, Rep. Juan Vargas concluded that “There is no way that detention center personnel can comply with social distancing when detainees are sleeping on top of each other. A mass reduction in the number of detained individuals is the only thing that will help mitigate the crisis at their facilities. At this point, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) alone will not save lives.”
ICE’s failure to truly commit to the health and welfare of those in custody, together with the profit motive of the corporations that make money off of human suffering, will continue to place even more people at risk. The mental health of those imprisoned deteriorates with the uncertainty and lack of clarity surrounding the spread of this disease.
On May 17, 74-year-old Choung Woong Ahn from South Korea took his own life while under ICE custody at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield. Held at the “Mesa Verde” private facility run by the GEO Group since February, Woong Ahn was medically vulnerable to contracting the coronavirus because he suffered from diabetes and heart-related issues.
Despite efforts by his attorneys to have him released on bond, ICE denied Woong Ahn’s appeals. According to a recent report published by the ACLU, “death by suicide is growing in the context of inadequate mental health services and the inappropriate use of isolation.” The 43 migrants who wrote the letter to the elected officials recognized the threat the coronavirus pandemic has on their mental health when they posed the following question: “Is a person’s mental health not just as important as one’s physical health">
As jurisdictions around the country debate whether they should move to different phases of opening up to the public, it remains clear that the coronavirus has become a disaster at ICE’s detention centers. As of May 16, ICE has ed 1,201 confirmed cases among its detainees, with 2,394 being tested, or just over 50% of those tested. Knowing that ICE is an unable agency with a history of human rights abuses, and the private corporations, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, prioritize profits over human needs for the population they detain, elected officials must take immediate action to hold ICE and the for-profit companies able. A priority should be to seek the immediate release of all those detained under ICE’s custody, lest they want to be accomplices to a preventable human rights disaster that’s unfolding in our communities.
