At Least 20 People Have COVID-19 at One ICE Jail. Those Inside Say Many More Are Sick.

[babylonsister]

At Least 20 People Have COVID-19 at One ICE Jail. Those Inside Say Many More Are Sick.
“I don’t want to die in here,” says one immigrant trying to speed up his deportation.
Noah Lanard


On Friday evening, a Guatemalan man told me he spent three nights last week in solitary confinement at an ICE detention facility after developing a fever. Manuel, a pseudonym to protect against potential retaliation, expected to receive medical attention while in isolation at the Richwood Correctional Center, a for-profit immigration jail in Louisiana. Instead, he says he got no aide while fighting off exhaustion and aches. “They put you in there,” he surmised about his nights alone, “and you live or you die.”

About two hours later, Immigration and Customs revealed that 17 new people had tested positive at Richwood. It brings the total there to 20, more than any other ICE detention center in the nation. But those government numbers may show only a sliver of the crisis unfolding at Richwood. Interviews with Manuel and six other Richwood detainees suggest more are infected. They said many of the roughly 70 people who remain in their unit are sick with COVID-like symptoms. Overall, the jail was holding about 200 people earlier this month. (ICE and LaSalle Corrections, the private prison company that runs Richwood, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Before being isolated, Manuel had been in close contact with Salomon Diego Alonzo, who, like Manuel, was one of nearly 700 people who ICE had detained in raids of Mississippi chicken plants in August. They were in the same dorm and talked all the time until Alonzo was isolated shortly before Manuel. Alonzo had learned earlier this week that he has COVID-19 and I asked Manuel if he thought he’d had the new coronavirus, too. He hoped not, but didn’t know. Unlike Alonzo, he said he hasn’t been tested.

Manuel said nearly half the people in the dorm have come down with something. A Mexican man in the dorm told me has a headache, fever, and a cough. “It’s not just me,” he stressed. He added that he has a hernia, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Like Manuel, he’d been arrested in the chicken plant raids. He has five children, three of whom are US citizens.

ICE revealed Friday that only about 1 percent of the roughly 32,000 people in its custody have been tested. Instead of testing detainees it knows have been exposed to COVID-19, ICE generally leaves them in group quarantines until they develop symptoms. Only then are they isolated. Dr. Chris Beyrer, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, compared the reality of being stuck in a group quarantine to torture when I interviewed him earlier this month. “Cruel and usual punishment,” he said. “That level of anxiety, that level of stress…It’s a form of torture, you might say. A new form of torture. You could call it COVID-19 torture.” ICE has largely refused to exercise its broad authority to release people from custody to protect them from the pandemic.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/coronavirus-ice-richwood-deportations/

[notdarkyet]

1. The wh is like a prison. All locked up inside. Hope they are stir crazy.

[kimbutgar]

2. When MF45 is gone I predict that mass graves of immigrants will be found.

All these people in close quarters with weak immune systems will be the consequence of mf45’s evil policies resulting in mass deaths.

[7wo7rees]

3. Death camps, period.

Same with prisons across the country, same with detention centers for illegal kids, same with homeless population across the country, same with all the nursing homes, assisted living centers, same with veterans homes.
In the process killing our 1st responders, across the country. Our front line soldiers, our nurses, our doctors, all the staff that keep the hospitals going!

And we have the Tea Party Revival again.

Jesus C, laid out on the 18 ft. long bed trailer. I've lost the image from the Terry Sciavo nightmare, but it certainly seems appropriate now. And yes, the "Moran guy" seems quaint and cute now.

We are screwed.