At that point, in the detention camp’s first few years, Adayfi lived in a block where the men could hear and see one another through their cage-like cells, and they had begun a tradition of singing together on Saturday evenings. The night of the vacuums’ arrival, one detainee asked another “to sing a song of celebration to welcome his lovely lady.” But all of a sudden, the guards plugged in the devices, beginning “a chorus of angry screaming that drowned out our own singing.” Ruining one small source of joy and solidarity the men had managed to create, the vacuums were left on for hours.

The next day, Adayfi was moved to solitary confinement, where a vacuum whined interminably in front of his door, “stabbing my brain.” The torture went on for months, causing wrenching pain and quite literally driving him to distraction. He damaged his ears trying to stuff them with toilet paper. An Afghan prisoner broke down entirely and was taken away by guards and the camp psychologist. (He later told Adayfi: “I tried to cut my veins with my teeth to let my soul out.”) Adayfi eventually decided to try to out-crazy his torturers and, during a move between cells, pretended to be passionately in love with his vacuum. “My beautiful lady with the beautiful voice,” he wailed, hurling himself to the ground and demanding to be reunited with her. Of course, the perplexed guards took the vacuum away.

“That’s the thing about the Americans,” Adayfi writes in “Don’t Forget Us Here,” his new memoir of Guantánamo. “They believed anything but the truth.”

That might make for a good epitaph for Guantánamo, when and if it is ever closed. Certain truths are undeniable: Twenty years after the CIA and U.S. military began transporting men and boys to the island detention camp — picked up in Afghanistan and around the world — 39 remain there. Most of them have never been charged with a crime. Of the roughly 780 people who were held at Guantánamo, a handful have written memoirs, creating a body of work that testifies to the inanity of the war on terror, the horrors of incarceration, and the resistance and resilience of the people detained.

To those books we now can add Adayfi’s chronicle of the 14 years he spent there beginning at the age of 18, which comes out on Tuesday. Its closest predecessor, Mohamedou Slahi’s best-selling “Guantánamo Diary” (reissued as “The Mauritanian” after it was made into a film produced by Topic Studios, which is part of First Look Media, along with The Intercept) was written in 2005. Adayfi, by contrast, relates how he grew up in Guantánamo among the general population, a persistent “smiley troublemaker” (the camp authorities’ nickname for him, which he embraced), a witness to each era of Guantánamo’s evolution.

I first spoke with Adayfi in 2018, after his release to Serbia, the only place that would take him; the U.S. would not send detainees to Yemen, where Adayfi is from, citing the security situation there. He had written a book while in detention — actually several books — but they had been confiscated. As his English improved, he wrote more and more, hundreds of pages which he sent in the form of letters to his lawyers and then, upon his release, continued to type up. A few years ago I was able to read an early version, a raw and wild tome of anecdotes of prison life that has now become a polished memoir with the help of editor Antonio Aiello. Adayfi’s goal, he told me when we caught up again last month over Zoom, was not just to document what happened, but also to reflect how Guantánamo still marks everyone who was held there. That aim is there in the title, “Don’t Forget Us Here.” The “here” is where Adayfi still lives along with other former prisoners, even years after their “release.”

“The U.S. government should acknowledge what happened at Guantánamo, and they should apologize, and they should at least compensate those detainees,” he told me. Across my screen glowed the orange scarf he wears in remembrance of the men still inside. “This is the least you can do.”

Classified Memories

The story of Guantánamo is the story of unreliable narration. The government’s version of events is suspect, filtered through doublespeak diktats and an absurd classification regime that maintains that detainees’ own memories of their torture are classified. Lawyers cannot speak freely even to their clients about the intelligence against them because they also must maintain security clearance. Meanwhile, those who have been held at Guantánamo must contend with the volume of conflicting information about them that circulates in once-classified threat assessments, many of which were derived from torture.

The insinuations about Adayfi live on the internet: They must be repeated in every story about him, justify continued surveillance by authorities in Serbia, and make his life there uncertain and travel anywhere else a nonstarter. There is no end to suspicion. So for Adayfi, the process of preparing his book for the general public at times recalled the torturous cycles of questioning he had endured at Guantánamo. “It’s this fine line of, Is this another interrogation?” said Aiello, his editor. “He had told his story to so many people already, and everything we talked about he had already said.”

Adayfi grew up in Yemen to a poor but happy family; his father wanted all of the children, including the girls, to get an education. He spent his childhood chasing goats and sheep in the mountains. He recounts the first time he saw electricity, when he went to Sanaa to study. He says he was sent to Afghanistan to do research for a sheikh at a Yemeni Islamic institute and that he was captured by a warlord and handed over to the Americans. This early biography, and the details of what exactly he was doing in Afghanistan, are secondary: This is a narrative about the collective experience of Guantánamo and the “brotherhood” it engendered, even as it tells one man’s coming-of-age story.

About a year after he arrived in Guantánamo, Adayfi was brought to an interrogation room with a two-way mirror; he could see shadows moving behind it. “I opened my mouth and inspected my teeth,” he writes. “I looked under my arms at the new hair that had grown. I laughed at my wild hair and beard. I made funny faces, wondering, What would my mother think of such a messy boy?” Aiello told me that as they edited this scene together, Adayfi acted out his expressions over Skype. “It was one of those moments where I was like, holy shit, he was a kid. … Imagine being 18 years old and being told you were responsible for the biggest attack on American soil.”

Many Guantánamo narratives — including the film version of “The Mauritanian,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker story about Slahi, and the WNYC series about Abdul Latif Nasser — are animated by the question of whether a detainee was in fact who the U.S. government said he was: hardened Al Qaeda operative or hapless bystander sold to the CIA by Afghan warlords? Adayfi’s book is not really about proving anything about himself, though it is clear the allegations that he was a high-level Al Qaeda “general” make no sense, given his youth and background (the military eventually walked back those claims, saying he had never been identified as a member of the group). Guilt and innocence are two words that have never had much meaning in the Guantánamo context. The U.S. government has justified the continued detention of people at Guantánamo on the basis of whether they pose a threat to the United States. The prosecution of the alleged 9/11 plotters in the legally suspect military tribunal system has yet to even reach the trial stage, in large part because the proceedings are tainted by torture.

Top/Left: Post-it notes on the wall of Mansoor Adayfi's home. Bottom/Right: Mansoor Adayfi stands on the balcony of his home in Belgrade, Serbia, on Aug. 14, 2021.

Summoning Demons

Adayfi’s book is a brutal, sometimes airless account of prison struggle by a young idealist. It begins in an endless cycle of confrontation and abuse: “Pray. Eat. DRINK WATER!” he recalls. The camp administration and interrogators were obsessed with keeping the detainees hydrated, even as they tortured them, so they would stay alive; it is the first of many times when Adayfi will find himself bewildered, and almost amused, by the American insistence on abiding by rules while breaking the laws of human decency. “Arrange items in a row. Go to interrogation. Repeat your Internment Serial Number, your ISN.”

Where the men were held together in cage-like cells was loud, the lights were bright, the toilets smelled. It was overwhelming: “metal carts squeaking, bean holes banging, chains jangling, guards barking, detainees shouting, ventilators rumbling.” It did mean, however, that they could speak to one another and glean some information about where they were; some of the newer arrivals had even seen news of Guantánamo on Al Jazeera before they arrived there. The heat though drove some detainees to try to get sent back to solitary, “because it was the only place that had air conditioning and some peace from the chaos of the open cages.”

The years roll on in indignities, followed by protest — prompting beatings, pepper-spray, and solitary confinement — and culminating in hunger strikes and other acts of desperation. There are lulls when some compromise between jailers and prisoners was achieved. There are mass suicide attempts (“Code Snowball,” the guards yelled out as they ran in to cut down men who had hung themselves by their sheets, pepper-spraying the men “before cutting them down.”) There are riots orchestrated by breaking toilets, soaping the floor to make it harder for the guards to catch them. This book is the most comprehensive inside account to date of force-feedings, cell extractions, medical abuse, and other horrors of the detention camp that the government has, over the years, sought to keep secret.

Yet Adayfi is also a charming, exuberant soul, and his humor and flights of fancy come through in even the book’s most hard-to-read moments, like the lady vacuums: images of surrealist dissociation that help us understand how a human endures the worst. Adayfi’s first published writings were about the “lighter” side (if that word can be used) of life at Guantánamo, like the animals he encountered in the rec yard and his friendship with an iguana, which he wrote about for the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. There is literal toilet humor, and the time when he convinced an Afghan man that Ensure nutrition drinks (which they were fed during hunger strikes) was in fact milk from the breasts of American women. Other pranks speak to the aura of inhuman power the military ascribed to the men there. Once during a storm, guards gathered to watch a detainee who had “covered himself with a sheet and was holding a water bottle to his lips and whispering.” The guards asked what he was doing, and Adayfi and others told them that the man was summoning a jinn, or demon, who makes it thunder — and indeed, a storm had approached Guantánamo, and the thunder increased as the man continued to mumble above his bottle. One guard became hysterically afraid, screaming at them to make him stop.

Adayfi portrays the remarkable community that the men created as well as the faith that carried them through.

Art has long been an escape from the inhumanity of prison, and Guantánamo may have produced one of the most singular bodies of art in contemporary history: poetry, memoirs, paintings, and sculptures, like the exquisite tiny gondolas and sailing vessels crafted by Moath al-Alwi. Adayfi’s voluble personality is the opposite of the stoic nature of much of the art by or about Guantánamo prisoners, like the dignified but anonymizing from-the-back portraits of former guards and detainees taken by Debi Cornwall or pictures of their homes by Edmund Clark. Adayfi’s idiosyncratic, humorous style is something else, even if it also communicates, as Siddhartha Mitter has put it, Guantánamo’s signature combination of “the sinister and the mundane.” Still, as a spokesperson for others, Adayfi portrays the remarkable community that the men created as well as the faith that carried them through. Once, a hurricane bore down on Cuba, and the guards and staff evacuated. Due to high winds, they removed the tarps from the fencing that normally blocked the view from inside:

For the first time, our blocks quieted down. No guards, no chains, no banging and clanking. The song of our daily lives changed that day so that the wind could sing to us. Without the green tarps, we looked out our windows and saw the sea, the vast and beautiful sea, dark and angry, and the sea saw us, too, and raged at what it saw: hundreds of men in metal cages.

“Allahu Akbar!” an Afghani brother called out when he saw the sea for the first time. “Allahu Akbar!” brothers called out, thanking Allah for the wonder of this beautiful sea.

Adayfi’s principles, cleverness, and rage often hurt his own cause. At his first hearing in front of a George W. Bush-era panel meant to evaluate detainees as a threat to the U.S., he read out a statement in which he “told them again that I was not al Qaeda, but after what they had done to me, done to us, I would join if they would have me.” Once, later on, when the detainees were occasionally allowed a phone call with their family, a censor ended a call to his mother because he mentioned a hunger strike — classified information. He went berserk and “activated that beast within me, 441. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I broke everything I could get my hands on.” He was subdued by guards and once again labeled as a dangerous detainee. “I had never been categorized as compliant,” he notes. He worried about what compliance would mean: “Would better living conditions just distract us from fighting for what we really wanted, which was to be released?”

But better conditions did help. The men were given access to art supplies and classes, video calls, PlayStation consoles, and a microwave that one detainee liked to use to warm up his boxer shorts. They were allowed to keep books and other belongings in their cells. A pen and paper, a clock, a watch — such items gave Adayfi “power over my life.” He made a business plan for a cooperative milk and honey farm in Yemen with other detainees and began to write his memoirs.

By 2012 or 2013, things turned ugly again: The camp administration changed, privileges were revoked, and the men responded with more hunger strikes. Profound despair settled in as they realized that President Barack Obama would not simply close Guantánamo and set them free. The detainees aging and suffering from the compound effects of malnutrition and abuse were echoed in the fraying and rusting of the facility itself, in repairs and renovations that belied the goal of closure.

Adayfi comes of age inside, he changes, he learns how to moderate his anger, how to better advocate for himself and his brothers without compromising his values. The war on terror comes of age outside too. No one truly believes in what Guantánamo was purported to be — and yet it continues to exist.

In the final parole-style review before his release, Adayfi’s attorney reads out statements from family and villagers who had known him as a boy. “The evidence before you indicates that the good boy they knew has grown into a good man,” she says.

That he did so under the conditions of Guantánamo is a tragedy, and incredible.

Guantánamo 2.0

Adayfi called me over Zoom in July from the studio apartment where he now lives in a suburb of Belgrade. Pandemic lockdowns, he said, did not affect him much more than the already profound isolation he feels living in Serbia.

“I live in Guantánamo 2.0,” he said. “I have been detained, beaten, arrested, and they have my friends harassed, interrogated. … I found a woman I wanted to marry, but she married [someone else] because I couldn’t get a travel document.” He worries constantly about his family in Yemen, still wracked by war and famine, and has little hope of going there either.

He has residency papers but is not supposed to even leave the city without checking with his Serbian government minders. Serbia is not known for its friendliness toward Muslims, and his terror-suspect label means he is still under constant surveillance from security services. He has received periodic warnings that the housing support he gets from the government of Serbia could be cut off at any time. (Former detainees have gotten hugely variable treatment from the countries that took them in: Britain, for instance, paid them reparations; the United Arab Emirates imprisoned them.) Adayfi has chronic kidney stones, teeth problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, migraines, and trouble focusing — all lasting effects of Guantánamo.

Yet, as he did in detention, he has turned his despair toward study and writing. He just finished coursework for a bachelor’s degree in business administration and is writing his thesis on the economic integration of former detainees. The work with Aiello has given him a political and creative outlet: The two of them are writing a TV show based on his memoir, and Adayfi turned his computer around to show me the makings of his next book, “Life After Guantánamo,” which currently exists in the form of index cards and Post-it notes tacked up on the wall. He’s in touch with over 100 former detainees through WhatsApp and Facebook. He helps translate for them and their families via advocacy organizations like CAGE. I asked how he tracked them down. “Have you heard of the internet?” he said, laughing. Only a few of the people he has reached out to don’t want to be included in his endeavors, which he says he understands. “I am one of the most social people. Some people don’t want to talk, and I respect their privacy. But we have a really strong brotherhood.”

