“Someone diagnosed with pauci-immune glomerulonephritis” — Phillips’s diagnosis — “could get in trouble in a hurry if they’re exposed to heat, regardless of medications,” said Aaron Bernstein, an expert on climate and health at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

With treatment, patients with the condition are expected to have a 75 percent five-year survival rate. By the time he left prison last year, Phillips had end-stage renal failure, and doctors told him the likelihood of surviving five years was 40 percent.

“I feel like they gave me a possible death sentence,” said Phillips, who is now 42, of the Texas prison system. “I don’t think they care.”

The Coffield Unit is among the hottest places in the nation for incarcerated people, according to an Intercept analysis of extreme heat in more than 6,500 jails, prisons, and detention centers across the U.S. — and it’s getting worse. As of 2020, Coffield was one of 21 Texas state prisons with no air conditioning, according to public records obtained by the Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates, an organization Phillips’s wife, Casey, founded.

That he was transferred out of his sweltering cell at all, Justin said, was only due to Casey’s relentless advocacy. After months of calls, emails, and formal complaints, Justin was transferred to an air-conditioned unit. Four days before he was moved, the heat index outside the Coffield Unit was recorded at 127 degrees.

Desperation spurred Casey Phillips to turn her work on her husband’s case into statewide activism. As an advocate, Casey reserves much of her ire for one man: “Honestly, it’s Greg Abbott that doesn’t care. It’s him,” she said, referring to Texas’s Republican governor.

For more than a decade, Abbott has been a key figure stymying the fight for air conditioning in Texas carceral facilities. When he was the state attorney general, Abbott defended the Texas Department of Criminal Justice from heat lawsuits. Today he sets the agenda for legislative sessions — where heat-relief bills, like the ones pushed by advocates like Casey Phillips, go to die. Casey was blunt about Abbott’s role in the stalled legislation: “He’s the problem.”

The state prison system has spotty air-conditioning coverage at best. When the information was last made public in 2020, parts or the whole of around 70 Texas prisons, with a combined capacity of 122,000 potential inmates, had no air conditioning.

“If any other Texan doesn’t have AC, they can be in a shaded situation. They can drink more water. They can take a shower,” said Ariel Dulitzky, a human rights lawyer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the co-author of a report on heat in prisons. “Persons deprived of their liberty are under the absolute control of the state. They cannot do anything.”

“Incarcerated people will always be at the bottom rung in terms of targeting of resources.”

The push for air conditioning in Texas prisons is among the first fights like it in the nation, but it’s unlikely to be the last: With the climate crisis raising temperatures across the nation, the battle being waged in Texas will spread. According to the data reviewed by The Intercept, by the end of the century thousands of prisons across the U.S. — from New Jersey to Minnesota — will experience the kind of heat Texas sees today. Nobody seems to be ready. And, as in Texas, easing prisoners’ conditions is unlikely to be at the top of the political agenda.

“Prisons using AC to keep people safe will draw a lot of resources,” said Carlee Purdum, a specialist on disasters affecting prison populations at Texas A&M University. “And incarcerated people will always be at the bottom rung in terms of targeting of resources.”

To assess the dangers of the climate crisis for people behind bars, The Intercept cross-referenced the locations of more than 6,500 detention centers across the U.S. against both historic county-by-county heat data collected by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists and the group’s projections for how hot weather will increase. The group used the heat index, which incorporates humidity, for its data, because an outdoor temperature reading on a thermometer doesn’t capture how the body struggles in humid conditions with high temperatures.

For each county, the group calculated the historical average number of days each year surpassing heat index readings of both 90 and 105 degrees. According to the National Weather Service, a heat index over 90 degrees merits “extreme caution”; the agency says that over 105 is dangerous. A prison that lacks air conditioning can be even hotter inside than the outdoor heat index might suggest.

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people are being subjected to prolonged periods of high heat every year, according to The Intercept’s analysis, which relied on a 2020 Department of Homeland Security register to map jails, prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facilities, and juvenile detention centers. More than a third of the detention facilities in the U.S. have historically had more than 50 days a year, on average, with a heat index above 90 degrees, the data suggests. That includes nearly every detention facility in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma. There are no federal laws mandating climate control in carceral facilities, and none of those states’ corrections departments require universal air conditioning in state prisons. Nearly 100 facilities in Texas are located in counties with more than 10 days annually over 105.

Long spells of high heat, though, aren’t the only concern. Acute health issues can arise from brief temperature spikes in places where people and infrastructure aren’t prepared to deal with it. A short but sudden heat wave in the Northeast, for instance, could be more deadly than a prolonged period at the same temperature in Arizona. Research by Julie Skarha, a graduate affiliate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, shows that a heat index above 90 degrees in a prison in the Northeast can increase mortality by as much as 18 percent.

Heat index measurements will also mean different things for different people. People taking certain medications — including a class of drugs known as psychotropics that treat a range of mental illnesses, which are common among the incarcerated — are particularly sensitive to heat.

Jennifer Vanos, an expert on extreme heat at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, said, “The people who tend to be most impacted by heat are those who are sick, on medication, or have preexisting conditions that put them at a higher risk of heat death.”

Left/Top: Historical county-by-county heat index records show that the heat in U.S. carceral institutions is already high. Right/Bottom: Projections from the Union of Concerned Scientists show that the heat will soon get much worse. Maps: Union of Concerned Scientists

How much future prisoners suffer in the heat — and how many die — will depend on what policymakers do, both to stop runaway global warming and to improve conditions inside carceral facilities.

No amount of greenhouse gas emission cuts will change the fact that existing carceral facilities are about to get hotter. What’s unclear is how much worse things will get. That depends on governments’ success in transitioning economies from fossil fuels to energy sources that do not produce greenhouse gases, such as solar or wind energy.

By the end of the century, if massive steps aren’t taken to combat the climate crisis, it’s likely that nearly three-quarters of U.S. carceral institutions will experience more than 50 days a year with a heat index over 90 degrees, levels today associated with hotter regions of the country. Historically, only 224 facilities in seven states were in places with more than 10 days over 105 degrees. By 2100, more than half of the prisons, jails, and detention centers in the U.S. — 3,544 facilities in 32 states — will reach that level.

The impact will be dramatic in both historically hot and cool places. Facilities in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Pacific Northwest that are unaccustomed to high heat will begin to see dangerous days over 105 degrees every year. Other parts of the country will see unprecedented stretches of heat. No carceral institution today is located in a county with more than 50 days a year at 105 degrees; by 2100, almost 700 will be, mostly in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.

