“BURIALS ARE CHEAPER THAN DEPORTATIONS”: VIRUS UNLEASHES TERROR IN A TROUBLED ICE DETENTION CENTER

Ryan Devereaux
April 12 2020, 8:37 a.m.

TENSIONS WERE BUILDING inside the Alabama jail. A group of new detainees had just been dropped off at the Etowah County Detention Center in downtown Gadsden, and one of the men appeared sick. Word was spreading that he and the others had been exposed to the coronavirus. Detainees demanded that the new arrivals be quarantined. A young corrections officer resisted, telling the men that if they did not obey his order to lock down, he would summon the “troops.” For the men in the unit, the implication of the officer’s words was clear.

Karim Golding, a veteran of the unit, decided that desperate measures were in order. The 35-year-old slipped between the bars of a second-story railing. He tied one end of a rope of bedsheets to the railing. He wrapped the other in a noose around his neck. Thirty-nine-year-old Tefsa Miller soon joined him and did the same. On the opposite side of their unit, a man streamed the scene on his cellphone, capturing a moment that would have otherwise gone unseen by the outside world.

“This about to become a suicide,” he said. “They both about to hang it up.”

The men did not leap from the railing. The troops never came. Golding’s plan seemed to work, at least for a moment, forcing a dialogue between detainees and jail officials that led to the peaceful resolution of a heated showdown. Nonetheless, the dramatic events that unfolded on the night of March 20 underscored a grim reality: As the coronavirus grips the nation, a rising tide of terror and a profound sense of abandonment is coursing through its immigrant detention system.

“If we die, so what? This is the attitude of the people here.”

Locked in closed-off places across the country, where social distancing is impossible and failures to provide adequate medical care are longstanding, tens of thousands of people are now expecting the worst.

Golding, in an interview with The Intercept, said that what happened in Etowah last month was the culmination of years of frustration on the part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at the remote Alabama facility, frustrations that have taken on life-or-death urgency with the coronavirus ripping through the United States and increasingly spreading throughout the South. Despite last month’s dramatic protest, ICE continues to send detainees to the Alabama jail, including individuals who have come through facilities with confirmed coronavirus infections.

Recently, officials at Etowah consolidated two units into one, virtually doubling the number of men sharing the space overnight.

“We’re the last people to get protected,” Golding told The Intercept. “If we die, so what? This is the attitude of the people here. This is the attitude of the attorney general. This is the attitude of the president.” ICE’s actions in recent weeks have revealed a macabre calculation that values carceral profit over human life, Golding argued. After all, he said, “Burials are cheaper than deportations.”

The video of the suicide threat went viral soon after it was streamed. Etowah County Sheriff Jonathon Horton quickly batted it down as a hoax. The man who streamed the event was swiftly placed in an administrative lockdown, and according to sources inside the detention center, threatened with criminal charges for use of a contraband cellphone. In an email to The Intercept, Bryan D. Cox, ICE’s southern region public affairs director, said the “brief, minor protest” was “based on inaccurate information.” Cox added, “There is no one in ICE custody at the Etowah County facility with suspected Covid-19. Rumors to the contrary are false and needlessly spread fear through misinformation.”

Prisons, jails, and detention centers are widely known to be major vectors of infectious diseases. As of last week, Cook County Jail in Illinois was “the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections,” according to a New York Times analysis.

On Rikers Island, the infection rate among incarcerated people has been reported to be seven times that of New York City, which is currently home to the largest number of coronavirus cases on the planet.

Screenshots from a video, live streamed to Facebook by a detainee at Etowah Detention Center, of the protest by Karim Golding and Tefsa Miller.
Screenshots: The Intercept

So far, ICE has reported 80 confirmed cases of Covid-19 among employees or detainees in two dozen facilities and one local hospital across 14 states. Unlike law enforcement agencies in the criminal justice system, ICE has sweeping discretion to release the people in its custody for civil immigration violations at any time. Last month, more than 3,000 doctors signed an open letter calling on the agency to do just that. Medical experts at the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ICE, have issued similar calls, describing the potential danger in the detention centers as a “tinderbox.” In March, a former top DHS civil rights official told The Intercept that she expects ICE’s current posture to result in detainee deaths.

As demands for sweeping releases of incarcerated people have mounted, several legal organizations have taken aim at ICE’s facilities in the South, where the agency has a particularly poor track record when it comes to medical care.

Last week, a federal judge overseeing a case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana ordered ICE to disclose the number of detainees it is granting and denying release to in several Southern states, including Alabama, after filings in the case revealed that ICE’s New Orleans field office was denying detainees parole at rates of up to 100 percent. ICE’s propensity for denying parole to detainees, particularly in the age of Donald Trump, is well-documented. As The Intercept reported earlier this year, the agency has been accused of going so far as to manipulate algorithmic software to ensure that everybody in its custody stays locked up.

An email to congressional staffers obtained by BuzzFeed News last week revealed that ICE was reviewing the cases of some 600 immigration detainees who it considered particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus — a sliver compared to the thousands of individuals being released from jails and prisons in the criminal justice system across the country. The agency has thus far offered no indication that it plans a wide-scale release of the more than 35,000 people currently in its custody.

In the case of Etowah, ICE’s position is that there’s no story there. “Bottom line: ICE is following the appropriate CDC protocols to include the use of PPE, screening and testing, and cohorting of persons,” Cox wrote in an email to The Intercept. “If you choose to write an article here the only version that would be factual is that the facility’s population is down, there are no cases, and it is fully complying with CDC protocols.”

“We have no confirmed cases because there’s nobody being tested.”

ICE’s editorial preferences aside, interviews with multiple detainees and audio recordings from inside Etowah suggest a more complicated reality. The men held by ICE described a facility that is fundamentally unprepared, and seemingly unwilling, to protect those in its custody. Among detainees, there is a prevailing sense that jail officials are doing the bare minimum, ticking off the necessary boxes to say they took appropriate actions should an outbreak occur.

To a person, sources inside Etowah each said the same thing about the people responsible for keeping them alive: They do not care.

In late March, days after the threatened suicide, dozens of Etowah detainees requested to be screened by a nurse for Covid-19. “These past two weeks I felt like I had it and I got past it,” Golding said. “We asked to be tested, knowing that they didn’t have tests, even though they’ve been telling us they have tests.” It was a basic screening, Golding stressed, not a test for the coronavirus. Golding said a nurse told him he was “symptomatic” and provided him with Advil and allergy medication.

Several other detainees were told the same, he added — none were placed in quarantine.

The Intercept asked ICE and Sheriff Horton about the claim that multiple detainees had been told they were symptomatic. “If you have a detainee telling you the facility has suspected cases, they are spreading inaccurate rumor to you,” Cox wrote in an email. While ICE has not reported a confirmed case of Covid-19 in Etowah, detainees worry that fact might have something to do with the measures the agency is taking — or not taking — to proactively protect the people in its custody.

“We have no confirmed cases because there’s nobody being tested here,” Golding said.

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/12/...-jail-alabama/