He has sent copies of his book to Guantánamo. He gave me a letter he had written to accompany them, addressed to the book itself. “I don’t know how the camp administration will receive you; they might deny you from visiting your birthplace and visiting the brothers there, they might ban you from the camp library and classify you as a threat,” he wrote.

It continued: “This time they can’t detain you or harm you, they can’t stop you. … I’m sure you have a lot to tell them.”

The post “They Believed Anything but the Truth” — 14 Years in Guantánamo appeared first on The Intercept.

Ich remembers these helicopter flyovers taking place daily, sometimes even twice daily, beginning around the end of 2006 and continuing until 2008. Ich, who is now 35, told The Intercept that she would run into her hut, terrified that she and the other villagers were about to be forcibly expelled from their land by Compañía Guatemalteca de Niquel, or CGN: a Guatemalan mining company with which Lote Ocho and at least 18 other Indigenous communities had been embroiled in a dispute over land since early 2005. The helicopters also reminded her of the military helicopters that she saw as a little girl toward the end of the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, during which the military committed genocide against several Indigenous groups.

Making Ich recall her country’s genocidal past and fear the use of force in the future seems to have been the point.

At the time, CGN was a subsidiary of Skye Resources, a Vancouver-based mining company. On October 12, 2006, Skye’s vice president of operations, William Enrico, sent several colleagues an email suggesting ways to deal with the “invaders,” as they called the Indigenous villagers:

“Cesar advised me to have more flignts [sic] – especially helicopter. It may be good if our regular flights did some circling over the important areas for psychological impact. This shouldn’t cost us anything extra.”

The man who gave Enrico this advice was César Montes, co-founder of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, once a formidable left-wing militant group whose stronghold encompassed the Ixil region where, between 1981 and 1983, the military committed genocide against the Ixil people. Ixil refugees fleeing to the mountains were strafed by gunmen in helicopters. Montes, who seems to have worked informally as a consultant for Skye and CGN, would have had a keen understanding of the “psychological impact” that helicopters flyovers would have on Indigenous villagers.

The flyovers above Lote Ocho were revealed in previously private corporate documents that have become public through a lawsuit in Canada. These documents, largely unreported on until now, show that the harassment by helicopter was just one part of a much larger campaign that Skye and CGN undertook to expel Indigenous communities from a huge swath of land that the companies never had any legal right to either explore or exploit. The effort relied on mostly successful attempts to influence, manipulate, or pay the most powerful institutions of the Guatemalan state, including the judiciary, the security forces — and even the presidency. The campaign culminated in two waves of evictions targeting several Indigenous villages on January 8, 9, and 17, 2007. Eleven women from Lote Ocho were allegedly gang-raped by police officers, soldiers, and CGN’s security during the last eviction. Ich is one of those women.

She and the others are now suing Hudbay Minerals Inc., a Toronto-based mining company that bought Skye in 2008, acquiring Skye’s legal liability. During the ongoing lawsuit, the women’s lawyers obtained the emails, photos, and other documents cited in this story through the discovery process and filed them in court as exhibits in an affidavit. Hudbay has not yet formally responded to the affidavit, and the company declined to comment to The Intercept because the “matter in question is currently before the courts.” CGN did not respond to multiple requests for comment and written questions. None of the CGN or Skye employees or their Guatemalan associates that The Intercept attempted to reach for this piece replied or commented. In previous court filings and public-relations materials, Hudbay has disputed the 11 women’s claims, arguing that prosecutor and police records show that no CGN or other private security guards were present at the eviction on January 17 — and in fact, that “no illegal occupiers were present.” In other words, none of the women were even there, Hudbay claims.

The 11 women’s accounts of the trauma that the alleged gang-rapes caused them are unfathomable. Five were pregnant at the time; four miscarried, and one, three days from her due date when she was allegedly gang-raped, said in a deposition that she gave birth to a stillborn that “was all blue or green.” Marriages were irreparably ruined. The impoverished community eventually split and drifted apart as some members accepted jobs at CGN, even as the company allegedly intimidated and harassed the women to pressure them into dropping their lawsuit. Thirteen years after the evictions, the women claim to live with chronic pain and ongoing emotional suffering. Sometimes, the two merge. During a 2017 deposition, one woman said: “Something has entered inside me, and it is a fear. It’s a terror, and it is a physical pain that I live with all the time.”

The Legacy of the Land

Before January 17, 2007, Lote Ocho, a village of about 100 homes, was perched high on a mountain, giving the families there a breathtaking, panoramic view of the rolling, green Guatemalan highlands and, “in the distance, the glinting mirror of Lake Izabal,” as photojournalist Roger LeMoyne described it. Lote Ocho was secluded, an approximately 45-minute drive up a treacherously bumpy, unmaintained road from the nearest town, Cahaboncito. But the people of Lote Ocho rarely went into town. They lived off the land.

An intimate, spiritual connection to the land is at the heart of the worldview of Lote Ocho’s villagers, who, as Maya Q’eqchi’, belong to one of the more than 20 Indigenous groups in Guatemala descended from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. But in 2004, Skye was granted permission to begin work in a large area in northeastern Guatemala that was home to many Maya Q’eqchi’ communities, including Lote Ocho.

Earlier that year, Skye had bought the rights to the open-pit Fenix nickel mine, located near the majority-Maya town of El Estor, on the shore of Lake Izabal, from the Canadian mining company INCO. Skye had also bought INCO’s 70 percent share of its subsidiary, EXMIBAL, which Skye then renamed CGN. But the deal also saw Skye acquire the long-festering, unresolved disputes over land left by INCO and EXMIBAL’s violent past.

INCO began negotiations over a potential open-pit nickel mine with the military dictatorship of Guatemala in 1960, the year that civil war broke out. After an INCO-hired engineer contributed to the drafting of a new mining code permitting “open sky mining,” forbidden by Guatemala’s then-suspended constitution, EXMIBAL was granted a 40-year mining license for an area covering 385 square kilometers in 1965. The next year, Col. Carlos Arana Osorio launched an ostensible counterinsurgency campaign in the area, which would earn him the nom de guerre “the butcher of Zacapa.” During this campaign, the military expelled peasants from land that would become the site of EXMIBAL’s facilities. Between 3,000 and 8,000 people, mainly noncombatant Maya Q’eqchi’ peasants, were killed. In the ’70s and ’80s, EXMIBAL vehicles were used for drive-by shootings targeting local civilians; at least one of them involved the police. In 1978, EXMIBAL employees and soldiers executed four people in the town of Panzós where, one month earlier, the military massacred Maya Q’eqchi’ peasants who were protesting over land claims. The full extent of EXMIBAL’s violence will likely never be known: “I, personally, know of even more cases that are not documented and are guarded under the seal of the confessional,” Daniel Vogt, a priest and then-director of a Maya Q’eqchi’ rights organization, told Skye’s COO in September 2006, in an email that came to light in the Canadian lawsuit. “What has remained is a history of pain and desperation.”

It was against this historical backdrop that Skye and the rechristened EXMIBAL, CGN, acquired a license to explore an area of 259 square kilometers that encompassed at least 19 Maya Q’eqchi’ settlements on December 13, 2004. The Canadian embassy in Guatemala had lent Skye a helping hand: “After months of negotiation, during which the Embassy played a strong supportive role, the Guatemalan Ministry of Energy and Mines has issued a 3 year exploration licence to Skye Resources,” a counselor from the Canadian embassy wrote to his colleagues on December 16, 2004, in a previously unreported email obtained by the women’s lawyers. “Any victory for responsible mining interests is a victory for Canadian investors.”

But Guatemala’s Constitutional Court would later rule that the license was granted illegally. The Guatemalan government did not consult the Indigenous people occupying or using the lands before granting the license, which it was required to do under the U.N.’s International Labour Organization Convention 169, or the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, to which Guatemala has been a signatory since the 1996 Peace Accords. The ILO found the license contravened Convention 169 in 2007, and the Constitutional Court came to the same conclusion on June 18, 2020.

“What has remained is a history of pain and desperation.”

Given this history, it was virtually inevitable that the exploration drilling in early 2005 would spark many conflicts between the companies and local communities, who alleged that CGN was encroaching on their land and destroying the environment, including by polluting their water supplies. Nevertheless, on April 17, 2006, Guatemala granted Skye and CGN another license — also later found to be invalid by the Constitutional Court — which allowed them to start mining.

In response to CGN’s increasingly active operations, five Maya Q’eqchi’ groups composed of about 300 families moved onto company-claimed land on September 17, 2006. They argued that they were reclaiming lands that INCO had stolen from them over 40 years ago. Over the next two months, these groups grew to nearly 1,000 families.

From the time these settlements were founded right up until the evictions in January 2007, which targeted some of these recent settlements but also another decades-old village, many people on both sides of the dispute urged the companies to resolve the standoff through dialogue, according to emails in the court documents.

“Any attempt to forcibly evict the villagers would end in tragedy,” Vogt, the priest, emailed Skye management on September 22, 2006. Just three days before the evictions, CGN’s own consultant emailed a company manager: “As we have already said, there will NEVER be a positive eviction.”

Even though Skye management stated that the “invasions” were not affecting operations, primarily because most of them were “not on essential project land,” Skye decided that if the villagers would not leave on their own, Skye and CGN would force them off.

“Keep the President Informed”

Two men from the town of El Estor were high up on a remote mountain when they say they saw about 50 people force their way onto CGN’s land on September 23, 2006. The village of Lote Ocho was now located on the land where this group had “enter[ed] by force,” indicating that Lote Ocho was another land occupation. Or at least, that’s what the men allege in affidavits that CGN filed in a Guatemalan court in the fall of 2006.

Those affidavits “falsely asserted that the affiants had personally witnessed members of the community of Lote Ocho using force to occupy their village when in fact the affiants had never been to Lote Ocho,” lawyers for the 11 women alleged in their own affidavit.

“This is important because these are the foundational documents that start everything,” said Cory Wanless, who, along with Murray Klippenstein, is representing the women in court. “It undermines the whole legal foundation of seeking an eviction in the first place.”

The two lawyers have been litigating this and two other cases against Hudbay (the company that bought Skye) since 2011. The lawsuits have garnered international coverage because they could set a precedent in making it easier to hold multinational corporations accountable in their home countries for wrongdoing abroad.

He argues that the affidavits that initiated the eviction proceedings are unreliable for a few reasons. Most importantly, Lote Ocho has been located in the same area for decades; it wasn’t settled on that day in September 2006, although several additional families did join Lote Ocho that month as part of the broader reclamation movement. And if 50 people entered the area “by force,” why were these two men — who just so happened to be passing by on top of a secluded mountain — the ones swearing the affidavits instead of a company employee against whom this group would presumably have had to exercise force?

The lawsuits could set a precedent, making it easier to hold multinational corporations accountable in their home countries for wrongdoing abroad.

While these affidavits appear highly implausible by themselves, they are also virtually identical to two other affidavits that CGN filed, each supposedly listing the names of the occupants of a different village that Skye and CGN wanted to evict. The affidavits recycle the same list of names, with only minor differences. Taken together, they assert that the same individuals simultaneously occupied three different settlements. Wanless thinks CGN filed these affidavits because, in Guatemala’s often dysfunctional courts, “that’s enough to get the job done.”

They did, in fact, get the job done, and Wanless may be right about why they worked. There is often a “lack of due diligence on the part of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and judicial authorities to investigate [land] disputes; eviction orders are often authorized after a superficial consideration of the facts,” states a 2008 Amnesty International submission to the U.N.

Many judges “just take into account the title that the private sector is presenting,” said Ramón Cadena, director of the Central American office of the International Commission of Jurists. This also facilitates “pressure by private-sector entities,” he said.

Despite the affidavits being accepted, CGN had trouble obtaining the eviction order for Lote Ocho. On December 1, 2006, Enrico, the Skye executive, emailed other senior management at the company an update.

“We’ll need pressure on the Puerto Barrios Judge,” he wrote. “We have this arranged.”

One week later, the judge granted the eviction order, according to the affidavit filed by the women’s lawyers.

But CGN soon had to clear another legal hurdle: The villagers and an Indigenous rights group, CONIC, had gone to court and requested an amparo — similar to an injunction — to temporarily prevent the impending evictions because they had not been notified of them. In late December, it seemed likely that they would be granted their request, which would have postponed the evictions for at least six months.

According to emails filed in court, CGN managers called their “contacts” at the Policía Nacional Civil, Guatemala’s national police, to see if the PNC could conduct the evictions ahead of schedule, before the amparo could be granted. However, the police replied that too many officers were on holiday. Additionally, “they said the order to speed up the execution of the orders will have to come from a very high level either the President or the Minister of the Interior,” Monzón wrote.

Monzón called Rodolfo Sosa, a CGN lawyer, who said he would try to speak to the Guatemalan president, Óscar Berger. Sosa and Berger were once partners in the same prestigious firm, and Sosa’s daughter is married to one of the president’s sons. Sosa could not reach Berger, however. So Monzón contacted his “friend,” the minister of defense, who also couldn’t help because of the vacationing officers.

Since those avenues were dead ends, CGN requested that the court let it weigh in during the legal proceedings that CONIC had initiated.

“We hope that with this actions [sic] we will be able to delay CONIC process for at least 2 weeks, which means the eviction orders will be executed within that period of time,” Monzón wrote. Enrico replied that it was important to keep Rodolfo Sosa informed of the “slowing strategy,” since “Rodolfo is our avenue to keep the President informed.”

This “slowing strategy” worked: The evictions took place before the amparo could be granted.

The emails show that Skye and CGN had woven themselves into a network of informal connections that they drew on while attempting to influence government officials. This illustrates how “collusion between business and the state” works in Guatemala, University of Oslo professor Mariel Aguilar-Støen told The Intercept. Aguilar-Støen co-authored a 2016 article that examined how local elites often participate in mining projects by, for example, working as company managers or lawyers, allowing the companies to exploit “the networks of contacts that the domestic elites control,” the article states. The way CGN leveraged its connections “is a very good example of how mining companies in particular operate and how they gain access to resources,” she said.

