MIAMI — It’s lights-out time in the crowded room shared by more than 80 men.
It’s about 11:30 p.m., so the guards dim the overhead fluorescent lights and the immigration detainees slip into their barrack-style bunks, two-tier metal beds about three feet away from each other.
That’s when a sea of red, orange and blue T-shirts and shorts fade under white blankets. The colors are used to tell the detainees apart by civil and criminal histories. Scattered sounds of coughing and sneezing make their way through the 2,000-square-foot detention pod.
“Some of us start praying, and others just hide under the covers,” said Miguel Torres, a 38-year-old-Mexican national who has been in ICE custody for about six months.
“We don’t have masks so our blankets and God are all the hope we have.”
Torres is one of about 600 people being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Krome detention center in southwest Miami-Dade County, where more than half of the detainees have been identified as having been exposed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Instead of testing or isolating the potentially infected detainees, government officials put them together in pods, regardless of their age, medical condition or criminal history, a practice that ICE calls “cohorting.”
“We’re all sick in here; we’re all sinking in each other’s germs,” Torres said between tears and coughs. “I just hope me and my podmates live to see our families again.”
The practice of housing together people exposed to the virus sparked a lawsuit in Miami federal court in early April. Immigrant advocates are seeking the release of about 1,200 non-criminal detainees at three South Florida ICE detention centers as coronavirus cases continue to climb behind bars. U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke is expected to make a decision this week on whether ICE needs to cut populations at Krome, the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach and the Glades County detention center in Moore Haven to allow for proper social distancing between those who would remain.
While the detainees await the decision, many of them say conditions are getting worse: “One day we are nurses, other days we are caregivers,” said Torres, referring to a fellow detainee, 78-year-old Ramon Gomez, who’s being held at Krome after serving time in state prison for various criminal charges.
Gomez uses a wheelchair because he’s too weak to walk. The Nicaraguan national, who was granted political asylum four decades ago, was described by nine detainees as “frail and barely mobile.” They said he often struggles to make it in time to the bathroom.
“He’s just weak so he soils himself; it’s not his fault,” Torres told the Miami Herald. Another detainee chimed in: “There’s a guard who is nice and gives us clean clothes so that we can change him.”
On a recent afternoon, Torres and three others picked up Gomez from his wheelchair and carried him to the showers, a situation that has become routine. They helped him lather up, wiped him down and dressed him in a clean uniform.
“That’s not their role — it’s mine,” said his wife, Graciela Gomez, a retired nurse.
She says her husband, a retired maintenance worker and father of four, was intubated in February after suffering a lung infection. She said ICE never told her that her husband was sent to the hospital, and she only found out when the hospital staff called asking her for permission to intubate him. “He needs his wife, his kids. He needs his home.”
Like thousands in detention nationwide, Ramon Gomez, who has underlying medical conditions, remains in ICE custody amid the global health pandemic. Over the course of the past few weeks, ICE says it has done its best to release or provide adequate medical care for the most vulnerable.
ICE “continues to work diligently to ensure employees are operating under the safest and most practical conditions to reduce the risk of exposure and prevent further spreading of COVID-19 during the course of ongoing daily operations,” the agency said in a statement. Bryan Cox, an ICE regional spokesman, told the Herald in mid-April that “ICE is evaluating its detained population.”
Cox noted that the agency has flagged a small fraction of its approximately 32,000 detainees as being “at higher risk for severe illness as a result of COVID-19.” He said the agency initially identified about 550 detainees nationwide over the age of 60 or pregnant.
“Of that population, ICE identified more than 160 individuals for release after evaluating their immigration history, criminal record, potential threat to public safety, flight risk, and national security concerns,” Cox said. “This same methodology is currently being applied to other potentially vulnerable populations.”
Nelson Valera was among them.
His attorney sent a six-page letter to the Department of Homeland Security saying that because her client had flu-like symptoms and was given acetaminophen and nasal decongestants by ICE medical staff, he was already in “imminent danger” of catching the virus because his immune system had deteriorated.
Valera was released from Krome after being held on a DUI charge and sent home to Naples on April 20 with a monitoring device on his ankle. Three days later, as his symptoms worsened, he went to the doctor and tested positive for COVID-19. On Wednesday, his wife and two adult children also tested positive for COVID-19.
Valera, a 53-year-old Venezuelan national, says his symptoms began while he was “cohorted” with 60-plus other men. ICE staff told the group they had been in contact with someone who tested positive and had to be placed on lockdown.
“But they wouldn’t say who that person was,” Valera told the Herald. “So we were forced to just be stuck in there, going mad. Just the fear and anxiety are enough to kill you when you’re smushed in there like a sardine.”
Prior to the pandemic, detainees were separated by the color of their uniforms. A blue uniform means the person had a history of civil infractions; orange means a criminal history; and red means the person is considered a violent criminal offender. The reds could only interact with the oranges, and the blues could only interact with the oranges. The reds and blues could not mix. But now in quarantine, those lines are blurred, and reds are mixing with the blues, detainees say.
If a pod has been placed on lockdown, that means no one can leave the room. The rooms vary in size: Some have more than 100 detainees who share five toilets and 12 showers. Others have 50 people, who share five showers and three toilets “arranged so closely that your knees touch the other person’s knees if you both sit down,” one inmate said.
Hand sanitizer is available only for the guards.
Detainees who have been in contact with someone with the coronavirus are ordered to be quarantined together for at least 14 days. The detainees can be released from lockdown once they have been symptom-free during the 14-day quarantine period. However, most quarantined pods at Krome have had their quarantines extended by two or three weeks because people have continued showing symptoms.