By the end of the century, thousands of U.S. detention facilities will see sustained dangerous temperatures — sometimes running more than 50 days a year. The only way to protect incarcerated people will be for city, county, state, and federal policymakers to act, investing significant resources in installing functioning climate control systems or reducing the number of people in the carceral system.

The fight over air conditioning in Texas prisons, though, shows what it takes to force incremental action on heat in prisons — and the lack of political interest that makes progress so difficult.

In July and August 2011, at least 10 people died of heat-related causes in Texas prisons. Several of the victims’ families sued Texas in federal district court. Other suits followed, including one filed by people incarcerated at an unair-conditioned medical and geriatric prison known as the Wallace Pack Unit.

The attorney for the Pack Unit prisoners argued that they were being subjected to Eighth Amendment violations — cruel and unusual punishment — because the state knew about the conditions and did nothing about it. The plaintiffs also pointed to the Americans with Disabilities Act and argued that reasonable accommodations had not been provided to people with heat-sensitive disabilities. As attorney general at the time, Abbott represented the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in federal court.

Texas was forced to sign a settlement in 2018 in which the state agreed to air-condition the prison. Soon after, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced that by the end of 2021 it would make air-conditioned beds available to prisoners with the highest risk of heat-related illnesses. It also introduced new measures prisons must take when the heat index rises above 90 degrees, such as providing additional water and giving fans to incarcerated people. Tens of thousands of people, though, would still be left behind bars in severe heat.

A year later, under pressure from the organization, the first bill to provide funding for air conditioning in all Texas prisons was introduced in the state Legislature. And in 2021, another version of the air-conditioning legislation sailed through with bipartisan support in the Texas House of Representatives, only to die in committee in the Senate.

Things have since stalled. When a special legislative session was called last fall, with Abbott setting the agenda, advocates could not convince him or statehouse leaders to put an air-conditioning bill on the table. With Texas’s infrequent legislative sessions, prisoners won’t get another chance at relief until 2023.

“It means more deaths. It means more medical issues,” said Amite Dominick, who now leads Texas Prisons Community Advocates. “It means family members worrying when their loved ones on the inside tell them, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

“If we can’t get anyone to help us, how are these other families that don’t have experience advocating for loved ones going to get justice?”

In a statement to The Intercept, Robert Hurst, a spokesperson for the Texas prisons authority, said, “Core to this department’s mission is protecting the public, our employees, and the inmates in our custody. It is a responsibility that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice takes seriously.” He said the agency gives incarcerated people access to ice, water, fans, and, when needed, air-conditioned respite areas.

An automated heat sensitivity score identifies people with health-related illnesses who should be prioritized for air-conditioned beds, Hurst added. He declined to explain how the score is calculated or whether the agency has fully implemented the program.

A list of health problems that would qualify priority placement does not include kidney disease.

To his family’s great relief, Justin Phillips came home in the spring of 2021. He’s hoping to eventually get on a kidney transplant list, but for now he goes to dialysis three times a week. Meanwhile, years of fighting for other people left Casey Phillips behind in caring for her own health. She stepped down as president of the organization she started to take care of herself, her husband, and their kids.

The Phillipses want to take the prison and state to court to hold them accountable for Justin’s worsening illness. So far they have been unable to find an attorney to take their case. “If we can’t get anyone to help us,” Casey asked, “how are these other families that don’t have experience advocating for loved ones going to get justice?”

The post In Sweltering Texas, Prisons Without Air Conditioning Are About to Get a Lot Hotter appeared first on The Intercept.

No power meant no cooking, no televisions to furnish a distraction. Time in the communal day room was scrapped. Prisoners could only rarely call their loved ones. Toilets stopped working for hours at a time, and the ventilation systems would go down as smoke wafted into the facility, according to two people incarcerated there at the time. (A California prisons official said the facility was “running full-power operations.”)

Now, with the Dixie Fire approaching, incarcerated people in the C-Yard were locked in their dark, smoky cells. Cell doors, normally electronically powered, were in some cases padlocked by guards, according to a man incarcerated at the C-Yard, who asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals. He said the guards dismissed prisoners’ concerns about how to open the locks if the flames came into the prison complex: “The COs would laugh at us and tell us, ‘You effers are going to stay in your cell.’”

No one in the C-Yard, five buildings constructed to house hundreds of people, had any idea if, when, or how they would get out if the flames encroached on the prison campus. “We never had any evacuation drills,” said Joseph Vejar, a prisoner at California Correctional Center who served as chair of the inmate advisory council; he says he discussed the fire and the generator failure with prison officials. Vejar said he was never shown the details of the prison’s emergency protocols: “I never heard of them having a plan for evacuation.”

Absent any details about evacuation plans, prisoners and their advocates across California are skeptical that meaningful arrangements exist.

In Susanville, a fire event was foreseeable. Using U.S. Forest Service data, The Intercept mapped wildfire risk against the locations of more than 6,500 prisons, jails, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers listed in a 2020 Department of Homeland Security register. The analysis showed that the California Correctional Center falls in the 90th percentile for wildfire danger in the nation.

With its vast expanse, enormous population, and hot, dry climate, California is the state with the most detention facilities at the highest risk levels: About a fifth of the state’s institutions are above the 95th percentile, according to The Intercept’s analysis. (The count includes a couple dozen small fire camps, where incarcerated firefighters are trained and work, that are by design in the most fire-prone areas.)

Left/Top: A burn probability map visualizes historical data from 2000. Right/Bottom: A map of projected risk for 2030 shows that wildfire danger is growing fast. Credit: Pyrologix

Meanwhile, wildfires in California have been getting worse — larger and more destructive, with each fire season coming earlier than the last. Warming temperatures and drought exacerbated by the climate crisis are creating an ever more parched landscape, leaving swaths of land ready to ignite.

“The California prison system should figure out the most high-risk prisons,” said Joe Scott, a wildfire researcher, “and make a plan.”

In an email, Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operates under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, said the agency regularly reviews and updates emergency protocols, including evacuation plans, for each prison. “Due to the construction features of many of our prisons and camps, landscape fuel management modifications, dedicated fire brigades, and planning, many of our state prisons are well prepared for any wildfire risks, regardless of the area they are located,” she said. Thornton declined to share any specific details “for safety and security reasons.”

Asked if the prison system analyzed wildfire risk for institutions, Thornton said the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services “develops and maintains planning, preparedness, prevention, response and recovery strategies.” Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the office, said the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was responsible for identifying risks to prisons. “Our general take,” he said, “is every place in California is wildfire country in 2022.”