Black, Blue, and Green

CGN already had a preview of just how violent evictions could be. On the morning of November 12, 2006, a public prosecutor and about 60 police officers showed up at a Maya Q’eqchi’ settlement of approximately 30 families that was located across the road from CGN’s housing complex, on the outskirts of El Estor. The families had settled there early the previous morning, when it had been the scene of clashes with the PNC and CGN employees. An uneasy peace had reigned since later that morning, when government officials charged with resolving land disputes were said to have struck a tentative agreement with some leaders of the Maya Q’eqchi’ settlements that were established in September. But with the arrival of the prosecutor and the police, the situation soon spiraled out of control.

During the standoff that ensued, it became clear that the prosecutor did not have a judicial eviction order, which he argued was not necessary — but he was incorrect, according to a contemporary Amnesty International report that explains the legal process for conducting evictions in Guatemala. The priest Daniel Vogt and a partner apparently defused the tension enough that by midday, the families left with their supplies, but a clash erupted between the police and locals not long afterward, and later that day, the police fired tear gas into another settlement by CGN’s airstrip to evict its inhabitants. Then the police shot tear gas, without warning, into another settlement to evict some 200 families, according to a contemporary report by Vogt’s Maya Q’eqchi’ rights organization. During these skirmishes, goods were stolen and several people were injured, including a pregnant woman who had been engulfed in tear gas, the report states. Two people disappeared. The next afternoon, one of the missing people was found lying unconscious and badly beaten beside a trail. There were more skirmishes with the police that day.

About 20 people broke into CGN’s community relations center and a newly renovated but still-empty hospital and set the buildings on fire. Internal company correspondence reveals that this group was likely what company management called a “youth mob” that was “not related to the invaders.”

“Later on at night everything went back to normal-a military group was deployed to EE [El Estor] to safeguard our personnel,” reads a company email.

In response, a community relations consultant sent an email stating, “Having the military deployed as peacekeepers opens an area of risk for us – we need to make sure we create a clear distinction between company security forces and the military.”

Documents strongly suggest that the public security forces were paid large sums of money for their work in the evictions.

But that distinction was already very blurred, as is clear from an email sent on November 17, 2006, just days after the military’s deployment and the heavy-handed, unlawful evictions. CGN’s financial manager wrote to Skye’s chief financial officer: “We have paid to keep the invaders under control this week Q125,000,” which was approximately $16,447.37 at the time.

The money had covered the hotel rooms, meals, and gasoline of 125 PNC officers. CGN had also paid for the meals of about 65 soldiers who were sleeping in CGN’s cafeteria for security reasons.

The money for the police was transferred “to personal account [sic] who is working to coordinate these tasks,” wrote CGN’s financial manager.

The “personal account” likely belonged to one of at least several middlemen whom Skye and CGN had retained to take advantage of their connections to the PNC and military, according to the affidavit submitted by women’s lawyers. One middleman was a friend of the second-in-command of the PNC, and another was a disgraced colonel involved in a “powerful mafia ring in the army and police” in the 1990s, according to Latin American Digital Beat. From October 2006 until at least up through the evictions in January, the companies spent close to $140,000, and likely far more, in clandestine payments to these middlemen, who passed on nearly all of it to the security forces, according to numerous emails, bonus sheets, and spreadsheets entered into the court record.

While a lot of money went towards paying for logistical supplies, such as gasoline and lodging, certain documents strongly suggest that the public security forces were paid large sums of money for their work in the evictions themselves.

For example, a security and human rights audit that Skye requested states, “There are rumors of 1.2 million quetzals” — about $157,895 at the time — “funneled to the armed forces for their work in land evictions, when all that was officially agreed to was logistical support such as gasoline.” These rumors were pretty persuasive: “Based on the rumors of misused funds, the company fired the actors that instigated this type of activity,” the audit notes.

One spreadsheet shows “the total funding in cash” as of December 31, 2006, “for evictions.” It records payments for vaguely worded services like “funds invasions security.”

Legal experts have raised the possibility that just the payments for the logistical supplies violated Guatemalan and Canadian anti-corruption laws. Paying for the supplies of the public security forces amounts to bribing them, since Skye and CGN effectively bought a degree of influence over them, argued Guatemalan lawyer Verenice Jerez, who worked with CICIG, a now-disbanded United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission. “In this world, nothing is free,” she said. Alan Franklin, a Canadian corruption law expert who sometimes works with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, echoed what Jerez said. But Jennifer Quaid, another Canadian expert, said that it was unclear whether the payments ran afoul of the version of the relevant Canadian law that was in force at the time. No charges have been laid against either company for making them. Hudbay and CGN did not respond to written questions from The Intercept about the payments.

Regardless of whether any laws were broken, the companies were heavily involved in the planning and execution of the operations of the public security forces. This close working relationship extended up to the highest-ranking officers. In December 2006, CGN’s site manager “coordinated” with Rodolfo Sisniega-Otero, the son of a notorious general and a commander of the Brigada Guardia de Honor, an elite corps of military police. And one day before the alleged gang-rapes, one of CGN’s middlemen and Edin Palma, a PNC chief, went on a reconnaissance flyover of the “invaded areas.”

Skye and CGN management also participated in coordinating the on-the-ground activities of the rank-and-file police officers and soldiers who effectively worked as partners of CGN’s security. Photos show that shortly before the eviction on January 9, dozens of PNC trucks and vans stretched in a long row along the road outside of CGN’s compound, inside of which a white pickup truck carried men “in what appear to be army uniforms,” according to the affidavit filed by the 11 women’s lawyers. The public and private security forces gathered at CGN’s facilities “on the morning of each eviction, including the eviction on January 17,” the affadavit alleges. Photos also show CGN managers, their middlemen, and PNC officers having a meeting after the eviction of January 8, 2007. This was just one of the “pre-eviction planning sessions and post-eviction debriefs [that] were held in CGN’s offices,” the affidavit claims.

The armed, masked men who stormed into Lote Ocho as the rain poured and the wind gusted at 5 o’clock in the evening on January 17, 2007, only seemed to be distinguished by their uniforms. The uniforms were black, “the colour of the sky,” and “the colour of the trees,” the women say. Black, blue, and green: the outfits of the PNC, CGN security, and the army. Something else helped tell them apart: Two of the women who are literate say they saw CGN’s logo on the blue uniforms.

This distinction mattered little, however, since the three groups of men had allegedly already broken into smaller groups and teamed up when they attacked, according to the women’s depositions. Men from each force seized one pregnant woman who was making tortillas and dragged her into the bushes as her children cried and screamed, she testified. She described the men as a “dog when he comes and he finds some food and he’s growling.” It was all together that they gagged her, wrapped cloth around her eyes and ears, cut her clothes off with a machete, and raped her one after another in what was perhaps an intentional reenactment of the rapes that the military used as a tactic of terror against Maya women during the civil war. “They took off my clothing and they played with my life,” another woman said during her deposition. Men from all three groups splashed gasoline over the makeshift huts and the women’s tattered clothing and set them ablaze.

Irma Cac, one of the woman who was allegedly gang-raped, cried while speaking in Toronto in September 2019 after attending a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit. “I will never forget,” she said, “it will never escape from my eyes — the color of the uniforms of the soldiers, of the police, and of the private security.”

Update, September 26, 2020, 3:45 p.m.
This article has been updated to include that Murray Klippenstein is also representing the 11 women.

The post How a Canadian Mining Company Infiltrated the Guatemalan State appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s not an appropriate use of our jobs as paramedics,” he told The Intercept, in his first interview since the lawsuit was filed on August 17, in the District Court of Minnesota. In Woodbury, the police, EMS, and firefighters all collaborate as part of the city’s Public Safety Department.

The lawsuit also addresses several alleged instances of falsified EMS training credentials that Baker claims to have found among former colleagues in the department.

Baker said he felt pushed out of his job after refusing to administer ketamine in an incident in September 2019. Prior to that, he had to give ketamine injections on three other occasions as part of Woodbury EMS and recalled a trigger-happy mentality in the department around the drug.

“The dispatchers would say: Get your ketamine ready, bring your ketamine,” he said. His lawsuit claims that the “symbiotic relationship between EMS and police officers has created room for police officers to coerce paramedics like Plaintiff Baker to administer Ketamine on unwilling subjects.”

“If a ruling like this comes from Minnesota, establishing that it is unlawful for paramedics to be coerced to use sedatives, all cops will think twice about this.”

Baker’s is the first whistleblower complaint in the country to directly address ketamine-induced sedation in policing. There is not yet strong national data on ketamine use in police arrests, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon. In Minnesota’s Hennepin County — which includes Minneapolis and is adjacent to Washington County, which includes Woodbury — a civilian oversight board conducted a sweeping report on “Pre-Hospital Sedation” in 2018 and found that ketamine use by the Minneapolis Police Department had sharply increased in just a few years. Before 2015, there were an average of about four mentions of ketamine per year in police reports of detainees, but in 2017, there were 62. (Minneapolis’s Deputy Police Chief Art Knight told The Intercept that since the report came out, police leadership had been informally recommending all officers in the force not to request sedatives from paramedics, though he was not sure how strict officers’ compliance has been since then.) The most high-profile ketamine-related incident to date is the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black massage therapist, in Colorado last year. Officers placed him in a chokehold during his arrest and then injected him with a very large dose of ketamine, which rapidly led him into cardiac arrest. He died a few days later in a hospital.

Kenneth Udoibok, a Minneapolis-based lawyer who specializes in police brutality and is representing Baker, said his case could set a precedent in conceptualizing ketamine-induced sedation as a kind of excessive force. Usually, Udoibok said, “the actual victims of ketamine injections cannot make a strong case.” Police officers outsource the injections to paramedics, and paramedics can plausibly claim that arrestees were being “belligerent” or that they presented “safety concerns,” he explained. “What’s different now is that someone on the other side has come forward.”

“There are so many instances across the country now of police officers pressuring paramedics to administer ketamine,” said Udoibok. “If a ruling like this comes from Minnesota, establishing that it is unlawful for paramedics to be coerced to use sedatives, all cops will think twice about this.”

Baker resigned from his post at Woodbury EMS in December, after about 18 months on the job. He now lives in the suburb of Inver Grove Heights with his wife and daughter and works as a paramedic for a private health services company in Minneapolis. He grew up in Maryland and became a volunteer emergency medicine technician when he was 16, he said, speaking from his home via Zoom. Baker served in the military as a police officer from 2007 to 2012, including a deployment in Baghdad from 2009 to 2010. After the military, he went back to school for emergency medical care.

Coincidentally, one of the assignments he completed for his bachelor’s degree from Eastern Kentucky University last year was writing up a protocol for “Continuous Communication and De-escalation during Behavioral Emergencies.” Thus, Baker has been somewhat unusually focused on deescalation as a way to deal with detained people and patients, which he said put him in conflict with the workplace culture of the Woodbury EMS and the Woodbury police.

“As a military police officer, they referred to deescalation as ‘verbal judo,’” he said. “It sounds cliché, but my ability to communicate is my most powerful weapon. I can convince people to communicate about 90 percent of the time.” He said he tries to humanize himself to excitable patients by talking about his family or bringing up light topics like sports. “I was also aware that my uniform was very similar to that of a police officer, which is inherently stressful, especially to patients with mental illness,” he added.

When Baker responded to a call on September 22, 2019,  according to the lawsuit,Sgt. Tom Ehrenberg and other police officers pressured Baker to administer ketamine. Baker said in an interview that the man being detained clearly had a mental illness but that he also did not resist any directives to a degree that seemed to require sedation. “He was on his feet and complied with all the officer’s orders … and even had a conversation with me about the Vikings,” Baker recalled. He refused to sedate him, and the man was eventually released.

“I was also aware that my uniform was very similar to that of a police officer, which is inherently stressful, especially to patients with mental illness.”

“You shouldn’t just jump to sedation because there are plenty of situations where people will appear combative or disordered, but they are actually hypoxic, or their blood sugar is low,” said Baker. “Ketamine is especially concerning because when you administer it, it takes away the patient’s ability to cooperate with you. And we should be giving patients every opportunity to cooperate.”

That day, said Baker, Ehrenberg waited for him at the station and berated him for not cooperating with the request.

Baker soon felt pressure to leave his post. He was placed on a “progressive improvement plan” in November, which he was told was in response to his “insubordination,” and it included a list of check-ins and behavioral interventions that were to continue for an indefinite period of time. He decided to quit instead.

His lawsuit names the city of Woodbury, as well as the city’s fire chief and two EMS commanders. Attorneys for the city told The Intercept that “with regard to the administration of any medications, such as ketamine, a medical professional determines whether the intervention is medically warranted under the circumstances. No employee of the City of Woodbury improperly administered any such medications. Mr. Baker was never disciplined or subject to retaliation and we categorically deny the allegations in the complaint.”

Ketamine, a synthetic drug discovered in 1962, is a fast-acting general anesthetic that is typically used in humans as a sedative before surgeries. It has been marketed in the U.S. as an anesthetic for both humans and animals since the 1970s, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and is also used recreationally for its dissociative effects. Its side effects include severe confusion, hallucinations, loss of bladder control, and shallow breathing. In a 2017 medical study conducted by several Twin Cities doctors on “ketamine as primary therapy for prehospital profound agitation,” 57 percent of the patients had to get intubated after their ketamine injection. A 2016 study comparing ketamine to haloperidol, an antipsychotic medication also used to treat delirium, found that complications occurred in 49 percent of patients receiving ketamine, compared to only 5 percent for the haloperidol group. It concluded that while ketamine is a faster-acting sedative, it is “associated with more complications and a higher intubation rate.”

“Of course there are other, less intrusive drugs, but ketamine is fast-acting and powerful,” said Udoibok. “And it has been heavily marketed both to paramedics and law enforcement.”

The typical dose of ketamine is based on a person’s weight, explained Baker. “The rule of thumb is 5 mg per kilogram of bodyweight, so you typically start at 250 mg and give more doses if needed.” It is usually delivered as an intramuscular shot to the butt or forearm. But it’s possible to go overboard, said Baker. Elijah McClain, for instance, who was roughly 140 pounds, immediately received a 500 mg shot and incurred a heart attack shortly thereafter.

“I’m not anti-ketamine,” said Baker. “There are a few situations where it is appropriate, like where a patient is actively trying to get out of restraints. … But even still, many other sedatives that are available, like Ativan, don’t run such a high risk of people going unconscious or dissociating.”

“The City of Woodbury allowed the custom of stifling any form of reporting wrongdoings by employees at the EMS, no matter the context.”