Before being quarantined, detainees were able to play sports, go to the cafeteria for meals and visit the library. Now, the food is brought to them on trays by staff. After detainees make a line, an officer scans their identification bracelets, allowing them to grab their juice drinks and plates. Depending on the size of the dorm, the detainees can sit at round or square plastic tables. If there’s not enough room, they sit on their bunk beds.
During the day, card games, Monopoly and dominoes are available. One television is shared among the dozens of men. Monitored tablets that sit on mounted docks as well as payphones on the wall are available for use if family members or friends deposit money. During the day, detainees wait in long lines to talk to their loved ones. Sometimes, the detainees with the most seniority hog the lines and fights erupt.
Though there are small windows with opaque glass near the high ceilings, there’s only one that lets them see outside the pod.
“It’s the small rectangular window on the front door,” Valera said of the view, which leads to a hallway and whoever is knocking. “If you peek hard enough you can see grass and a fence in the background. It’s like a portal to the outside world. So we just sit there and watch.”
According to Valera and 12 other detainees interviewed by the Herald, ICE still transferred people in and out of the segregation pods.
“Though they told us we were in quarantine, they kept bringing detainees in and out of the pod,” Valera said. “In some cases, they took people to the airport to try to deport them but when their flight was canceled they brought them right back.
“All I keep thinking about is my family and the detainees back at Krome,” added Valera, a former health and safety engineer for General Electric in Venezuela. “I know I have the virus because I got out and got tested, but them? Everyone is sick in there and yet they’ll never know because they don’t have tests.”
On Tuesday, paramedics took a detainee out of Krome on a stretcher after receiving a call from staff that he was going into cardiac arrest and not breathing, according to federal sources.
“It’s been a mess. That call is one of many similar ones that have happened there within the month,” said a federal immigration official who works at Krome and asked to remain anonymous. Miami-Dade County Fire Rescue confirmed receiving a call from Krome on Tuesday morning but would not comment on the case for health-privacy reasons.
As of Tuesday, only 705 out of 32,309 ICE detainees had been tested for the coronavirus nationwide, according to the most recent federal data available. That means about 2.2% of detainees have had access to a test. Out of the 705 tests administered, 425 people, or 60%, tested positive.
Four detainees and eight staffers have tested positive at Krome, according to court records. Glades and Broward detention officials told the Herald there are no suspected cases of detainees or staffers with the virus. ICE would not comment on positive, pending or suspected cases at the three centers, citing the ongoing federal lawsuit.
The government’s attempts to remove people from immigration detention centers to deport them has also resulted in a series of frenzied approaches, which have led to practices that seemingly change day to day, center to center, detainee to detainee.
In a trek that began on April 13, at least 50 Guatemalan detainees were transferred from airports in Miami and Georgia and two Florida detention centers 13 times between April 13 and April 21 after their flights kept getting canceled. On the most recent attempt to deport, ICE removed the Guatemalan nationals out of segregation at Krome, bused the detainees to an airport in Georgia but took them back when the flight didn’t take off.
The strenuous efforts were made after the Guatemalan president said he would not allow deportations from the United States unless ICE begins testing migrants before they are deported.
“On the trip to the Georgia airport it was around 120 of us from different centers that they picked up,” said Edison Garcia. “Our problem is not about being deported anymore. They can deport us, but stop playing with our lives by carrying us from one place to the next with no masks or gloves. “
Transfers like these are one of several reasons why immigration organizations nationwide say they are urging Miami federal Judge Cooke to order the release of non-criminal detainees from Krome, Glades and BTC. The attorneys say the detainees can be monitored by phone, physical check-ins or GPS through an electronic ankle bracelet.
National health scholars and law enforcement experts, who have filed sworn statements in support of the legal action, say “detention facilities are designed to force close contact between people and rely on massive amounts of movement every day from one part of the facility to another.”
Homer Venters — an epidemiologist and the former chief medical officer and assistant commissioner of Correctional Health Services for the New York City Health and Hospital System — wrote that the densely packed housing areas and other conditions “will result in preventable morbidity and mortality.”
Meanwhile, detainees at the detention centers have been so terrified of catching the coronavirus from new inmates that bloody fistfights erupted among immigrants and staff last month, leaving some guards and detainees with serious injuries.
“A detainee from Krome suffered cracked ribs during April 7 fistfights at the detention center — protests against ICE’s practice of bringing in new inmates who had not been tested for COVID-19,” said Rebecca Talbot, a volunteer with Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees, a Krome visitation program.
Talbot added: “After he was injured, he says guards placed him in solitary for 12 days until the swelling in his ribs went down. In solitary, he did not receive medical care, was not allowed to shower, and was not provided with toilet paper. He was unable to call a lawyer because his phone account was blocked. He was then transferred to Glades County Detention Center on April 23 with his ribs swollen, bruised, and still painful. As of April 24, his phone account was still blocked.”
The Herald interviewed the detainee, who has since been transferred to Glades. He asked not to be named because his mother doesn’t know he is in ICE detention.
“She has a heart condition and if she finds out I’m hurt she will have a heart attack,” he said, noting that dozens of others are participating in hunger strikes and have since had their communication accounts shut down.
Simultaneously, many detainees report that a staff kitchen worker was showing COVID-19 symptoms. As a result, all detainees who were on work assignment in the kitchen were removed from their dorms and quarantined in the same room, Talbot said. “They believe this because they are showing symptoms of COVID-19 such as fevers.”
Meanwhile, the family of Gomez, the detainee in the wheelchair, prays for a miracle.
“We already know he’s going to die, so all we’re asking is for ICE to let him die here with us,” his wife said.
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