Immigrants face coronavirus in ‘death trap’ detention centers. California must act

California’s immigration prisons – crowded and medically under-resourced – are COVID-19 tinderboxes waiting to happen. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and the private companies that run these prisons are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.

Our state and local leaders can and must act to protect the approximately 5,600 immigration detainees whose lives are presently imperiled by both the coronavirus and federal inaction.

While public health experts have urged officials to immediately reduce jail and prison populations and custodial arrests, and some law enforcement agencies across the state have taken bold steps to do so, ICE has eschewed public health concerns and made little effort to release vulnerable detainees, saying instead it will do so if a court orders release.

ICE has broad discretion under federal law to release individuals in its custody, and alternatives to detention are just as effective at ensuring people appear for their immigration hearings.

ICE is refusing to exercise sound judgment to save lives by releasing people, even though immigration detention is entirely unnecessary. In fact, many detainees are entitled to release under immigration law but remain detained simply because they cannot afford the exorbitant bond amounts.

While the dramatic expansion of immigration detention has its origin in the same set of discredited, punitive and racially-motivated 1990s crime laws responsible for mass incarceration, the national warehousing of immigration detainees has nonetheless continued unabated, in large part due to the profit motives of the companies that run these facilities.

Today, four California immigration detention facilities are operated by private prison companies GEO and CoreCivic. Both are notorious for medical neglect and high rates of preventable deaths in their facilities. Adelanto, the largest immigration detention jail in the state, is known for wanton medical neglect. In 2018, DHS’s Office of Inspector General identified “significant health and safety risks at the facility” including “untimely and inadequate detainee medical care.”

California has already taken transformative action to reduce immigration detention in the state by enacting Assembly Bill 32 last year, which banned all new private prisons and detention in the state.

Faced with the current coronavirus pandemic, California must take immediate steps to prevent the unnecessary loss of human lives in immigration detention and surrounding communities, particularly in the face of the federal government’s perilous refusal to release detainees.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, along with state and local law enforcement agencies, should immediately halt all voluntary transfers of individuals to ICE custody. Cooperation between state and local law enforcement and ICE accounts for 70 percent of all ICE arrests. Doing so will ensure the reduction of California’s immigration detention populations going forward and is critical at this time to ensure that state agencies are not delivering people into life-threatening conditions.

The governor must also use his emergency powers under the California Emergency Services Act to stop GEO and ICE’s plans to work around AB 32. They are trying to expand existing detention centers by converting decommissioned state prisons into immigration detention centers. Imagine if we used those decommissioned buildings for medical or other COVID-19 response efforts, rather than permitting their conversion into additional death traps. Our organizations have outlined these asks in a letter signed by more than 150 organizations in California.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, history will judge us most harshly on the obvious steps we failed to take. The governor has demonstrated bold leadership to protect the residents of the state during dire times. His efforts to reach people experiencing homelessness and poverty during this time should be particularly lauded.

We now need him to act where the federal government is failing and ensure that immigrants in detention do not become the victims of a preventable tragedy.