Scott has been researching and modeling wildfire behavior since the 1980s, when the work was “an esoteric backwater of forestry that nobody cared about.” In 2004, Scott founded Pyrologix, a research firm based in Missoula, Montana, that assesses wildfire threats. After the deadliest and most destructive wildfire seasons on record in 2017 and 2018, Congress passed legislation calling for a nationwide assessment of the dangers posed by wildfires; the U.S. Forest Service hired Scott’s firm.

Scott and his team set out to develop a dataset that could be used as a tool for prioritizing the management of fuel before a blaze breaks out and the response after it does. To determine the most high-risk areas, they looked at both the probability that an area will burn in any given year and the potential for intense fires. They also sorted the data by housing density to identify areas where concentrated numbers of people might face fires.

“I do not see anywhere in the country where risk is going down. It’s either flat or going up very, very fast.”

As they combed through the data, Scott and his team noticed something: patches of very high-density housing in remote areas that were prone to burning. At first he suspected some kind of error in the model. As he went through each location, he was surprised instead to find carceral facilities. “Every time I look,” Scott said, “it’s a prison camp, a juvenile detention facility, a jail.”

The Forest Service fire data, which The Intercept used for its detention facility risk analysis, does not fully account for how fires are changing. Its assessments are based on historical records that cover 1992 to 2015 — not including, for instance, the Northern California blazes of October 2017 or the fires that have torn through the Pacific Northwest in recent years. The 2017 fires forced researchers like Scott to rethink changing wildfire behaviors. It soon became clear that the number of “fire weather days” — characterized by a combination of heat, strong winds, and low humidity — are proliferating from Oregon to Texas to Oklahoma.

“I do not see anywhere in the country where risk is going down,” Scott said. “It’s either flat or going up very, very fast.”

Sixteen of the nation’s 54 high-risk, high-capacity facilities are in the Golden State, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a privately run ICE detention center. Three of the prisons with large populations and extreme risk are in Oklahoma and eight are in Texas.

“I think we can assume that fires are going to continue regularly now and are now going to be chronic.”

The Intercept’s analysis found that many of the most fire-prone facilities are concentrated in the American West. In both Idaho and Nevada, more than a quarter of detention facilities are at the highest level of peril.

Then there are unexpected areas of danger. Florida has more state-run facilities facing extreme wildfire risk than California and is home to the highest-risk facility in the nation with a capacity of over 1,000 people: the Everglades Correctional Institution. It’s not a matter of dryness — the state prison sits next to a tropical wetland — but rather nearby vegetation is so flammable that fires can move on top of the water. The facility was evacuated in 2008 because of wildfires; flames came dangerously close in 2017 and again last spring.

“I think we can assume that fires are going to continue regularly now and are now going to be chronic,” said Woods Ervin, who works with the coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide grassroots group that is pushing California to close prisons. “All signs point to that prisons don’t work, and so we need to figure something else out, because it’s just untenable.”

In the end, neither prison was evacuated during the Vacaville fire. Thornton, the state corrections agency spokesperson, told The Intercept there were no evacuation orders for the prisons themselves. As in Susanville, the agency refused to provide any details about what plans and procedures the detention facilities had in place for wildfires, let alone why they were not evacuated.

“The present state of ‘mass incarceration’ in the U.S. has resulted in a full-blown logistics nightmare in terms of emergency actions.”

The sheer number of prisoners in California’s often overcrowded facilities creates a powerful disincentive for the state government to act. “The present state of ‘mass incarceration’ in the U.S. has resulted in a full-blown logistics nightmare in terms of emergency actions, making the decision to evacuate seem impossible,” Carlee Purdum, an expert on the impact of disasters on incarcerated people at Texas A&M University, wrote in a recent book.

Prison evacuations frequently go poorly. When Oregon evacuated prisons being approached by wildfires in 2020, incarcerated people reported being left without sufficient food, water, bathrooms, and Covid-19 protections. Some were unable to access medications they needed. Others reported being placed in facilities alongside — and facing retaliation from — members of their former gangs.

With the pace at which wildfires are getting dramatically larger and more severe, Newsom’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has taken flak from advocates for being unprepared for the deepening climate crisis in the state’s prisons, jails, and detention centers.

The Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, an advocacy group known as TGI Justice Project, is demanding that California create guidelines for what should happen when prisons do evacuate. Newsom has yet to respond.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, a state body that provides lawmakers with policy advice, said that it would take nearly $20 billion to resolve the full list of infrastructure problems prison officials have identified — a total that doesn’t even fully account for climate adaptation costs. (The agency’s report doesn’t mention wildfires, except to reference incarcerated people serving as firefighters.)

With prison populations declining, the Legislative Analyst’s Office also had another suggestion: Close some prisons. Organizers with Californians United for a Responsible Budget want more. The climate crisis has made the scope of infrastructure needs so unwieldy, they say, that repairs should be halted altogether. Instead, the organizers are pushing for California to close 10 prisons and release 50,000 people.

Two closures are already penciled in. In April 2021, the Newsom administration announced that it would close the California Correctional Center by June 2022. The town, whose economy depends on the facility, sued and won an injunction, freezing the process for now.

Vejar, the former head of the C-Yard’s inmate advisory council, who was released in November, said prison officials told him the backup generator that failed had needed repairs for more than 20 years. Closing the California Correctional Center, he said, was also overdue: “I think they’re doing what they should have been doing a long time ago and closing it down.”

The post As Wildfires Threaten More Prisons, the Incarcerated Ask Who Will Save Their Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

At the Cross City Correctional Institution, the prison administration repeatedly canceled visitation hours throughout July. As August progressed, the yard between buildings filled with water. Classes and religious services were scrapped.

On the main unit, fetid water started coming up through the drains, said DaRon Jones, who is incarcerated at Cross City. Guards told all the prisoners to pack what they could into a pillowcase and prepare to evacuate, but Jones spent hours locked in his cell with the filth. “The water was close to ankle-deep, with human waste floating by as we were fed in our cells,” he said. “The smell was unlike anything I have ever encountered.”

When they were finally led outside, Jones waded through knee-deep water. “There were snakes and bugs swimming in the water as we made our way to the bus,” he recalled.

