ICE has been endangering both detainees and employees by refusing to back down from its mass detention policies, with ICE even showing this intentional disregard during lawsuit proceedings.
When Deivys Perez Valladares, currently jailed at the Krome Processing Center in Miami-Dade, testified in a virtual hearing, he said the guard standing next to him hadn’t bothered with putting on a mask. “Yes I am scared,” he said according to Miami Herald. “Like right now, the ICE official who is here with me, he doesn’t have a mask on.” Another man, Alejandro Ferrera Borges, testified that the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach sometimes “runs out of the travel-sized shampoo bottles they are given once a week,” the report continued.
So basically ICE and its $8 billion annual budget is forcing detained people and their advocates to have to go to court for weeks and months to fight for what are crumbs compared to its vast resources in order to try to stay safe. This complete disregard for the lives and safety of detained people was noted in the court ruling, with Cooke citing Perez Valladares’ testimony and the fact that the guard who accompanied him had been unmasked.
Cooke further ruled that ICE officials should move detainees only if they must go to a medical appointment or are being released from custody, after Perez Valladares further testified that he’d been moved between three different detention facilities in the span of one week. He told the court that at one point, he was “placed in a cramped hielera— Spanish for icebox—for 13 hours with 17 other detainees,” Miami Herald continued.
Under the ongoing lawsuit, Cooke had ordered ICE officials to lower capacity at the three facilities to 75%, but that simply hasn’t been enough when immigrants have died from COVID-19 after being held in custody. Yes, soap is important, but detainees should be released. In video from the Miami Herald, detainees at Broward said conditions are simply just too dangerous. “There are too many people here, you can’t follow social distance,” one man said in Spanish. “Do we need to die in here for people to realize that coronavirus can kill us all?” a second man pleaded.