Beyond the ketamine incident, part of Baker’s whistleblower lawsuit deals with a number of falsified credentials he found among his colleagues, which he claims threaten public safety. After Baker signed up to give refresher emergency medicine courses last year, he alleges in his lawsuit, he learned that other emergency medicine certifications obtained by several of his colleagues had misleading attendance records behind them. Meaning that people got their credentials — which allowed them to receive higher salaries —without actually attending all the required classes, which violates a Minnesota statute. He escalated the complaint to his superiors but said it was “swept under the rug” for months. (The city of Woodbury’s attorney said that a review had been conducted and concluded “no training records were falsified and Mr. Baker’s complaints were properly addressed.”) An email provided to The Intercept between Baker’s colleagues, dated November 2019, shows that Baker was placed on a punitive progressive improvement plan in response to his “being a ‘whistle blower’ for the EMS education matter.’”

Udoibok connects the two parts of the lawsuit as part of a general “climate of cutting corners” at the EMS that ranges from improper certifications to overzealous calls for sedation. “The City of Woodbury,” per the lawsuit, “allowed the custom of stifling any form of reporting wrongdoings by employees at the EMS, no matter the context.”

So far, Baker has been pleasantly surprised by the reception from his previous colleagues at Woodbury EMS. “I thought I was going to get pushback, but it’s the reverse,” he said. “So many people have messaged me and said thank you for speaking out.”

Update: Aug. 25, 2020, 4:48 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to clarify Baker’s perspective on the likelihood of a ketamine injection resulting in an overdose.

The post Minnesota Paramedic Speaks Out Against Police Use of Ketamine Injections appeared first on The Intercept.

A year and a half earlier, on a spring afternoon, she was walking along Morris Avenue in the Fordham area on her way to pick up her son from school. Two narcotics officers suddenly approached, demanding to see her hands. When Gonzalez complied, they cuffed her, frisked her, and put her into a waiting police van. She remembers panicking to the point of hyperventilating because no one would tell her what was happening. Several months pregnant, she was dizzy and dehydrated by the time they unloaded her at the 46th Precinct, but officers ignored her when she pleaded for medical attention. Instead, she was subjected to a full-body cavity search. “I didn’t even know what that was and had to have an officer explain it to me,” she said in an interview this spring.

Hours passed before Gonzalez learned the charges were for possession and sale of a controlled substance — a “handshake” transaction that an undercover officer alleged to have spotted minutes before the arrest occurred. Given that she neither did drugs nor sold them, she was shocked when police sent her to Central Booking, where she would remain for two more days “caged like an animal,” she said. Four months and numerous court appearances later, the criminal case against her was dismissed. “It was terrifying,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

While killings by police attract significant public attention, a steady tide of nonfatal but abusive police encounters, often involving the same officers year after year, pile up in state and federal court dockets. They reveal disdain for fundamental civil liberties and cost millions of public dollars. The Bronx is full of people with no charges against them who the city has paid because they’ve been abused by police. The anger spilling into the streets in protests against police brutality this summer is grounded in a history of poisoned encounters and deep impunity.

An examination of settlements against the NYPD in the Bronx reveals a pattern of routine violence and harassment: false arrests, warrantless searches, frequent use of strip searches, denial of medical attention, physical abuse, lewd conduct, and arrests without probable cause. In almost all cases, the criminal charges precipitating the arrests were dropped.

The detectives named in Gonzalez’s still-pending lawsuit against the city, Jodi Brown and Irie Humphrey, have racked up a taxpayer tab of at least $1.3 million in city payouts. The lawsuit was Brown’s fourth in 2019, and Humphrey’s third between May and November 2019. In fact, Brown is one of New York’s most frequently sued cops, the subject of at least 30 lawsuits.

He’s hardly alone. Month in, month out, year after year, the city settles cases involving routine police brutality and misconduct over incidents that never become major news. The same officers’ names appear again and again. In the Bronx, city data shows that nearly 190 cops were named in at least five lawsuits between 2015 and 2019, and 11 others have been the subject of over 10 civil claims each. The settlement amounts aren’t headline-grabbing — $9,000 here, $40,000 there — but they add up.

An examination of settlements against the NYPD in the Bronx reveals a pattern of routine violence and harassment.

Public records show that New York City paid out more than $30 million in 2019 to plaintiffs in the Bronx who filed their cases alleging police misconduct between 2015 and 2019. That’s 45 percent of the approximately $67 million city taxpayers shelled out to cover such complaints against cops citywide that year. Overall, for lawsuits filed between the latter half of 2015 and first half of 2020, taxpayers paid out nearly nearly $250 million to people in all five boroughs.

These figures don’t even account for the full magnitude of the cost of allegations of mistreatment by the NYPD, thanks to the opaque way the city reports these numbers. New York City’s Law Department releases the data in increments that show settlements for claims filed in a given five-year period. Earlier claims may also have settled during that time, but they don’t show up in the data. The data also does not include settlements reached without going to court. According to the Comptroller’s Office, the city paid $21.8 million in prelitigation settlements on police misconduct claims in fiscal year 2019 alone.

These are the findings of an investigation by Lehman College journalism students, including the authors of this piece, who spent the spring digging through public records of the New York state court system, data released under a Freedom of Information Act request, a database of federal lawsuits constructed by the Legal Aid Society, and calling plaintiffs and attorneys. The investigation focused on the Bronx, but similar cases play out in each of the boroughs.

“The NYPD has a robust civil lawsuit monitoring program that includes a serious legal review of an officers’ litigation history,” Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Not all lawsuits filed for money have legal merit. The ones that do can be valuable tools we use to improve officer performance and enhance training or policy where necessary.”

For advocates, however, the repeat payouts show a complete lack of consequences. “It’s no surprise that so many of them are repeatedly accused of excessive force or covering up a false arrest. The first time they do it, they’re not held accountable, so they do it again,” said Darius Charney, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

On the morning of May 29, 2015, NYPD officers smashed through the front door of an apartment in the Fordham neighborhood in the West Bronx. Charging into the first bedroom, they trained guns and flashlights on its shocked occupant — a frail woman in her mid-50s — and ordered her to “get the fuck on the floor.”

That woman, Luz Arbelaez, had lived on that floor for 23 years. It was where she’d raised four children after fleeing political violence in Colombia, and it was where she’d done her best to keep them out of trouble despite the gang activity plaguing their neighborhood. Now grown, three of her kids had recently moved back home to care for their mother after she was hit by a car earlier in the year. None of this, however, mattered to the officers growing impatient as Arbelaez struggled to get out of bed. According to a complaint the family filed in court, one of the officers grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the living room and exclaimed, “Make way for the drug addict!”

In another bedroom, her daughter Deborah was ordered out of bed wearing nothing but a T-shirt, Deborah said in the complaint. Two officers made rude, leering comments while she scrambled to find her underwear. Then she was handcuffed next to her mother in the living room, sobbing uncontrollably.

According to the complaint, Luz’s sons Sebastian and Pablo were similarly accosted, cuffed, and shoved face-down on the floor while detectives ransacked their room, demanding to know where the drugs were hidden. After their bedroom was tossed and the curtains torn down, both young men were aggressively strip-searched in front of a bare window. While the family sat for two hours in the front room enduring ridicule and threats, Sebastian and Pablo’s clothing was yanked from the closet and bureaus, dumped in a pile, and doused with bleach and cornstarch. When Luz began to show signs of medical distress, shaking and appearing faint, Sebastian pleaded with officers to get his mother’s seizure medication. Luz was only allowed to take the pills after she began to shake so violently, she started falling off the couch.

In many of these cases,  the city admits no wrongdoing on the part of the police — a standard feature of such settlements.

Police said the raid was based on a tip about drug dealing in the apartment, but in the end, according to court documents, it turned up nothing. Yet Luz, Sebastian, and Pablo were all arrested and marched into a waiting police van. Unsecured and still handcuffed, the family says they were jostled and thrown about as the vehicle was driven to the location of other raids before arriving at the 48th Precinct, where Luz was searched and spent several hours in a cell; her sons were sent to Central Booking. They spent approximately 20 hours in custody.

All of the charges were eventually dismissed. There was no evidence of illegal activity found in the family’s apartment. Four years later, this past January, the city of New York agreed to settle the Arbelaezes’ civil rights lawsuit, although the family says most of the money was eaten up by legal fees.

Attorney Marc Cannan, who represented the family through two years of litigation and delays, called their experience “horrific,” describing it as one of the most shocking cases he’s handled due to the “sheer nastiness” of the cops’ behavior. Sebastian Arbelaez, now 32, said he still startles awake around 5 a.m. every morning, instinctively listening for the sounds of cops creeping into his building. “When you live in a neighborhood like mine and hear your door being kicked down at some crazy hour, you just assume it must be criminals breaking in,” he said, “not the police, who are supposed to be protecting you from that kind of stuff.”

But similar incidents have played out in many other settlements. In another 2015 raid, officers handcuffed Dahiana Capellan in her underwear and went through her phone, laughing and making lewd remarks. They found a gun in another bedroom in the apartment and arrested her; she spent nearly 43 hours in custody before being released on bail. After a few months, the case was dismissed, and two years later the city of New York paid her $40,000. Ryan Coleman, who settled with the city for $9,000 in December 2017, was denied his seizure medicine when officers arrested him after he recorded a plainclothes police officer speeding in the wrong direction on a Bronx street. He was held for approximately 32 hours before a judge released him. About an hour after his release, he had a seizure.

In many of these cases,  the city admits no wrongdoing on the part of the police — a standard feature of such settlements.

As much as the city is spending to pay out victims of police abuse, City Hall sees the situation as an improvement.

“Over the last several years, we’ve seen a reduction in the number of lawsuits brought against officers,” said Law Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci. According to Paolucci, some of the downward trend in civil claims since 2017 is a result of the department’s partnership with the NYPD on litigation matters in recent years, which has led to “improved fact-finding, filing more motions to dismiss,” and lower settlement amounts, he added.

But police reform advocates say the city still has a significant problem. “We are hemorrhaging money from the cost of these lawsuits,” said civil rights attorney Juan Cartagena, president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. “We’re talking multiple millions spent every year on police misconduct, and a lot of it’s the same cops repeating the same offenses — and no one’s doing anything about it.”

“We’re talking multiple millions spent every year on police misconduct, and a lot of it’s the same cops repeating the same offenses.”

Early on in his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a mission to get a handle on the onslaught of suits against the NYPD. In 2015, he promised to allocate additional funding to the Law Department to defend police officers against “frivolous” lawsuits. The city’s budget for fiscal year 2016 included $3.2 million in funding for this purpose, enough to hire 40 more people, tasked with fending off meritless claims and helping the unit take more cases to trial.

Attorney Samuel DePaola, who is representing Shakeima Gonzalez and has handled dozens of other similar cases, finds the city’s claim about frivolous lawsuits laughable. A former assistant district attorney in the Kings County District Attorney’s Office from 2011 to 2014, DePaola said it’s the city that chooses to settle with his clients before they go to trial, adding that he’d be happy to meet them in court. “I’ll take my chances going up against the work of these officers any day of the week,” he said.

Attorneys who battle the Law Department say that the city’s lawyers are often in the dark about what really happened in a case. They too have to wait for discovery materials from the NYPD, which often reveal officers’ underlying conduct to be more egregious than they initially anticipated.

For DePaola, turning over those stones again and again has revealed some root causes of misbehavior within the police force’s ranks. There is an incentive to be aggressive with arrests, he said, because the most “active” officers are also the most rewarded. “They’re getting raises basically based on the amount of arrests they make, regardless of whether they are ‘good arrests,’” he said. “These officers have so little supervision, no oversight, no accountability — it’s their own heart of darkness in the NYPD. They do whatever they want.”

Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, said that there is a culture of covering up for bad behavior. “If it’s known that a particular officer at a precinct has five lawsuits pending, they’re not going to stage an intervention. What they’re going to do is assign his next bad arrest to a different officer,” she said.

Transparency about police behavior is key to accountability, Wong said, and New York took a step in that direction in June when Gov. Andrew Cuomo repealed 50-a, a law that had shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from examination. The NYPD police union has fought the repeal in court, and a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order preventing the city from releasing information. ProPublica, however, recently published a cache of city-dwellers’ complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board obtained thanks to the repeal. The accounts of abuse by officers echo many found in lawsuits against the city.

Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was lead counsel in the landmark 2013 class-action suit that successfully challenged stop-and-frisk, the NYPD’s policy of aggressively stopping and searching young, mostly Black and brown men. He said that it is frustrating that there hasn’t been more progress under de Blasio, given that his time in office has directly coincided with federal monitoring of the NYPD’s court-ordered reform process. “We’re just not seeing meaningful change of policing on the street,” he said.

The idea that the city ended stop-and-frisk and turned a corner is an unfortunate misconception, according to Cartagena from LatinoJustice. He said the practice still happens in the Bronx, along with a host of other discriminatory policing practices that lead to settlements each year.

“I just feel like with what happened to me and what I still see happening around the neighborhood, someone is going to die.”

“It’s almost as if the cost of doing business is racial profiling and that it’s a cost the city is willing to tolerate,” Cartagena said. “They seem to think that the money we pay out in damages, as taxpayers, is worth it. But what they’re not accounting for is the other cost: a loss of confidence in the police and an erosion in police-community relations.”

That’s precisely how Shakeima Gonzalez feels. In fact, her terror of local cops has steadily grown since taking them to court. Last October, just weeks after she filed her lawsuit alleging a false arrest, it happened again — different officers, same deal. While running midday errands, Gonzalez said she was stopped, frisked, assaulted, whisked into a police vehicle, and eventually shipped to Central Booking without being informed of her rights or the crime she’d allegedly committed. This time, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute her.

And this time, Gonzalez didn’t wait a year to file suit; as of this month, she and DePaola, her attorney, have two cases against NYPD officers entering the discovery phase in the Bronx Supreme Court. Gonzalez said her weariness with the situation has hardened into anger, strengthening her will to fight back — and not only for her own sake, she added. “I just feel like with what happened to me and what I still see happening around the neighborhood, someone is going to die.”

Kayla Beltran, Marcus Diego, Ana Garcia, Fernando Murcia, Maya Persaud, Genesis Ramos, Jhonny Reyes Castro, Lester Robinson, and Ruth Sandram contributed reporting for this article. The work was conducted as part of a class project at Lehman College – CUNY under professor Eileen Markey.