The rising waters were predictable, according to an Intercept analysis that cross-referenced flood risk data from the First Street Foundation with the locations of more than 6,500 carceral facilities across the U.S. Cross City was at a severe risk of flooding. (Florida Department of Corrections press secretary Paul Walker, who did not initially respond to a detailed inquiry about Jones’s case, sent a statement after publication disputing the account. “The rising flood waters did not enter the housing areas until after the evacuation was completed and at no time was food delivered during this evacuation,” Walker said.)

Fiercer hurricanes, rising seas, profuse rainfalls: The climate crisis is causing more flooding across the nation. And while federal and state institutions are generally lagging when it comes to climate resilience, the carceral system is in particular peril. Many jails and prisons were built as the war on drugs ramped up and have since been all but neglected. Worsening disasters will test the deteriorating buildings.

“Most of the infrastructure we have now was built in 1980s and 1990s,” said Molly Gill, vice president of policy for FAMM, an organization focused on sentencing reform. “We built all these prisons when we passed mandatory sentencing laws and had our prison booms and embarked on mass incarceration,” she said. “All those chickens are coming home to roost.”

“We built all these prisons when we passed mandatory sentencing laws and had our prison booms and embarked on mass incarceration. All those chickens are coming home to roost.”

Florida is in especially bad shape. Cross City is one of 52 jails, prisons, and detention centers in the state that face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years, according to The Intercept’s analysis. Half of those facilities, including Cross City, are run by the state of Florida, under the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The state is responsible for more carceral institutions with elevated chances of flooding than any other government authority, local or national.

The DeSantis administration seems ill-prepared for the next rounds of flooding. There is a huge maintenance backlog, little evidence of robust disaster planning, and resistance to policy changes that would leave fewer people in prison. For state leaders, staffing woes overshadow all those issues: Some 5,500 low-paying prison guard positions are currently unfilled, out of a workforce of 18,000.

Authorities with the DeSantis administration said the prison system is addressing problems like flooding. “Planning and preparing for natural disasters such as flooding is an integral part of our operations. We will continue to work with local emergency management officials in an effort to identify aggravators associated with the rise in flood waters,” Molly Best, deputy communications director for the Florida Department of Corrections, said in an email. She defended the department’s response to the Dixie County flooding: “Inmates at Cross City CI did not wait weeks for evacuation. Cross City CI was evacuated immediately at the onset of the flooding incident.”

Prisoners, as wards of the state, can’t make decisions about leaving flood zones. For the most part, they must rely on their custodians — policymakers and politicians — to protect them. DeSantis has persistently refused to pursue reforms that would meaningfully improve conditions, and in the state government, there is little will to hold him to account. Incarcerated populations tend to be low priorities in the halls of power.

“Most legislators would much rather focus on jobs and education in Florida than they would trying to fix the most difficult public policy area in the state, which is a collapsing prison system, because there’s no credit to be gotten from that,” said Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes. “We are on a completely unsustainable trajectory.”

The flood risk data was drawn from the First Street Foundation’s flood model, which was developed as an alternative to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s outdated and incomplete flood zone maps. First Street’s property-specific flood risk assessments, or “Flood Factors,” take into account flooding due to rivers, tides, precipitation, and storm surges. The Flood Factors also incorporate the impacts of the next 30 years of the climate crisis. Though First Street’s model has limitations for assessing risk to prison campuses, it can also illuminate which facilities deserve scrutiny.

According to The Intercept’s analysis, 621 facilities across the U.S. have major to extreme flood risk. Not all of the high-risk facilities are in places where one might expect to find them, like the Gulf Coast; many are located instead in landlocked states like Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Several of the most imperiled locations identified in The Intercept’s analysis have already experienced flooding. When a surge from Superstorm Sandy hit the tidal waterways around New York City, nurses at the Hudson County Correctional Facility were forced to wade through hallways of knee-deep water to attend to panicking prisoners. The Franklin County Corrections Center II in Columbus, Ohio, has been forced repeatedly over the past decade to ferry staff to work in boats.

Police watch over prisoners from Orleans Parish Prison who were evacuated due to high water in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 1, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina was America’s introduction to the horrors wrought by the climate crisis behind bars. As the storm approached New Orleans, mandatory evacuation orders went out for the city, but more than 6,000 people held at the Orleans Parish Prison were left behind.

A promised emergency plan, insofar as one was put in action, fell short. When the facility’s generators failed, lights, ventilation, and toilets stopped working. Days went by with little to no food or medication. In some areas, the waters reached chest level. Violence broke out. Five hundred-seventeen people on the prison roster were never accounted for.

The Orleans Parish Prison, though, doesn’t carry an extreme flood risk. The contradiction points to the unpredictable nature of flooding in a climate-impacted world. It also shows how other factors — in New Orleans, the hurricane-strength wind, infrastructure failures, and gaps in political will — exacerbate catastrophes. The failing levees weren’t a natural disaster, but rather one born out of manmade neglect.

“A lot of prison flooding issues have more to do with sewage and old water pipes than they do with storms.”

Where floods will occur depends on far more than topography or location. A detention facility’s position on a hill, for instance, won’t protect it in heavy rains if the windows are broken and the roof leaks. Conditions affecting nearby roads and power supplies can sow chaos even at prisons that appear to be low risk.

Plumbing and sewage systems that aren’t properly maintained can also create flooding hazards. A prison in South Carolina and a jail in Pennsylvania with minimal flood risks, according to The Intercept’s analysis, have both experienced sewage floods owing to infrastructure failures.

“A lot of prison flooding issues have more to do with sewage and old water pipes than they do with storms,” said FAMM’s Gill. “Every hurricane season, our families get very frightened for their loved ones who are in facilities in places like Louisiana and Alabama and coastal Florida. They worry not just about the flooding, but they also worry about the integrity of the building.”

When Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, more than 2,000 people at the U.S. Penitentiary at Beaumont, one of four federal prisons situated around a traffic circle in Beaumont, Texas, were never evacuated. The city frequently lies in the paths of hurricanes — making the prison there one of the most notorious in the U.S. for its history of flooding.

The stories from Beaumont — which is located in an area with some of the highest flood risks in the country — are indicative of the outsize role the federal government plays in flood-prone detention. The Intercept’s analysis identified 25 facilities under federal authority that are in areas with major to extreme flood risk.

After Harvey landed, people incarcerated at Beaumont Penitentiary recounted dire conditions: no air conditioning; toilets shutting down; problems accessing food, water, and medications; and restricted access to phones and email. Complaints, the detainees said, were met with retaliation.

The parcel of land where Beaumont sits faces significant flooding in rare 500-year flood events. By 2050, those odds will shift dramatically.

