Time to disband ICE

Three Cameroonian asylum-seekers locked up at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana say that a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement guard threatened to expose them to Covid-19 if they failed to obey his orders and submit to a transfer. The guard made the threat clear, Clovis Fozao, one of the detained men, told The Intercept: If the detained migrants didn’t submit, they would be transferred to Bravo-Alpha, the detention unit where Covid-19-positive detainees are held in quarantine.

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After the threats and the assault, Fozao and the others gave up and submitted to the transfer. “What could we do?” he said. “There were so many more of them than us.”

The men said that they were crammed into a van with other detainees and taken to a staging center in Alexandria, Louisiana, where migrants are often grouped together before a deportation flight. There, they were again forced into overcrowded conditions where it was impossible to socially distance. There were about 100 people in one room, estimated one of the detainees, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

After an affidavit submitted by a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups was delivered to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the deportation flight was canceled, as first reported by The Guardian. The letter lists a host of violent tactics ICE officials used to pressure the detainees to submit to their deportation.

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Two days after taking office, President Joe Biden issued a 100-day deportation moratorium, one of his central campaign promises for immigration policy. The administration committed to “review and reset enforcement policies” as deportations were on temporary hold. Four days after it was signed, a judge in Texas granted an injunction on the moratorium, based on a lawsuit brought by the state of Texas. Though some expect the injunction to be lifted, ICE wasted no time in ramping back up its deportation machine.

As part of the same rush to continue deportations, Jusiel Mendez, a Cuban asylum-seeker being held in Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, said that this week he and a group of other Cuban asylum-seekers were also being threatened with exposure to Covid-19 if they didn’t sign their deportation orders. Mendez told The Intercept that a ranking official at Etowah, who he called a “captain,” threatened to expose the group to the virus.

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Fozao, who has been detained for 18 months, said that some of the guards had claimed that the “coronavirus is fake. It’s not real.” He added, “The way they manage Covid is very bad. I mean very, very bad.”

Both Pine Prairie and Etowah have come under fire for their dangerous mismanagement of Covid-19, with detainees in Etowah being punished for asking for a Covid-19 test.

“They’re going to put me in solitary for this, for talking,” Mendez told The Intercept. “But I want people to know. What are they going to do, kill me? Maybe.”

  Intercept

Maybe.