The post Lawsuits Show the High Cost of NYPD Abuse in the Bronx appeared first on The Intercept.

Martínez was one of the hundreds of noncitizens serving federal sentences at the privately-run Taft Correctional Institution in California who were moved to the North Lake in March and April as Taft prepared to close down. The Intercept previously reported that North Lake had not been prepared for the influx, and the California transfers — none of whom were sick with the coronavirus prior to the move — were thrust into harm’s way.

Both facilities were part of a secretive web of federal prisons that are overseen by the Bureau of Prisons but operated by private contractors. Called Criminal Alien Requirement prisons, or CARs, they hold only non-U.S. citizens who could be deported at the end of their sentences. They are not ICE detention, but often have ICE annexes and personnel that take custody of people as they finish their time, and they are the only privately run BOP prisons. For North Lake, the operator is the GEO Group, a publicly traded detention firm and one of the two largest such companies in the United States. These prisons often escape scrutiny, falling as they do between the immigration and criminal justice spheres. Deaths of immigrants held in CARs don’t show up in ICE statistics, and the coronavirus crisis in these facilities has been little-noted.

Interviews with Martínez’s cellmate and others at the facility, his family members, and relevant documents show that for Martínez, the decision to move him to North Lake was part of a pattern of mismanagement and negligence that ultimately cost him his life. First his symptoms were barely treated, and then, as he lay gasping for air in his cell, fellow inmates say a nurse and guard were much too slow to call for help. As another person incarcerated at North Lake, Omar Jdaitawai, put it: “Believe me, if they take care of business, he’s still alive today.”

This business was the drug business, which he had fallen into after unsuccessful efforts to enter a more mainstream field. Elaine attributes this to Martínez’s undiagnosed ADD and depression, growing up in poverty, and the chronic lack of opportunity afforded an Afro-Latino in Cuba, where his great passion had been folkloric dance. He had done time on state charges before being arrested by DEA agents for federal possession of crack cocaine in March 2018.

The arrest hit particularly hard because Martínez had a son who was seven at the time, whose mother was also incarcerated. The boy lived with his maternal grandmother, but Martínez had been caring for him a few days a week. “He felt that the worst thing about getting put in prison was that he lost that connection with his son. He didn’t care about himself, he felt remorse for that,” said Elaine. “He was swearing that this would never happen again.”

“Before I could even write the letter, he was dead.”

Once it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic was a dire threat to people in jails in prisons, and particularly older individuals, Elaine and Martínez’s adult daughter, Feliz, decided they were going to try to have him released on humanitarian grounds. His public defender, Elaine said, “wanted me to write a letter to the judge and say that with his age and his health” – Martínez had a heart condition — “he was going to die if he didn’t get out of there. Before I could even write the letter, he was dead.”

At Taft, the prison in California, Martínez had seemed in good shape and good spirits; his acquaintances there recall a gregarious man focused on turning his life around in the time he had left. “Everything was perfect with Mr. Martínez, but as soon as we got here” – to North Lake — “maybe a week and a half, two weeks, we pretty much all got sick,” said Javier Miranda, who knew him at Taft.

Like several others who exhibited Covid-19 symptoms, Martínez was taken to a separate unit where people were monitored and given temperature checks, though very little in the way of treatment. At one point, his condition worsened so rapidly that he was taken to the hospital, but after about a week and a half, according to his former cellmate Roberto Guerrero, he was brought back to general population, without having been definitively told whether he had the virus or not.

“He said they wouldn’t tell him anything, they did the test but wouldn’t say whether he had it. … They took him to the sick area, they called it quarantine, where they took everyone who got sick, but he was telling me all they gave him was Tylenol and told him to drink water,” Guerrero said.

“When he came back, a blind man would see he is still sick,” said Jdaitawai, who had also known Martínez at Taft.

In a note written to GEO staff and dated April 22, about three weeks after the move to North Lake and almost a month before his death, Martínez wrote that he was having “alergy unusual dry nose, pain … suffering with strong pain and my left and right lum I see blood and my spits. … I need to see the doctor soon is possible I need helps to brifts.”

“He called me before he passed, about a week, and said, ‘Everything hurts on my body, everything hurts and I can’t eat, I haven’t eaten in a week.’ His voice was horrid,” said Elaine. “He was sick, sick, sick. He said, ‘I’m not ready to die.’”

In the early afternoon of May 18, Martínez was using the bathroom when he began to have trouble drawing breath. Guerrero, his cellmate, noticed and called out for help. A guard arrived quickly, followed by a nurse. That’s when things started going wrong. The nurse was attempting to get Guerrero to translate her questions to Spanish as Martínez yelled raggedly that he couldn’t breathe. After a little while, the nurse and the guard attempted to carry him over to his cot, but instead they dropped him on the floor, where he started losing consciousness.

According to Guerrero, it was about 10 minutes before additional emergency medical personnel were called. He estimated that a total of about 45 minutes elapsed between the first calls for help and when Martínez was taken away to the hospital. “For me, it was an act of medical negligence, and I’ve told the authorities,” he told The Intercept. “The reaction that I witnessed was very slow, as if they didn’t know what to do.”

Two others who witnessed the incident backed up Guerrero’s account of a significant time lag between when the nurse and guard showed up and when Martínez was carried out on a stretcher, unresponsive.

After Martínez ’s death, GEO Group staff gave misleading information about what had taken place. Guerrero said he was told that Martínez had died en route to Cadillac Hospital, about a 45-minute drive from North Lake. He and others also said prison personnel subsequently claimed Martínez had died from cardiac arrest. “They came back here to clear themselves, said, ‘We did everything in our power to keep him alive, but we lost him, and he didn’t have coronavirus,’” said Jdaitawai.

Elaine said she was told something similar: “The Bureau of Prisons people said, ‘Oh, we took such good care of him.’ They said he had cardiac arrest.”

However, in response to queries from The Intercept, the Mid Michigan Medical Examiner Group — which serves as the chief medical examiner for several counties including Lake County, where North Lake is located — issued a letter clarifying that Martínez had died inside the prison infirmary as a result of “[b]ilateral pulmonary thromboemboli associated with COVID-19.”

Martínez’s death was part of a larger culture of indifference to the health of the men incarcerated at North Lake.

A spokesperson for the GEO Group referred detailed questions to the BOP, which did not respond. Donald Emerson, who was the warden of the prison at the time and informed Martínez’s family of his death, declined to comment when reached by phone. According to sources inside and outside the prison, Emerson was fired sometime in late July. His replacement, longtime former BOP official Angela P. Dunbar, has been named in various lawsuits filed by people under her supervision, including for medical neglect in a prison she oversaw. (Dunbar could not be reached for comment.)

What is clear is that Martínez’s death was not a fluke but part of a larger culture of indifference to the health of the men incarcerated at North Lake. The Intercept is aware of at least one other coronavirus-related death at the facility, and several men inside described similarly lethargic response times to all sorts of medical problems. One described having had a splitting headache for hours one evening and being ignored as he called for help; medical staff only responded when he started vomiting, at around 3 a.m. Another had an arm fracture that was not being addressed. Guerrero said he had been waiting weeks to receive surgery for a rare condition called paraphimosis, which is considered a medical emergency that can cause permanent damage to the penis if left untreated.

About two weeks ago, other Taft transfers organized a hunger strike to protest the medical treatment as well as spoiled and irregular meals, lack of privacy, and some other issues. There were apparently some minor concessions, and it’s possible that Emerson’s dismissal had something to do with the complaints. Yet many don’t expect the conditions that led to Martínez’s death and the rapid spread of disease to fundamentally change. “Because you are not American citizen, they don’t give a heck about us,” said Jdaitawai. “They just have to get the money, and that’s it. Meanwhile, whatever is going to happen to us, let it happen.”

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“Looks like we’re dodging a bullet,” Mesa Verde warden Nathan Allen wrote in an email on July 2.

If new detainees continued to arrive at Mesa Verde, and people inside continued to test positive for Covid-19, ICE would have no choice but to limit street arrests or release detainees to make room for people to isolate.

But only if people were tested.

On May 27, Russell Hott, acting assistant director for ICE custody management, sent out a document outlining ICE’s new nationwide Covid-19 testing plan.

In response, San Francisco ICE field director David Jennings suggested that Mesa Verde be exempt. “Hi – we submitted some concerns about being a test place,” Jennings wrote in an email to Hott. “We have no place to cohort anyone who refuses, is positive, etc – were we Removed from the list?”

Hott reassured Jennings. “Henry [Lucero] backed away from the full testing,” he wrote back. Lucero is ICE’s executive associate director for enforcement and removal.

Internal emails released as part of a lawsuit against ICE show that the agency and GEO Group officials could have tested everyone in Mesa Verde for Covid-19 but chose not to, knowing that to make room for positive cases to isolate, they would need to drastically reduce the total number of people held in the facility. (The emails were first reported by the Los Angeles Times.)

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered ICE officials to rapidly test everyone held at Mesa Verde on weekly basis and to stop taking new detainees. ICE brought more people into Mesa Verde than it freed during the week of July 27, according to the legal coalition suing the federal government over conditions in the facility.

“Completing the testing is not the issue it is just what we will need to do with the results.”

Bree Bernwanger, a senior attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is part of the suit, said testing would interfere with ICE’s mission of detention and deportation. “ICE does not want to test, didn’t test, and, essentially, stuck its head in the sand, because they didn’t want to release people from detention,” Bernwanger said.

ICE and GEO Group both declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Mesa Verde, which currently holds about 120 people, has just two medical isolation cells. Both are regularly filled with detainees on suicide watch and in protective custody, according to emails between ICE officials.

Officials feared that broad testing would reveal positive Covid-19 cases which the facility was not equipped to handle, so they preferred to avoid testing altogether, emails show.

ICE had already nixed a proposal to test all detainees in Mesa Verde because they had nowhere to put people who tested positive, Brooke Sanchez Othon, a clinical specialist at Wellpath, a health care contractor with ICE, wrote in a July 6 email. Comprehensive testing in the facility would create “housing issues,” she said. “Completing the testing is not the issue it is just what we will need to do with the results once they are received.”

Mesa Verde would be unable to isolate more than one person who tested positive, warned ICE Assistant Field Office Director Alexander Pham. “If/when a second positive case is identified,” Pham wrote in a June 4 email, “there will likely be no logistical way to cohort/isolate which would then require the clearance of an entire housing unit/dorm in order to accommodate the positive case cohorts.”

“Clearance” meant letting people go — something ICE had been reluctant to do. If Mesa Verde was required to implement widespread testing, the facility would have to release “low risk” detainees and halt new arrests to make room for quarantined detainees, Pham wrote in an email on May 27. “If our hand is forced,” he wrote, they’d have to “let the lows go and don’t take anymore in.”

A week later, GEO Group sent out a plan for comprehensive Covid-19 testing. Pham explained in an email that the plan would ultimately force ICE to release large numbers of detainees from Mesa Verde.

ICE could “identify the least egregious cases for release,” to make room for a designated isolation dorm which could hold everyone who tested positive, Pham wrote in the June 4 email. But if a “less egregious” detainee tested positive, ICE would be unable to release anyone in their cohort, he explained. Mesa Verde officials would instead have to release an estimated 25 to 40 of the “more egregious” detainees.

ICE knew testing and isolating for Covid-19 would disrupt the process of detention and deportation. On May 26, Nathan Allen, the GEO Group warden, wrote that the acting field office director “would rather not have staff testing” because it could interfere with Enforcement and Removal Operations, ICE’s deportation program.

“They decided not to do broad and regular testing, because they didn’t want to have to deal with the truth.”

“ICE’s priority is containing people and deporting them,” Bernwanger said. “They refuse to take actions to protect people in their custody from Covid-19, because doing so would prevent them from continuing to detain and deport people.”

Covid-19 cases have spiked at Mesa Verde this week: According to Bernwanger, 10 detainees and 16 staff members have tested positive so far and two of four dorms are still awaiting results. Advocates say the true number of infected people is likely higher than ICE statistics reveal.

In a collective letter written August 6, people detained in Mesa Verde wrote that as recently as last week, ICE continued to transfer people into the facility, “straight from prisons with massive COVID-19 outbreaks, without being quarantined or even tested for the virus,” they wrote. “Dozens of people in our dorms are showing symptoms of COVID-19, and are desperate for care.”

ICE and GEO “knew that if they didn’t do testing, Covid-19 would be likely to spread,” Sean Riordan, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California and one of the lead attorneys on the case, said in an interview. “And yet, they decided not to do broad and regular testing, because they didn’t want to have to deal with the truth.”

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But Covid-19 was something else.

“This is probably the worst breathing issue that I’ve ever had,” Rodriguez said. The virus spread to her lungs and caused pneumonia, which sent her to the hospital. “It’s like you’re just struggling so bad. Just to get a good full breath of air.”

Covid-19 hit her family this June, spreading quickly from her older brother, to her sister and her young child, to her dad and then finally to Rodriguez. She got the worst of it.

Respiratory illnesses are no stranger to the Latino communities who live around California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea. Asthma rates here are some of the highest in California, with air quality routinely failing to meet federal and state standards. Thanks in part to the state’s omnipresent water wars, the water in this desolate, former vacation destination is rapidly drying up, salinating the lake, and releasing decades-old contaminants into the air.

The community already beset by an environmental disaster is now facing a pandemic of the worst proportions. Residents and activists, who have long fought for more funding and pollution mitigation, say the area was already at a steep disadvantage for health care. Now the largely agrarian community has found itself in the middle of a perfect storm of environmental neglect, poverty, and the coronavirus.

As Covid-19 cases resurge across the U.S., the numbers have been stark in the Golden State. Heralded for fast-moving lockdowns that helped thwart maxed-out hospitals at the beginning of the crisis, California is now breaking single-day case records.

The communities near the Salton Sea are some of the state’s hardest hit. To the north, the Eastern Coachella Valley has the largest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any of Riverside County’s districts — and Riverside has the second highest number of Covid-19 cases in the state, aside from Los Angeles. Across the lake to the south, adjacent Imperial County has also emerged as a Covid-19 hotspot, with the highest death rate in California. The main hospital there is so overrun, they’ve turned to using portable military-style tents in the triple-digit heat. Nearly all admitted patients are suffering from Covid-19.