One prisoner, Sergio Alberto Rosales, described the situation as “low water rations and living in our own defication [sic] which would ferment from the extreme heat.” In a message sent to the Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network, he said, “i felt i was going to die because the water was not enough to sustain a 6’2 235lb body . when i passed out the first time my celly called the officer to ask for help and we were met with aggression and ‘your just faking be a man and suck it up.’”

The Prisoners Legal Advocacy Network sent Rosales’s and other prisoners’ distressing testimony to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons, which runs the facility, describing the conditions as “persistently unconstitutional.”

The federal government was aware of the potential dangers. In 2014, FEMA had identified the area as being prone to flooding. And it had happened before: When Hurricane Rita hit in 2005, people left behind at Beaumont described conditions similar to Harvey: days without food and weeks of stifling heat punctuated by overflowing toilets.

The flooding is only expected to get worse. According to the First Street Foundation’s flood model, under today’s climate conditions, the parcel of land where Beaumont sits faces significant flooding in rare 500-year flood events. By 2050, those odds will shift dramatically, with the area likely to be inundated even in the type of flood that occurs every five years.

Since 2017, little action has been taken by the Bureau of Prisons to plan for the sort of flooding at federal facilities that will only become more common as the warming climate fuels more extreme storms.

Before Harvey hit, there were hints of progress. President Barack Obama issued executive orders that required federal agencies to make climate adaptation plans.

The Justice Department’s initial plan in 2014 pointed to flooding and severe weather as the most serious threats to its infrastructure, including prisons. The report called for action to identify high-risk facilities and plan for climate impacts. (The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to The Intercept’s request that the agency provide its evaluations, share a list of facilities facing dangers, or send the criteria used to make such determinations.)

Obama’s effort, however, was scuttled by Donald Trump when he became president. Now, through a pair of new executive orders, President Joe Biden is picking up where Obama left off. An updated Justice Department climate adaptation report, dated July 2021, says the department is beginning to reevaluate facilities for climate dangers and will prioritize environmental justice in its climate adaptation plans.

“The entire country should develop local, state and federal climate resiliency plans which includes close attention to our most vulnerable populations.”

It’s not clear whether the health and safety of incarcerated populations will again fall to the wayside: The report’s plan to identify “disadvantaged” communities includes an Environmental Protection Agency tool that provides little information about incarcerated populations. A second system that will be used to make assessments for the project is still in the planning stages.

What is clear is that governments are falling short on providing protections for incarcerated people, said LaTricea Adams, the head of Black Millennials for Flint and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, who declined to comment specifically on the new assessment tool. “The Department of Justice and EPA, just to name a few have turned a blind eye to the racially motivated actions (and inactions) that take place in prisons that house majority Black and Latinx people,” she said in an email. “The entire country should develop local, state and federal climate resiliency plans which includes close attention to our most vulnerable populations including (but certainly not limited to) our individuals who are incarcerated.”

Members of Congress are also pushing for better accounting of how the Bureau of Prisons manages disasters. For two years running, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., has introduced a bill that would require the bureau to submit detailed annual damage reports describing how federal prisons and the people inside fared during major disasters. The bill, which stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, would have encouraged corrections officials to consider home confinement or early release to manage disasters in carceral facilities.

The provision speaks to the scope of the challenge. Mass incarceration means hundreds of thousands of people are stuck behind bars as climate disasters unfold. Reducing prison populations would mean many fewer people stuck in the way of climate harms, yet the prospects for large-scale reforms of the criminal legal system seem remote.

In 2014, the National Institute of Corrections recommended that prisons move toward a “green corrections” system, which would include rooftop gardens, solar energy, and wastewater recycling. For advocates, such reforms would hardly do enough to keep incarcerated people safe.

“Decades of research has demonstrated how bad these systems are at doing what they’re designed to do, especially in terms of rehabilitation,” said Nick Shapiro, who leads the Carceral Ecologies team at UCLA. “You’re pulling the most vulnerable people and putting them in the most vulnerable situation, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Experts are increasingly arguing for prison abolition as the most effective climate disaster mitigation strategy. Few federal leaders have embraced the approach, but in state capitols a debate is underway.

In Florida, a growing contingent of Republicans are calling for a combination of infrastructure investment and sentencing reforms. Brandes, the state senator, joined state Rep. Dianne Hart, a Democrat, in calling for bringing back parole, which the state effectively abolished in 1983, to get more people out from behind bars. Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson, while focusing less on systemic reform, has vocally advocated for closing old prisons and building bigger, air-conditioned, and disaster-ready facilities. As a start, the state Senate’s proposed budget this year includes $1.3 billion for two new prisons.

About 100 miles away from the senators’ offices, in Cross City, officials are toying with both approaches. In the wake of the floods, they entertained the idea of closing Cross City permanently. Community members opposed the move, saying they rely on the facility economically. Following the objections, DeSantis recently announced hundreds of thousands of dollars in flood control projects for Dixie County’s prison.

Update: February 16, 2022
This story has been updated to include a statement by the Florida Department of Corrections about DaRon Jones’s case that was sent after publication.

Correction: May 11, 2022
This story has been updated to reflect that a government tool mentioned in the Justice Department’s climate adaptation plan includes limited information on incarcerated populations.

The post With Floodwaters Rising, Prisoners Wait for Help in Floating Feces appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the past 20 years, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly issued compliance orders and documented environmental violations at the Cottonport Monofill tire processor and landfill, located next to the prison. The company never cleaned up its mess and declared bankruptcy seven years ago. On January 16, towering piles of tires and tire scraps caught fire, and they wouldn’t stop burning for 11 days.

As the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections tells it, favorable winds kept smoke safely away from the prison in the early days of the fire. Those inside, however, say they experienced respiratory problems and headaches for days before being evacuated.

People inside the prison attempted to cover vents with cardboard to keep the smoke out, but it wasn’t enough. Moore, who is 37, said that one of the men in his unit began coughing up blood. Several people interviewed by The Advocate also described smoke entering the facility soon after the fire began, followed quickly by health issues. The prison was already in the midst of a Covid-19 outbreak, with 307 people testing positive.

Finally, four days after the fire began, officials evacuated the prison. However, even as state environmental monitors collected evidence of elevated levels of volatile organic compounds and particulate matter in the air — both of which can cause health problems — the evacuees were not allowed to see medical staff until well after their return to Laborde on January 27, according to three people interviewed.

