Two leading groups have released a devastating report exposing the inhumane treatment of immigrants at a notorious, privately operated prison in Arizona. One person detailed in Advancement Project National Office and Puente Human Rights Movement’s “Arizona's Carceral Crisis: The Human Cost of Being Confined” report in fact died after they collapsed in Eloy Detention Center’s recreation yard and was left unattended for as long as half an hour.
“During our tour of the facility, we noted that Eloy’s clinic had doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, licensed clinical social workers, five medical record technicians, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, dentists, and dental hygienists, as well as a pharmacy on site,” the groups said. But the issue is that this has appeared to be for show: “Existence of these resources, however, belied their actual usage, as was revealed to us in our conversations with people who were currently detained.”
Group members who conducted interviews at Eloy—all from Advancement Project National Office, because Immigration and Customs Enforcement repeatedly denied entry to Puente—said detainees told them medical resources were “difficult to access” or just plain went unused. “We were also told by our interviewees that the emergency services were insufficient. The response times were wholly inadequate when an actual emergency or issue arose. We learned of a person who had collapsed in the recreation yard and was not attended to for 20-30 minutes, resulting in their death.”
Antonio, a man who spent nearly five years jailed at Eloy, said there were three deaths during his time there, “all allegedly suicides. Antonio suffered physical abuse himself. He recounts being hit several times by guards at the facility.” The prison also neglected his dietary needs, which ultimately wreaked havoc on his body. “Eventually, a doctor forced the facility to operate on Antonio, saying that if he didn’t receive surgery that he would die. The result: a colostomy bag surgery.”
“Immigrant detention is a brutal, dehumanizing system of mass incarceration where as many as 52,000 people are detained daily in the U.S. for daring to seek a better life,” the Advancement Project National Office said in a statement. “Contact with the criminal legal system disproportionately impacts Black and Brown people. This system brings private prison companies great profit at the cost of pain inflicted on immigrant communities.”
This is all done in defiance of congressional authority, which sets limits on how many people the agency can detain, but are limits the agency lawlessly ignores, by the thousands. When ICE has exceeded its limit on how many people it can jail it has also refused to say where the extra money came from, but it’s not hard to pinpoint exactly where. ICE’s brazen challenges to Congress should alarm us, but so should the mass detention of immigrants, and with our tax dollars.
“We witnessed and heard accounts of the many ways that Eloy denies people who are currently detained basic hygiene and human dignity,” the groups continued, saying officials also deny detained people free access to drinkable water. “In light of sweltering temperatures, the lack of clean water presents a challenge for people who are detained. They have to buy water from the facility or take the risk of drinking maggot-infested, or questionable, water from the facility’s faucets.”
The report calls for an end to mass immigration detention. “Prisons and detention centers like Eloy are costing state governments billions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year as well as being a continuing fiscal burden for the U.S. taxpayer,” said Jovana Renteria of Puente Human Rights Movement. “It is wasteful and destabilizes families and communities and results in human rights abuses for people who are detained." See the full report from Advancement Project National Office and Puente Human Rights Movement here.