“Covid is a leech. It thrives in these conditions, that’s why you’ve seen the spike here.”

“Covid is a leech. It thrives in these conditions, that’s why you’ve seen the spike here,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, a veteran environmental justice group based in Imperial Valley. “We experience it everyday. People are dying, getting sick, and having permanent scarring.”

Oasis and Mecca, two of the gritty towns that dot the receding banks of the Salton Sea, were once aptly named. Created by accident in 1905 after a failed levee dumped fresh water from the Colorado River into the formerly bone-dry basin, the sea was a true desert wonder. In the mid-20th century, it became a family resort, appealing to residents looking for a break from the hustle of Los Angeles, a three-hour drive to the West. Vacationers came for water sports and to fish the stocked corvina.

In the 1970s, there was a dramatic shift. Runoff from neighboring farmland that flowed untreated into the sea, paired with swiftly salinating waters due to limited new water supply, led to mass fish die-offs. Algae in the lake, feeding off the decay, turned the water freakish shades of green and red. Then a pungent smell began.

But nothing exacerbated the issue more than the 2003 approval of a multimillion-dollar transfer of water to San Diego: the largest farm-to-urban water agreement in U.S. history. It diverted water from the Colorado River that was previously available for use in the valley, dwindling runoff to the lake. Critics say the benefits from the deal haven’t trickled down. The water barons in the region — the wealthy farmers who hold original water claims in the valley — were equally opposed to the transfer. About 500 farms control the rights to nearly 3.1 million acre-feet a year of water from the Colorado River. Contrastingly, nearly a quarter of Imperial County lives in poverty. Per capita income from 2018 was approximately $17,500, according to the latest census figures.

Many Imperial Valley residents are tied to a massive agriculture sector that’s responsible for producing the majority of the U.S’s winter crops.

“I like to call it the last plantation. You have enormously wealthy white farmers and you have really poor people,” said Malissa McKeith, a lawyer at the nonprofit advocacy group Citizens United for Resources and the Environment. She fought for years against the water transfer agreement, pushing for at least a quarter billion dollars to be set aside to build hospitals and increase medical services for future environmental impacts on residents, to no avail.

The water loss, now exacerbated by increasingly warm temperatures due to climate change, has all but determined the Salton Sea’s destiny. It will keep shrinking, and the toxic dust laced with arsenic and fertilizer will be more and more exposed. The lake has already retreated a football field’s length in parts, revealing crumbling banks made of petrified barnacles and dead fish exoskeletons. It’s littered with dead birds, recognizable only by their residual feathers.

For McKeith, it’s unsurprising how hard Covid-19 has hit the community, considering the particulate matter that continues to blow from the sea.

“You’re starting out with people who have such compromised respiratory systems,” she said. “This situation may finally wake people up to the environmental Chernobyl they created, by allowing so much water to go to rich communities without addressing the Salton Sea.”

Nearly 50 percent of Riverside County and 84 percent of Imperial County are Hispanic, according to state and census estimates. Many Latino communities in the counties lack access to basic health care and have health conditions such as asthma, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. Families frequently live together in multigenerational homes. Many also work in essential jobs as farm pickers, prison workers, and nurses. Most can’t afford to take sick leave, let alone move elsewhere.

Research has linked polluted air — which Latinos in the U.S. are more likely to breathe than white people — with a higher likelihood of death from Covid-19. Exposure to poor or cramped living conditions and comorbidities are also believed to exacerbate infection rates and worsen outcomes. In California, the risk to Latino communities is clear. Latinos make up an outsized portion of Covid-19 cases, accounting for 55.6 percent of cases and 45.2 percent of deaths in the state, despite being approximately 39 percent of the population.

Latinos make up an outsized portion of Covid-19 cases in California, accounting for 55.6 percent of cases and 45.2 percent of deaths.

Anna Rosas, 34, a registered nurses assistant who works the night shift at the El Centro Regional Medical Center in Imperial, feels pangs of guilt over the death of her husband (and high school sweetheart) Luis Rosas.

“I can’t help, you know, to maybe feel that it was my fault,” she said.

As a health care professional for the past 13 years, Rosas had a heightened awareness of Covid-19’s spread in her community. She washed her hands, wore masks, and limited her outings. “My husband would make fun of it. He would be like, ‘Oh, well, when you come home from work, I’m gonna have to hose you down,’” she said.

But by the time she joined her sister-in-law’s Mother’s Day celebration on May 10, along with six other close family members, she was feeling ill.

When Rosas later tested positive, she isolated herself in her home, pushing Luis and their 8-year-old son to move in with his sister, who at the time was living with her girlfriend, her parents, and her brother in a three-bedroom apartment. Within a week, nearly the entire family had symptoms.

While Rosas was able to avoid the hospital, her sister-in-law and mother-in-law were later admitted and intubated. Rosas’s 33-year-old brother-in-law died at home. After three weeks in the ICU, her husband also passed away. He was 37 years old. Her husband had weight and heart issues, as did other members of his family.

“I wish I would have definitely isolated myself, coming to work and not coming home. Because, me being a worker at the hospital, I wish I really definitely would have done that,” Rosas said. “It’s hard though. I’ve never been separated from my husband in my life.”

“Riverside County only knows the Eastern Coachella Valley exists because it’s on a map,” said Maria Pozar, a stay-at-home mother in the tight-knit unincorporated community of North Shore. Located just off the banks of the Sea, the neighborhood consists largely of mobile homes. At least 84 people there have contracted Covid-19.

Pozar is considered the unofficial mayor of the town, a role she stepped into when mothers at the sewing classes she taught began voicing concerns about their kids’ frequent nosebleeds — attributable to the sea. Now she’s concerned about the increase in Covid-19 cases, which she blames on the county’s decision to reopen too early. Riverside County voted unanimously on May 12 to approve a plan for reopening businesses, despite evidence of growing cases in the Eastern Coachella Valley. Two weeks later, cases more than tripled. Imperial County similarly moved to reopen in early June, despite having the highest rate of Covid-19 cases in the state at the time.

“We don’t know what’s under the sea. What we do know, is we don’t want it exposed.”

The virus’s attack on the southern California desert communities has rubbed salt in festering wounds of inequality.

“The government has a responsibility to take care of everyone,” said Olmedo of Comite Civico del Valle, who grew up in Imperial Valley. “We need to be able to stabilize the exposed area [around the sea]. We’re not talking about natural dust from undisturbed areas. This has been a sump for industrial waste, and municipal waste. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. It’s been a site for a military proving ground. We don’t know what’s under the sea. What we do know, is we don’t want it exposed.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the Salton Sea area in 2018, agreeing that the region was at its “tipping point.” In June, the state legislature appropriated $47 million to help the Salton Sea. Some, including Olmedo, view the moment with a glimmer of hope.

In order for residents to survive amongst the bleak dregs of the lake, Olmedo said he and others must let go of past resentments, accept that the water has been sold, and focus on mitigating the two main crises now facing the region: climate change and Covid-19. That means working in tandem with some of the government officials that locals have long felt were against them, being viewed as laborers and little more.

“We have a 100-year-old playbook here where the pioneers came here and they ‘found’ Imperial. Clearly those of us who are Latino, Mexicano, and Native American, we never really had any power. It was stripped away from us. So we have these carried-over sentiments. But now we have these bigger issues that affect everyone,” Olmedo said. “This crisis that is here, is in the center of our community and nothing else matters.”

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Correction, July 28 4:03 p.m. EST:
This piece has been updated to clarify the terms of the 2003 water transfer agreement between Imperial Valley and San Diego. 

The post Coronavirus Strikes Latino Families Near California’s Salton Sea appeared first on The Intercept.

“Please, help us obtain our freedom. … It’s so dangerous these days, we find ourselves between life and death. We don’t want to be the victims of this ruthless virus, and here, in these conditions, really it’s just a matter of time.”

“I’m going to ask to be deported. Because being locked in this place there’s no peace, not psychologically or emotionally.”

“The fact that we are migrants doesn’t give them the right to treat us like criminals. … I’ve been detained for five months in this center with my lung condition and problems with my liver. Do you think that proper nutrition for a sick person is bread and ham every day?”

“I’ve seen things and lived things that no other person should have to live through. They put me into quarantine to see if I was carrying Covid-19 and from there, they only took us out for 20 minutes to bathe and make a phone call … 14 days of quarantine.”

In June, women held at Eloy Detention Center, a private immigration prison in Arizona owned and operated by CoreCivic, began to write down what they were going through. The letter writers did so despite the threat of retaliation, because, they said, people had to know what was happening. “You can’t speak freely here,” one woman wrote.

The letters have gone out to clergy, lawyers, volunteers, and family members. At neighboring La Palma Correctional Center, advocates collected mass letters describing horrible conditions, fear of contagion, and reprisal by guards. Bob Kee has visited detainees at Eloy for years and gives out his number and address to many of the people he meets. When bimonthly community volunteer visits to the prison were suspended in early March, he got occasional phone calls from friends inside. Their accounts of the conditions alarmed him. He asked one woman he knew, “Will you write me a letter, and she said, ‘I will,’ then two weeks later I got this big manila envelope with 40-odd letters.” Kee and other advocates shared many such letters with me, on the condition that the women’s names not be used.

The mostly handwritten notes represent an archive of an ongoing crisis in immigration detention facilities in Arizona, where hundreds of immigrants and correctional staff have been infected with Covid-19. According to CoreCivic, 159 employees, or 50 percent of the total workforce at Eloy, have tested positive  to date. One correctional officer has died of the disease.

Thirty-four detainees at Eloy are currently being monitored after testing positive, according to ICE statistics; in total, 252 people held at the facility have contracted the disease. That puts Eloy among the ICE facilities with the highest number of infections. La Palma, which is also operated by CoreCivic, has had 105 reported cases. The actual number may be higher: The Arizona Republic obtained internal emails saying that as of June 22, 270 detainees at Eloy had tested positive. CoreCivic said the figure was a typo.

“I’m going to ask to be deported. Because being locked in this place there’s no peace, not psychologically or emotionally.”

The letters were mostly written in mid-June and describe a spiraling panic beginning in late May. Many of the complaints were also outlined in a lawsuit lodged in early June arguing for the release of medically at-risk detainees at Eloy and La Palma: lack of medical attention and cleaning supplies, and guards reusing protective equipment and punishing people who speak out. The problems were compounded because so many guards were infected. The facility was so short-staffed that women — even those who were not being monitored for coronavirus symptoms — spent hours locked in their cells, denied hot food and any kind of freedom of movement.

When the guards locked them in, a woman who was recently released told me, they’d say, “You have to protect yourselves.” But, she said, “we don’t go anywhere, we’re locked in a cell. You’re the ones that are in the street, you’re the ones that have to be careful with people coming into the center. Obviously you’re the ones bringing in the virus, not us.”

A spokesperson for CoreCivic, Amanda Gilchrist, responded to a detailed list of the women’s claims, saying: “These are baseless allegations, and the claims simply do not reflect the affirmative, proactive measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 our facility has been taking for months. We care deeply for our hard-working, dedicated employees, as well as individuals in our care, and we’re committed to their safety.” ICE declined to comment.

Conversations with several currently detained women and with volunteers and advocates who are in touch with people still at Eloy confirmed that while the lockdowns have eased and conditions have improved a bit, at least for people who aren’t quarantined, people remain fearful and desperate for release.

“It’s still scary because what if someone is still sick?” one woman told me by phone this week. “We’re getting mixed together. The other day, everyone in the unit was in the yard together.”

A Cuban asylum-seeker in Eloy was put in a section of the prison with people who had tested positive earlier this month, after she went to the doctor with trouble breathing. She insisted that it was her asthma, and she responded to asthma medication, but her cellmate had tested positive, so she was forced to wait for her results with people who had been infected. ICE has refused to grant her parole on humanitarian grounds, despite several attacks in the last month.

“My health is not the best,” she wrote in a letter to a local advocate in Arizona a few weeks ago. “My fear is I’ll keep having these attacks. I just ask God to give me health.”

“All the Workers Were Sick”

The spread of the coronavirus at Eloy seemed inevitable to the women held there.

“We can’t maintain social distancing because we have 50 women in each pod,” one woman wrote. “We touch the same things, the showers, microwave, chairs, tables, telephone.”

Keeping things sanitary was difficult. “We had to clean the cells with shampoo as chemicals were not provided to us,” one letter said. Several others added that the cleaning products they were given were diluted and ineffective. Correctional officers went from pod to pod, between the areas where people who had tested positive were being held in quarantine and the rest of the prison, without changing their protective gear. At mealtime, the food cart went between quarantined and nonquarantined areas. Multiple guards would reuse the same gloves and other gear, giving it a spray with disinfectant between rounds, the letters allege.

Medical attention, the women said, was terrible; there was none unless it was for Covid-19 symptoms, and in those cases, people were afraid that if they were thought to be infected, they’d be put into solitary. “When you get sick there, the only thing they tell you is ‘drink water,’ and ‘drink water,’ and ‘drink water,’ or maybe ‘take an ibuprofen and a lot of water,’” one woman told me.

“From what I’ve heard secondhand, you get no care when you get [Covid-19] in there,” said Kate MacNeil, a retired nurse who is a community advocate for people detained in Arizona. “It’s like being in solitary.” Multiple volunteers said they’d heard from people at Eloy and La Palma that even if they had symptoms, they would stay quiet about it because of how they’d be treated. A man held at Eloy told Mother Jones recently that while he was sick with the virus, he was held in isolation, had his temperature checked only sporadically, and was given only Tylenol and cough syrup after a week in isolation.

“Due to lack of staff to watch us the lockdowns are more frequent and longer. Many of us suffer from anxiety and claustrophobia.”

Setting aside the fear of contagion, women at Eloy suffered because of constant lockdowns and other deprivations because there were not enough staff. After the first positive cases were reported in late May, “everything seemed paralyzed during that time, no kitchen workers, no laundry workers, no maintenance, etc,” a Mexican woman wrote. The women were often locked in their cells for hours on end, with no access to the yard, commissary, library, telephones, or showers. “Saturday we were locked down 23 1/2 hours because there were only 2 officers for the whole unit, day and afternoon,” the Mexican woman reported.