When they arrived at a previously shuttered part of Allen Correctional Center, “Everyone was trying to see the nurse,” recalled 29-year-old Rondell Delaney. “They said it’s too many people.” Watts said a nurse took the names of people with health impacts, but there was no follow-up.

Upon returning, “I told them I’m having chest pain and a hard time talking,” Delaney recalled. Prison staffers told him the nurses were backlogged and he should sign up for sick call, which costs $3 or $6 for emergencies. He estimated another two weeks passed before he was allowed to see a medical professional. Even then, “All they did was check our temperature and see if we had Covid.” A month after the fire began, Delaney’s voice was still hoarse. Delaney, Moore, and Watts were all still dealing with migraine headaches — something Moore said he’d never experienced before.

Although Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Chuck Carr Brown declared the tire fire and subsequent cleanup an emergency on February 8, people incarcerated at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center say it didn’t translate into robust health checks for the 1,500 people who were locked inside next to the tire fire.

Ken Pastorick, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, denied that medical attention was inadequate. “A handful of prisoners who claimed health issues with the smoke were examined and cleared by the prison’s medical staff,” he said. “Employees effectively and efficiently executed the evacuation and return of prisoners without incident.”

To environmental experts, the burning tires represent a collision of failures by two state agencies that are supposed to protect the health of Louisiana’s most vulnerable people: the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist who has long worked with Louisiana communities coping with the health impacts of industrial disasters and pollution, said incarceration made a bad situation even worse. She surmised, “The evacuation would have happened earlier had it not been a prison.”

Pastorick replied, “Evacuating an entire prison is very rare, not something to take lightly, and must be fully warranted.”

Air Monitoring Dysfunction

Soon after the tires went up in flames, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality parked its Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory, a big white van full of environmental sensors, on the northeast corner of the prison, between the fire and Laborde. The state scientists were looking especially for types of particulate matter so small they can lodge in people’s lungs and bloodstream, known as PM10 and PM2.5.

On January 17, the first day that the mobile laboratory delivered results, PM2.5 levels spiked to 97.5 micrograms per cubic meter, a level Kimberly Terrell, staff scientist and director of community engagement at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans said was concerning and likely representative of pollution levels for those downwind. “Very high levels of PM2.5 like this are definitely known to trigger asthma events and cause difficulty breathing. They have acute, immediate impacts,” she said. For the next two days, the lab’s readings were lower.

On the fifth day, “The wind direction shifted and significant quantities of smoke generated by the fire inundated the Correctional Center,” LDEQ’s declaration of emergency says. “The smoke generated by the fire was so significant that visibility was greatly impaired near the vicinity of the Site.”

Guards lined up Laborde’s prisoners outside in the bad air to wait for evacuation, according to two of the incarcerated people interviewed. People who had tested positive for Covid-19 were loaded onto buses alongside everyone else.

“Very high levels of PM2.5 like this are definitely known to trigger asthma events and cause difficulty breathing.”

Yet despite the dire conditions, the state’s lab equipment again recorded relatively low levels of pollution. It wasn’t because the air was clear. “The MAML was likely outside the edge of the smoke plume,” Langley said. Complicating matters further, the day before the evacuation, the Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory’s power generator broke down, and LDEQ had to bring in a new van, which it placed in the same spot.

Issues like this are typical, Subra said. “Frequently they can’t put the MAML in the best place to monitor,” she said. Plus, “It’s had a history of breaking down.”

It’s also unclear what MAML readings would have triggered a response. Langley told The Intercept that readings above 15 parts per million for an extended period of time would be “concerning,” and a single reading of 100 would be cause for action. “If any receptors were within an area with readings that high, a shelter in place might be ordered,” he said.

Of course, the standard measurement for PM2.5 pollution data — and the measurement that LDEQ used for the MAML data it posted online — is micrograms per cubic meters, not parts per million.

Terrell said this kind of problem, too, is typical of LDEQ. “Yes, there was monitoring, but we are missing very basic information.”

The full spectrum of health impacts is difficult to determine without learning which chemicals were in the smoke. The LDEQ used canisters as well as handheld monitors to determine levels of volatile organic compounds, some of which are linked to cancers. Although LDEQ’s emergency declaration stated that they detected elevated levels of VOCs, Langley said he could not say which compounds his agency detected. He pointed to a laboratory backlog.

Years of Violations

Although the state fire marshal has not determined the fire’s cause, Langley said that environmental violations, documented by LDEQ for years, likely made things worse. “If a fire starts at a tire facility, the configuration of the tire stacks and presence of debris can contribute to the severity of the fire,” he said. “The tires were piled as high as 50 feet in areas and the piles were up to 100 yards wide. The area that burned did not have the proper spacing to provide fire breaks.”

Beginning in 2010, LDEQ filed three separate compliance orders against Cottonport Monofill, including a 2013 order describing tires piled too high and too close together, with fire lanes that were too narrow. The problems went unresolved as the years ticked by.

“DEQ is good at going out and inspecting sites, especially when someone complains,” said Subra. “They write up compliance orders, and they never get enforced.”

Cottonport Monofill filed for bankruptcy in 2015, a month after it applied to LDEQ for a new permit to operate. Despite the fact that the company was in bankruptcy court and still had an outstanding compliance order from 2013, LDEQ granted the new permit.

In 2019, the environmental agency issued another compliance order stating that the company failed to properly clean up the site, a process that would have involved shredding all the tires into chips and capping the landfill with clay. Instead, 100,000 tires remained, piled several times higher than the 10 feet allowed. Hydraulic fluid was spilled on the ground. The order demanded the facility’s owners take action within 30 days, stating that penalties of $32,500 per day were on the line. However, the situation was unchanged when inspectors returned that December.

Bankruptcy wasn’t enough for LDEQ to deny Cottonport Monofill’s permit, but it was enough for the agency to decide that no penalty should apply. “Due to the bankruptcy and inoperable status of the Respondent, the Department has not issued penalties to Cottonport Monofill LLC,” said Langley, over email. “Gross Revenues of the Respondent is one of the Factors the Department has to consider.”

Hunting for Accountability

It’s unclear who LDEQ expects to pay for the fire damage and the remaining tire debris. Langley said he couldn’t comment on liability. The agency’s inspection reports say First Guaranty Bank possessed the property after the bankruptcy. Yet bank Vice President Evan Singer denied to The Intercept that the bank is the owner or that it has responsibility for cleaning up the tire landfill.