“Due to lack of staff to watch us the lockdowns are more frequent and longer,” wrote another woman. “Many of us suffer from anxiety and claustrophobia.”

“They would tell us it was so we didn’t get infected, that it was better if we were in our cells,” said a Cuban woman, whom I will call Julia, who was released at the end of June. She asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing her asylum case. “But the truth was that they didn’t have workers. All the workers were sick.”

The women were told that they couldn’t have hot meals and received ham and cheese sandwiches, sometimes with an apple or some cookies, for three meals a day. A boiled egg in the morning, maybe a packaged burrito. Julia said that for two months she ate nothing but sandwiches.

“Sometimes they don’t even have ham, only cheese and bread. Sometimes they give us the bread with mold on it,” a letter writer noted. She also took issue with the guards’ lack of precautions moving between different parts of the prison. “When they bring the food cart knowing Charlie 100 has people with Covid-19 why would they put the food cart in their tank and then bring it in 200, 300, 400, 500?”

Two women I spoke with last week said that kitchen workers had just started up again, and that they now had one hot meal a day. “We’re still getting the boxes in the morning and for dinner,” one of them said. (CoreCivic said that hot meals had resumed on July 16.)

People who complained or pushed back faced retribution, several of the letters allege. Women were sent to solitary after refusing to take food they believed could have been contaminated because it came from an area under quarantine.

The letters echo the alarms raised by correctional staff at Eloy in recent weeks. A correctional officer who resigned in June following the death of his co-worker told the Arizona Republic that officers were told to ration masks and gloves, to wear garbage bags with holes cut in them as protective gear, and to keep working when they showed symptoms. The officer said that staff “who showed signs of fever were told to sit in a tent next to a swamp cooler until their temperature came down.” Many of the details of the guards’ allegations line up with the detainees: short-staffing, reused gear, watered-down cleaning products. There was little transparency, the guards said, when a staff member or detained person tested positive, putting those who had been in contact with them at risk.

“There was no information given in any of the briefings that we had about any of the pods that had positive cases in them,” Nicholas Berg, a guard who quit in early June, told the Republic. The guards also said the same things as the detainees about slow medical attention due to staff shortages, and that they often just told people to drink water.

“They take pictures when they hand out shampoo but things aren’t really like that.”

CoreCivic denied almost every detail of both the guards’ and detainees’ accounts, saying that there were adequate cleaning supplies, masks, and gloves, and that guards were required to remove their protective gear when leaving units housing people who had tested positive. The company disputed the women’s description of lockdowns, saying that they had not been confined to their cells or had their movement and privileges restricted for long periods of time.

Speaking to Congress on July 13, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger explained the outbreak at Eloy as reflective of “a little bit of an uptick” in overall cases in Arizona. He also denied that pepper-spray had been used at CoreCivic facilities, despite several well-documented incidents. He then had to walk back the claim.

“Have we been perfect? Absolutely not,” Hininger said, but added, “I feel good that we’ve made the appropriate investments along the way.”

Multiple letters insisted that ICE and CoreCivic were not telling the truth about conditions at the center. “The people from ICE say that everything that’s been happening is under control, but it’s a lie, because every day there are more people infected,” one woman wrote. “They take pictures when they hand out shampoo but things aren’t really like that.”

Private prison operators and their federal clients tend to play a game of passing the buck, with people inside as with the media. A woman held at Eloy wrote that when she tried to complain to a visiting ICE officer, the official said, “Well good luck, because we ICE officers are in charge only of your cases, and CoreCivic is in charge of your safety.”

At least 15 people have died while in custody at Eloy since 2003, including five suicides. “The food, the lack of medical care has always been a problem at Eloy,” said Kee, who organizes a fund to provide bond, supply commissary accounts, and buy phone cards for people detained there. “Care has always been horrible, and now it’s even worse.”

“They Don’t Want to Release People”

According to the agency’s latest figures, 3,780 people have tested positive for Covid-19 while in ICE custody, and three people have died. Advocates say ICE’s tally of positive tests likely undercounts the virus’s spread, given the lack of large-scale testing and frequent detainee transfers.

There are 22,142 people in ICE custody in facilities around the country. That’s a drastic drop from prepandemic levels, which ICE attributes to a combination of factors, including fewer people taken into custody along the border. The U.S. has invoked the pandemic to justify pushing almost everyone, including children, immediately back into Mexico. As The Intercept has reported, continuing deportations have certainly helped spread the coronavirus to the Caribbean and Latin America.

ICE claims that it takes medical vulnerabilities into account when determining whether to detain someone and that it has released hundreds of people who are at heightened risk. But in many cases, it’s taken lawsuits to force the agency’s hand.

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For the people inside, ICE can’t move fast enough. Cecilia Valenzuela, who does humanitarian work at Eloy and La Palma, said that a Venezuelan woman she is helping was granted withholding of removal — a status that keeps her from being returned to a country where she fears persecution — three months ago. But ICE had appealed the judge’s decision and so she simply has to wait in jail.

“The people who have bond, give them their bond,” said Julia, the Cuban woman. “Get them out. The sick people, give them humanitarian parole.”

“I had my bond hearing on June 11. And my partner, thank God, was already out. He got out before I did, and he paid my bond. He had to call and call because 13 days went by, and they didn’t put me in the system because everyone was in quarantine,” she told me.

“The problem is that they don’t want to release people. They always try to keep them in,” her partner added.

Julia said she was in touch with family members of some of the women she knew at Eloy. “It’s still bad,” she said. “Just yesterday I heard about a woman who was with us, and she had her court date in July. For asylum. She had her court date in July and they moved it to August, and yesterday I learned that she has coronavirus.”

Julia and her partner are free now, staying with friends in Arizona, and they wish the same for all the other immigrants they were held with. “They should give them a chance,” Julia’s partner said. “Inside, when one person gets infected, they’re going to all get infected, because everyone is hermetically sealed in there.”

“Breathing the same air. Everyone,” Julia finished his sentence.

The post Letters From ICE Detainees Expose Desperate Prison Conditions Amid Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on The Intercept.

Yesterday afternoon, a constellation of words appeared above these edifices, visible for miles around the city. “CARE NOT CAGES,” “CHINGA TU MIGRA,” “ABOLITION NOW,” and other phrases emerged in a circle behind a fleet of planes. The skywriting was part of a nationwide artist intervention entitled “In Plain Sight,” designed to draw attention to the hundreds of places in communities across the country where immigrants and others are detained each day. More messages will show up over different sites today and tomorrow.

Above Los Angeles, the planes were behind schedule. Earlier in the day, members of local immigrant rights groups gathered with artist Beatriz Cortez on the edge of MacArthur Park to chalk “DEFUND ICE” in candy colors in the middle of a street. A marimba band played, the day grew hot, and eventually most everyone went home to wait to see Cortez’s own phrase, “NO CAGES NO JAULAS,” suspended over the immigration court downtown.

Political messages in the sky seem as natural as a sunny day in Los Angeles right now; when I went to the beach for the first time in months in early June, a little plane buzzed over, dragging a banner declaring “Black Lives Matter.” Since the killing of George Floyd, all-caps slogans protesting police violence and affirming Black lives are everywhere: in windows, taped to windshields, spray-painted on toppled statues, embroidered onto face masks, hung on sheets dangled from overpasses. Of course this kind of mushrooming is typical at heated moments of protest, but the signs have a different resonance now, at a time when we are muted by our masks, kept indoors by the virus. They become a way of saying: I am there with you (a message just as quickly co-opted by mayors authorizing murals and brands commissioning artwork for their boarded-up shop windows).

“To stand in solidarity with folks who were saying they want to abolish ICE meant that we also had to engage with the history of violence and incarceration in the U.S.”

In that way, “In Plain Sight” fits right into the moment, and in-person gatherings like Cortez’s highlight, as she put it, “the Central American groups that have been fighting for these things for 40 years.”

“Rather than being an artwork about immigration, this is an artwork that seeks to serve and amplify the on-the-ground work that’s been done by our partner organizations,” said Cassils, who founded the project along with another Los Angeles based artist, rafa esparza. “In Plain Sight” was born out of a group text with artists who had been making work to protest the separation of families at the border and other abuses, but the idea to use skywriting came when Cassils had just returned from Europe and saw a plane spell out “Happy 4^th” last July, a sight that evoked for them a “militaristic display of patriotism.”

“What would it be like,” they said, “to usurp and reclaim this idea of what is it to be patriotic on the 4^th of July, in this country, in this moment?”

The vaporous letters of skywriting, at once ephemeral and numinous and pleasantly kitschy, have appealed to artists for decades, though the expense makes its use fairly rare. (Technically, what “In Plain Sight” uses is not skywriting — one plane looping around to make alphabet shapes — but skytyping, in which several planes fly in formation, guided by a computer to puff out digital dots in the form of letters.)

The technique has been used for advertising since the 1920s, and was popularized by brands like Pepsi, which had its own fleet of whirling messengers. But Instagram has made skywriting exponentially more valuable, since the temporary display lives on in every passerby’s post, and the press materials for “In Plain Sight” stressed its ’grammable nature; like much public art, the project merges commercial tactics with artistic intent in the name of raising awareness. Cassils had been doing some work for Puma, and was struck by the enormous amount of money that went toward a single ad campaign for shoes.

“As performance artists, we’re dealing with very little means,” they said. “But after seeing the audacity of the money spent on shoes, and learning abut the insanity of the problem [of immigration detention] and the scope and scale, we thought, we need to make this big. We approached the skytyping corporation here in LA and we asked them, ‘What’s the biggest gig you’ve ever done?’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ve done a nationwide campaign of 80 messages nationwide, for Geico.’ So we decided we would go for that.”

The often mysterious phrases that emanate from the tails of the planes are followed by the hashtag #xmap, directing people to a website showing the hundreds of immigration detention facilities across the country and offering connections to local immigrant rights and other groups organizing to end detention.

“To stand in solidarity with folks who were saying they want to abolish ICE meant that we also had to engage with the history of violence and incarceration in the U.S.,” said esparza. That meant inviting messages from Black and Indigenous artists and activists, as well as Japanese American artists whose relatives had been in internment camps in World War II. After George Floyd’s murder, he said, “to stand in solidarity with the movement for Black lives, I wouldn’t call it a pivot, we just always had it.”

Some of the messages are purposefully enigmatic or elegiac, like the name of Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, the first person to die of Covid-19 in immigration custody, chosen by Dread Scott to be flown over the Statue of Liberty, while over the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, another artist will write Mejia’s sister’s words about his death: “My pain is so big.” Esparza collaborated with Tijuana-based artists for three messages in Spanish near the border: NO TE RINDAS (“Don’t give up”); LA FRONTERA NOS CRUZO (“The border crossed us”); and SOY NUBE DE ESPERANZA (“I am a cloud of hope”).

Others are crystal clear: the many variations on “Abolish ICE,” or “YER TAX $ CAGE KIDS” over the San Diego ICE field office.

That urgency is needed. Over 22,800 people are currently in ICE custody. While that’s many thousands less than it was before the coronavirus struck — in 2019, the average daily detained population was about 50,000 — in many cases, it’s taken lawsuits to force the agency to free people. Just last week, a judge ordered the government to release children who had been held for weeks with their parents.

“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” the judge wrote.

Fear ripped through immigrant detention centers as the virus spread, with people inside desperately protesting unsanitary and crowded conditions and lack of medical attention. Guards met protests with retaliation, including pepper-spray, solitary confinement, and transfers to different facilities. Recently, cases in ICE detention have jumped — a facility in Eloy, Arizona, owned and operated by the private contractor CoreCivic, reported 222 confirmed infections last week. The message over Eloy? A single word: “RELEASE.”

The post As Coronavirus Surges in ICE Detention, a Message in the Skies Says “RELEASE” appeared first on The Intercept.

This prohibition did not extend to Criminal Alien Requirement, or CAR, prisons, a shadowy network of facilities overseen by the Bureau of Prisons but run entirely by private contractors and used exclusively to house noncitizens serving federal sentences, often for immigration-related offenses. CAR facilities tend to fly under the radar in debates over conditions in federal prisons or ICE detention centers, owing to the gray area they inhabit between immigration and criminal detention.

As one such prison, Taft Correctional Institution in Kern County, California, was preparing to close at the end of April, hundreds of people were moved out and sent around the country, heedless of the Covid-19 threat.

People transferred from Taft and family members who spoke with The Intercept described packed airliners flown out of Bakersfield airport with hundreds aboard. Many were sent to the North Lake Correctional Facility in Michigan, run by the private prison giant GEO Group. According to people inside, the prison administration was wholly unprepared to deal with the influx.

Hundreds of people were moved out of Taft Correctional Institution and sent around the country, heedless of the Covid-19 threat.

Gil, who says he was part of a group of 120 people moved from Taft to North Lake in April, asked a corrections officer if North Lake would be getting more transfers. “They said ‘We’re not taking in no more people.’ So we ask them why they brought us here. He said that was an emergency because they closed down the [Taft] prison,” said Gil, who asked his full name not be used for fear of being retaliated against by prison staff. “They said they weren’t ready for us. … One day they came into work, and they told them, ‘Hey, we’re getting 500 people here, so you guys got to be prepared.’”

BOP spokesperson Emery Nelson said that while the agency had indeed halted transfers on March 12 in response to the coronavirus crisis, people were moved “to allow for necessary repairs and construction to be completed at the Taft facility.” He added that people from Taft “were screened in accordance with CDC guidelines prior to leaving the facility,” and that they were quarantined upon arrival at new centers, with symptomatic detainees being tested for the virus.

However, people inside and their family members say that while new transfers are being kept apart from the general population, not much else is being done to control for the spread of coronavirus. Ricardo Limón, who said he was moved with a group of about 130 inmates from Taft, said that the kitchen was staffed by a group of incarcerated people who served both the Taft transfers and the rest of the jail. According to him, corrections officers had removed a coronavirus-positive person from the transfer population only to return him seven days later and place him with a new cellmate.

“We were asking, ‘Why are you bringing him if you know he’s contagious?’ and he said, ‘We don’t know if he’s contagious or not.’ So I said, ‘You’re bringing him and just praying he doesn’t infect us?’” Limón recalled the guard replying, “I don’t have anywhere to put him, the clinic is full, and he’s the one with the fewest symptoms.”