Avoyelles Parish also has a stake in the property. Land records from the parish assessor’s office say the parish bought the property in a 2020 tax sale. However, Joey Frank, director of the parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said that the rules around tax sales mean the parish isn’t liable for the cleanup either.

According to the bank, the site is still owned by Ward Enterprises LLC. Listed in the permit as the facility’s owner is Lloyd D. Ward, a former Maytag CEO who was forced to resign as CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2003 amid allegations of ethics violations. Ward did not respond to requests for comment.

LDEQ’s failure to assure Cottonport Monofill resolved its environmental violations before it disappeared tracks with Louisiana’s recent history. Under former Gov. Bobby Jindal, funding for LDEQ was dramatically slashed, leaving the agency with a skeleton staff and weakened environmental enforcement. “DEQ does not issue enforcement actions in a timely manner,” stated a January 2021 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor, focusing on air quality violations.

For now, the state is on the hook for the fire’s expenses. “The declaration of emergency allowed LDEQ to direct state resources to address the fire and control the pollution resulting from the fire,” including 800 barrels of a type of oil produced when tires burn, said Langley.

Dancing With the Devil in Louisiana Prison

The tire fire wasn’t the only environmental problem Moore has experienced at the Laborde Correctional Center. According to The Intercept’s Climate and Punishment investigation, the prison is located in a county that has historically seen 110 days annually with a heat index over 90 degrees and 10 days over 105 degrees. By 2100, as the climate crisis deepens, the county will likely see as many as two months annually over 105, a level the National Weather Service considers dangerous.

Moore has witnessed people pass out from the heat. “In the summer you’re dancing with the devil. In the winter, there’s no heat,” he said.

The prison was also the subject of an Environmental Protection Agency Clean Water Act enforcement action in 2017 for wastewater treatment problems, something the federal agency rarely issues against a prison, according to an analysis by Nick Shapiro, director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Exacerbating all of it is poor health care. In a recent ruling, a judge described “overwhelming deficiencies” in another Louisiana prison’s medical system, violating the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

“The medical system in the prison altogether is like you’re the bottom of the barrel. You’re going to get treated like crap every time,” Moore said. The tire fire was no exception.

The post Burning Tires Left Louisiana Prisoners With Migraines, Breathing Problems, and Minimal Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 20 years earlier, another climate catastrophe had upended Argueta Anariba’s life. In November 1998, he had fled Honduras in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. Now he found himself confronting new climate nightmares in Louisiana, with no possibility of escape.

The privately run facility where Argueta Anariba was held was one of several new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Louisiana. The implications of caging thousands of people in a state that’s notorious for extreme weather crystallized with the intensifying wind.

In the days that followed the storm’s landfall, detainees throughout the state would endure appalling conditions caused in no small part by ICE’s lack of preparedness for climate disasters. An Intercept investigation found that more than half of ICE’s detention facilities, including Catahoula, are already facing significant climate risks.

“Climate change has already exacerbated extreme weather conditions, and we are seeing a direct impact on incarcerated people warehoused in immigration detention facilities across the country,” said Karla Ostolaza, managing director of the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders, a public defense group that is representing Argueta Anariba. “We are very concerned that more extreme weather events caused by climate change will lead to further exploitation and disregard for detained immigrants at ICE facilities.”

On August 26, with Hurricane Laura lashing the Catahoula facility, the lights went out and the water stopped running, according to a court affidavit by Argueta Anariba. The services were down for five days. Several inches of water pooled on the ground. With the air conditioning down, the dorm felt like it was over 100 degrees. In the first days, facility employees brought in a few gallons to drink, twice a day, for more than 50 people.

“The toilets would not flush during this time, and some people were forced to defecate on the trays that they gave us for meals and then throw those in the trash,” Argueta Anariba said, adding that with staff avoiding the dorms, garbage piled up. The stench made Argueta Anariba feel sick and aggravated his asthma. “The smell was excruciating.”

People held by ICE in other parts of the state were experiencing similar problems, with protests arising among the detained.

2020 would soon set the record for the number of hurricanes that crashed into the continental U.S. Within weeks of Laura, wind and rain from another storm hit the Catahoula facility.

Evacuees from other facilities were bused to the detention center. Tensions were high in the overcrowded prison; Argueta Anariba said a pepper spray-like substance was frequently used as a means of crowd control. “I could not breathe and vomited several times,” he said. “My face felt like it was burning.”

When a third storm hit, electricity went out again, but with the heat less severe, the situation was more tolerable.

“In the three hurricanes that passed,” said Argueta Anariba, who is undocumented, “I lived the worst part of my life.”

The Next Disaster

The past decade has given rise to the notion of the “climate migrant,” a term that describes people like Argueta Anariba who are forced to leave their nation because of a climate-related disaster. The climate crisis means that migration to the U.S. is likely to increase in the years ahead. Around 680,000 climate migrants are expected to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between now and 2050, according to an analysis by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine.

“I traveled with many people who came from Honduras, escaping from the destruction that was the country,” Argueta Anariba told The Intercept in Spanish. “They’re still in this country, continuing forward, working to get ahead.”

For some climate migrants, the journey ends when they are ensnared in the U.S. immigration enforcement system. Many will find themselves in detention centers that are, an Intercept investigation found, especially vulnerable to climate risks.

To determine how the climate crisis impacts incarcerated people, The Intercept mapped more than 6,500 jails, prisons, and detention centers against heat, wildfire, and flood risk. ICE detainees were held in some 128 facilities as of 2020, according to research by the Carceral Ecologies team at UCLA. Catahoula Correctional Center is one of 72 immigration detention centers The Intercept identified as facing significant climate-related risks — risks that are poised to get more severe as the climate crisis deepens. (ICE did not provide answers to The Intercept’s questions for this article.)

The U.S. refugee system generally does not recognize climate disaster as a reason to grant asylum. In cases of environmental catastrophes, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has the power to designate a country for temporary protected status, a program that allows some of its citizens to temporarily live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.

The designation, though, is rarely applied. The program, for instance, was not opened up to those fleeing Honduras when hurricanes Eta and Iota devastated the country in 2020. When TPS is applied, onerous conditions can thwart those seeking its protections. After Hurricane Mitch, Hondurans were afforded TPS status, but Argueta Anariba didn’t qualify in part because of a criminal conviction, his lawyer said.

If restrictive U.S. immigration policies go unchanged, more climate migrants will end up in detention facilities. Without either new investments in infrastructure or a rethinking of U.S. immigration policies, detained migrants will be facing worsening climate risks — this time without the chance to flee.

Prisons at Risk

No states have more ICE detention centers than sweltering, storm-prone Texas and Louisiana. All 10 immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and 19 in Texas are in counties that have historically experienced more than 100 days annually with a heat index over 90 degrees. Those temperatures are hot enough to cause health problems in places where medical care is lacking and air conditioning often breaks down, if it exists at all.

ICE’s detention standards include only vague references to maintaining comfortable temperatures and offering climate-appropriate clothing, and advocates say there’s minimal enforcement. Even in the much-cooler Northeast, extreme heat is already creating dangerous conditions. “ICE frequently exposes people in their custody to extreme heat conditions without air conditioning in the summer and freezing temperatures without adequate heat in the winter — leading to increased health risks among the people we represent,” said Ostolaza, of the Bronx Defenders.

It’s going to get worse, according to county-by-county heat projections from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Historically, no ICE detention centers were in counties where heat spiked above 105 degrees for more than a month annually — a level of heat the National Weather Service designates as dangerous. By 2100, the county where Catahoula is located is likely to see nearly two months annually over 105 degrees. Across the nation, every ICE detention facility will see longer periods of high heat.

Shoddy infrastructure is already failing to keep up with snowballing climate-related problems. Catahoula has low flood risk, according to data from the First Street Foundation, and the water coming in during Hurricane Laura likely had more to do with structural problems than with flood vulnerability. ICE detention centers’ climate control systems are known for breaking down; summer after summer, public defenders have demanded that ICE address air-conditioning failures in a detention center in northern New Jersey.

For many immigrant advocates, the climate emergency lends new urgency for systemic changes that go beyond fixing buildings. “If we can foresee that these facilities are going to need infrastructure reworking, it’s a good sign that we need to end detention centers as a whole,” said Dagoberto Bailón, a coordinator for Trans Queer Pueblo, an Arizona-based organization that works with LGBTQ+ migrants.

In the cases of some risk-prone facilities, ICE is looking to scale up detention. In Georgia, the Folkston ICE Processing Center faces severe wildfire risk yet is in line for an expansion that would make it one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the nation, increasing its number of beds from 780 to 3,018.

Organizers have, however, scored victories. In New Jersey, the Hudson County Correctional Facility faces extreme flood risk and flooded during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As of this past November, under pressure, the facility no longer houses ICE detainees.

ICE and the Climate Crisis

ICE, for its part, is already preparing for the future. The Department of Homeland Security is evaluating detention facilities for climate risk and gearing up for the new migrant influx.

“Catastrophic events, such as floods, wildfires, and extreme drought, may prompt mass migration which has the capacity to overrun DHS facilities and infrastructure supporting the Nation’s immigration system,” the agency wrote in its Climate Action Plan, released in October 2021. “Climate change is likely to increase population movements from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean and impact neighboring countries.”

DHS lists increased migration among its top five climate vulnerabilities, but its climate action plan is light on details about what the agency will do about it. Department officials are working on creating a plan to predict and plan for future waves of mass migration, according to the climate report, hinting at more arrests and detention. “Increases in human migration may require more resources and operational capacity at the U.S. border to facilitate the application of immigration law, including the law governing claims for humanitarian protection,” DHS wrote.

And DHS is aware that many of its facilities could be at climate risk: “This risk could require relocating or even abandoning current infrastructure in certain circumstances,” the report says, calling for incorporating climate resiliency when expanding the detention infrastructure.

Until now, a main factor that ICE had used to choose where to locate detention centers was local communities’ demands for prisons to bolster their economies. In the case of Louisiana, criminal justice reforms led to fewer people being held in jails and prisons, creating economic gaps that were filled by new ICE contracts.

To Trans Queer Pueblo’s Bailón, it’s all part of a pattern that needs to be broken. “The U.S. is really good at solving problems by trying to put people away,” he said. “Investing in people looks like investing in other countries, investing in migration and having the means to have a smooth migration process, rather than having these detention centers where abuses happen.”

No Asylum

As a kid in Honduras, Argueta Anariba would spend four hours a day at school and eight hours planting and harvesting crops. He loved his classes, especially math, but he also appreciated learning at his father’s side in the fields. He knew from an early age that a bad harvest meant going to bed hungry. Today, climate-driven drought has pushed many Honduran farmers over the edge. In Argueta Anariba’s case, it was a storm.

Hurricane Mitch roared through Argueta Anariba’s community when he was 20. “We lost everything: property and land, jobs, crops,” he remembered. By then, he had two little children. “The government didn’t have capacity to help all the people that were affected. Due to the situation, I traveled to the United States to try to support my family.”

After passing through Guatemala and Mexico, Argueta Anariba made his way to Washington, D.C., where he joined a tight-knit community of Hondurans from his region.

His problems with ICE began after he demanded payment for one of his jobs. Argueta Anariba’s employer responded by threatening him, he said. In the weeks that followed, the conflict escalated until, according to Argueta Anariba, one of his former boss’s friends — who had gang ties — pulled a knife. Argueta Anariba stabbed him in self-defense, he says, and spent the next seven years in prison before being put in ICE custody.

An immigration judge ruled that Argueta Anariba cannot be released while he waits for the government to decide his asylum claim. By now, he has been in ICE detention — which is not supposed to be punitive — for seven years, a period equal to his prison term.

Last winter, he endured yet another climate change-related disaster, when a sudden cold snap struck Louisiana, leaving him shivering in a detention center with inadequate heat.

Despite it all, going to Honduras isn’t an option. Although a climate disaster drove Argueta Anariba to migrate, his asylum plea isn’t about a storm. While he was in prison, masked men broke into his mother’s home and beat her, demanding to know when Argueta Anariba would return to Honduras. Unable to rely on protection from a Honduran government with a reputation for corruption, Argueta Anariba is convinced that he will be murdered by associates of his Washington attacker if he returns.

In the coming weeks, Argueta Anariba may get the chance to leave confinement for the first time in more than 14 years. At a new bond hearing, a judge will reconsider whether Argueta Anariba should be released until his immigration case is decided.

More than anything, Argueta Anariba wants to be there for his kids again, the youngest of whom are U.S. citizens. “To be my own boss is my dream, and also I wish to help the community, to serve on some public projects. I would like to be part of pro-migrant organizations,” he said. “Maybe it’s for that reason that I’ve had to suffer and overcome some obstacles, if in the future I have the chance to get out and to show the public that we deserve one more opportunity.”

The post Migrants Fleeing Hurricanes and Drought Face New Climate Disasters in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.