Emilio Martínez described the same experience from the opposite perspective. He said he’d been transferred from Taft to North Lake on April 2, and by April 22 he’d tested positive for Covid-19. “About two weeks [after arriving] I started feeling feverish, my bones hurt, I was tired and very sleepy,” he said. He was taken away to an area reserved for symptomatic detainees, where he said he was kept for two weeks with only minimal supervision. “They’d come in, take my temperature, and say, ‘It’s OK, you’re OK,’ and then they’d close the door and leave. They wouldn’t check up on you all day, just in the morning and the afternoon. The whole night would go by without anyone coming to check in. You could die there.”

Despite what he said was a litany of health issues including diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a hip replacement, he described only being given aspirin to deal with the aggressive respiratory disease. Now back in general population, he still can’t taste or smell anything and remains fatigued at all hours. “They told me to drink a lot of water, and to exercise,” he scoffed. He’s not sure if he was still infectious when returned to the larger group.

In a meeting with higher-level officers and a member of the jail’s management, Limón and other people being held at North Lake suggested that everyone be tested, to which an official responded, “We don’t have the budget to do test everyone, it’s not as easy as you all think.” (Nelson, the BOP spokesperson, declined to say how many people had been tested at North Lake and other CAR prisons.) Limón is particularly anxious to avoid exposure given that he contracted Valley fever, a fungal infection that affects the lungs, while imprisoned at Taft. “If I get infected with the coronavirus with this Valley fever stuff I have, I’m going to die,” he said.

Gil and some family members of people held at CAR prisons independently brought up concerns with people being put back into general population days after being removed due to Covid-19, and with a lack of testing. Gil said one man in his pod was symptomatic for four days before he was removed and tested, and then brought back less than a week later. Several people also brought up a lack of adequate cleaning materials, including being instructed to wash common areas with water containing just a little bit of diluted bleach.

“If I get infected with the coronavirus with this Valley fever stuff I have, I’m going to die.”

While the bulk of recent transfers to North Lake were from Taft, some people were apparently transferred in from other prisons as well. Amy (who asked for privacy reasons to be identified only by her first name), whose husband is serving a federal sentence for illegal reentry after attempting to return to his U.S. family following a deportation, said he had been held at Great Plains Correctional Institution in Oklahoma until “it all started outbreaking. That’s when they moved him to Michigan.” In Oklahoma, she said, he had met people who had recently left California, some of whom were on their way to Michigan.

Great Plains had the earliest acknowledged spike of Covid-19 cases among CAR prisons and now is second only to North Lake, which has had a reported total of 104 cases, 91 of them “recovered,” according to BOP, as of this week. So far, at least two people imprisoned at North Lake have died from Covid-19, and one more at the McRae facility in Georgia. According to Gil, at least one of them was a transfer from Taft.

Both people who were held there and the BOP agree that there were no coronavirus cases at the Taft facility, meaning that those moved out and to Oklahoma and North Lake may well have been put in harm’s way by the transfers, especially given the unpreparedness of the destination facilities.

The North Lake facility had just been reopened as a CAR prison late last year, after having operated as a maximum-security state prison until it closed in mid-2017. Part of the difficulty in coordinating an effective response to the coronavirus seemed to be a culture that retained the posture of maximum security, even though the prison no longer is.

Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.

A Canadian woman whose husband has been at North Lake since February told The Intercept that he has spent weeks in solitary confinement after being accused of helping organize a hunger strike inside the facility and lodging a complaint against a guard who threatened him. “He’s in there trying to advocate for these men and help them,” she said. “They just basically threw him in a dungeon.”

Since the BOP began to use all-noncitizen prisons in the late 1990s, the centers have operated in a sort of blind spot for both immigration watchdogs who tend to focus on ICE detention, and criminal justice watchdogs who mostly concentrate on standard federal prisons. The fact that the centers are all run by contractors but overseen generally by the BOP allows both groups to employ the strategy (oft-used in the ICE detention context) of deflecting blame to the other for any shortcomings.

Asked for comment about the preparations to move all the inmates out of Taft, a spokesperson for the Management and Training Corporation — the private contractor that ran the facility — wrote, “The BOP determines and coordinates all inmate movement including those transfers that you’re referring to.” A representative of the GEO Group, which runs both Great Plains and North Lake, wrote “as a service provider to the federal government, our company plays no role in decisions related to the assignment, release, or transfers of individuals from contractor-operated federal prisons.” Asked about deaths at North Lake and the allegations that infectious people were put back into the general population, GEO Group and BOP each referred questions to the other.

Correction, June 22, 2020:
This article originally misstated the gender of the BOP spokesperson.

The post Authorities Transferred Hundreds of People Between Shadowy Immigration Prisons, Ignoring Coronavirus Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

Devin-Barrington Ward stood in the middle of the right lane of southbound I-75/85 at dusk last Saturday night with a bullhorn in hand, and he was not playing. “If you are not going to put your body on the line for black lives, go home! Make up for the sins of your ancestors!”

I smirked. I admit it. It was absurd to hear. Looking at him, I think he thought it was a bit nuts too. But we’re all a little crazy now. Standing in the middle of the Downtown Connector in Atlanta, Georgia, a highway that usually carries about 300,000 cars a day, is also patently absurd.

“That shit Devin said was really was fucked up and ridiculous,” said Rev. Kim Jackson, an episcopal priest in Atlanta serving as a protest chaplain. “But the fact that they didn’t gas the shit out of those white kids, or come at them with batons and rubber bullets, well, it does seem to reinforce the whole point that white folk are treated better.”

This idea of a “white shield” is gaining currency among activists, who want to demonstrate that police are more deferential than violent when facing white people. So far, police seem to be confirming that thesis.

Few things freak out Georgia’s powers-that-be more than disrupting the connector. The urban planning of the connector is legendarily terrible (and came at the cost of black neighborhoods in Atlanta). It is the fifth-most congested corridor in America. A snarl on the connector affects traffic patterns for 50 miles in every direction.

The connector is Atlanta’s neck. Demonstrators knelt on it for two hours.

The night before, a traffic cop had killed Rayshard Brooks in the drive-thru of a Wendy’s just east of the highway. After a struggle, Officer Garrett Rolfe shot Brooks in the back three times after Brooks ran from a DUI arrest with a cop’s Taser in his hand.

Rolfe was fired and the police chief resigned and it didn’t matter. With the city and the country in an uproar over disparate use of force, an Atlanta cop who almost certainly had been staring at Black Lives Matter protests for two weeks shot a black man in the back. It made a farce of the de-escalation and the return to relative calm over the previous week. It pulled the pin on a grenade. It beggared restraint.

The police killing of Rayshard Brooks made a farce of the de-escalation and the return to relative calm over the previous week.

About 100 young white people stood in front of a line of cars, arms locked, waiting for police to arrest them. On the northbound side, state troopers had a small armada of police cars ready to charge. Traffic backed up for miles in both directions. And in the middle of this standoff lay a quarter-mile of empty road like a street party, a placid bubble where people skateboarded and rode bicycles.

“White allyship means showing up even when I’m exhausted. Because as exhausted as I feel, it doesn’t come close to what my Black brothers and sisters must feel right now,” said Hannah Hill, a manager at the affordable housing startup PadSplit who is also an Episcopal priest and frequent protest chaplain. “It means that when I do show up, for the first time in my life, I have to realize I’m not in charge. I have to recognize that I don’t know what’s right for these Black protesters. Instead, I step back — or to the front of the line if asked — and allow them to direct me. To cede my own power and cultural supremacy to those leaders around me. It’s supporting their cause and their pain — it’s not about me.”

It’s not the first time people have taken over a highway here. A handful of protesters briefly shut down the connector in 2014 as the city erupted in grief over the police shooting death of Michael Brown. The next day, I watched more state troopers than one would think it possible to summon carefully prevent about 10,000 protesters from repeating the move. Demonstrators instead merrily led cops up and down Atlanta’s downtown streets late into the night, though without the smashed windows and graffiti of the last two weeks. Georgia’s conservative legislators subsequently tried and failed to make blocking a highway in protest a felony offense.

Saturday night, hundreds of people spilled onto the highway after hours of street protest in front of the Wendy’s. Protest chaplains had walked back demonstrators who tried to take the overpass earlier in the day, largely because there weren’t enough people to do it safely, Jackson said.

Police had also used force once earlier that day, when protesters had surrounded a police SUV trying to pull out of the parking lot of a liquor store across the street from the Wendy’s. Black bloc demonstrators started throwing bottles of water — and urine — at the cops. After someone hit a cop with a thrown skateboard, police let loose with ordinance — tear gas and a flash-bang grenade.

As with the highway stunt, the crowd bellowing “Fuck 12” (local slang for cops) was multiracial, though most of the parking lot projectiles came from white rioters from the black bloc. Black activists are wrestling with how to incorporate white help to address racism. It’s clear that discrimination cannot be solved without — as Chris Rock put it — nicer white people. An end to white supremacy requires white people to stop imposing it. On the other hand, black activists loathe the idea of surrendering their agency to white people in pursuit of racial equity, because it can be misused.

Black activists are wrestling with how to incorporate white help to address racism.

Just as police started to clear the protest from the highway, vandals set the Wendy’s on fire. I walked over as it started, to see a skinny young white guy wearing black bloc anonymizing gear gingerly step through a broken plate glass window of the restaurant to the gas station parking lot next door.

He was immediately confronted by four rugged young black men, all pissed off — at him.

“You don’t fucking live around here,” one man said to him, inches from his face. The black bloc guy looked petrified. “They are going to blame us for that.” The group milled around a bit, unsure if they wanted to let him walk, feed him to the cops, or just beat him like a rug.

Then a fire truck and a sheriff’s vehicle rolled up behind them. People — black and white — knelt in the street to block their path. The neighborhood guys walked away; the white guy ran into the street. One of the men looked down onto a silly little patch of lawn carved out of the parking lot concrete, picked up an apple-sized rock, and hurled it at the driver’s side window of the patrol car.

It’s one thing if someone from out of town does damage. Another if the locals do it. It’s one thing if a white person commits an act of arson in the name of black lives. Another if a black person does it. Which may actually be the point of all of this.

Slowly, amid a hail of rocks, the crowd backed the fire truck and the police car up University Avenue. Cellphone dead, I left before things got worse.

Police have a $10,000 reward for tips leading to the arrest of someone caught on camera torching the Wendy’s. The picture is of someone who looks like a white woman. Jackson, the reverend, said she saw the entire event, and that a multiracial group started the fire, including the young man I had seen.

As I walked the half-mile back to my car, I passed by a police major helping coordinate the SWAT team prepping out of sight. He and I are acquainted from my time working on homelessness and mental illness for the downtown business district. Out of sight of the crowds, after a long night, I walked up to him and unloaded.

“They think the chief resigning is going to change anything? That’s the worst thing that could have happened,” I half screamed. “Who’s going to be the interim? Someone who doesn’t have enough institutional authority to change anything. Where the fuck is the mayor! Of all the shitty timing for something like this to happen. Your guy just torched two weeks of protests. Things were starting to calm down, and we were starting to talk about reforms. What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”

“Well,” he said, “the leaders will have to come together, settle on a list of demands, and meet with the mayor.”

All that day, as I listened to people, it was clear that a dozen people were trying to lead. Richard Rose, the head of Atlanta’s NAACP, addressed the crowd and gave a press conference, and was shouted down by the street. A branch of Black Hebrew Israelites — a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group — had a loudspeaker-fueled diatribe going through most of the day. Mary Hooks from Black Lives Matter competed with people from the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, from Southerners on New Ground, from city agencies, from local nonprofits and from groups I had never heard of. Leadership in the street meant having a bullhorn and a stepladder.

“Man, there is no leader,” I replied. “All of this is organic. It’s just happening. There is no one to negotiate with, because anyone who claimed to have the authority to speak for the street would be lying and everyone knows it.”

His eyebrow arched. “So, it’s just looting and rioting” he said.

“Well, I’ll give you rioting,” I replied. “No one is going to steal anything around here.”

“It’s probably a good thing that you’re leaving then,” he said. “We’re about to gas the shit out it.”

The post Get on the Line: White Allies and Changing Tactics at Atlanta Rayshard Brooks Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

The asylum agreement faced protests and legal challenges, but the U.S. persisted and Guatemala, under the new presidency of Alejandro Giammattei, eventually acquiesced. Nearly 1,000 Honduran and Salvadoran asylum-seekers were sent to Guatemala before the program was suspended in mid-March because of the coronavirus outbreak.

A new report from Refugees International and Human Rights Watch finds that those asylum-seekers were poorly treated by U.S. border officials, misinformed about the program and their prospects of getting into the U.S., and left without resources when they reached Guatemala. According to the Guatemalan government, only 20 of the 939 people sent to Guatemala under the so-called Asylum Cooperative Agreement, or ACA, have actually applied for asylum there.

The report also argues that U.S. is violating domestic and international law by sending people to dangerous conditions in Guatemala without first hearing their asylum claims.

Hustled to Guatemala With Little Explanation

Interviews conducted by the report’s authors with 30 asylum-seekers who were sent to Guatemala revealed confusion and anguish. Interviewees related familiar stories of harsh conditions in U.S. detention: held for days without showers, served inedible frozen food, denied access to medical care, and verbally abused by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Many said they did not understand the process by which they were sent to Guatemala.

Homeland Security told him, “There are no Central Americans allowed into the United States.”

One Salvadoran man said that a Homeland Security official told him, “There is no asylum,” and “There are no Central Americans allowed into the United States.” A Honduran woman was also told the U.S. “wasn’t giving asylum anymore.” Unlike the normal process for asylum-seekers, many people subjected to the ACA weren’t asked if they were afraid to return home or go to Guatemala. All of the people interviewed for the report said that they had no chance to meet with an attorney. They were given various forms explaining the ACA, many only in English, but none properly understood that they had to ask for asylum in Guatemala — rather, they believed they’d have the chance to continue their U.S. asylum case from Guatemala. Some people didn’t even understand that they were being sent to Guatemala until they arrived there.

A spokesperson for CBP, Matthew Dyman, said that under the agreement, information is provided in English and Spanish, and that individuals are “referred for an interview with a [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] Asylum Officer, which will determine whether the individual has a reasonable fear of being transferred to Guatemala.” He added that following their transfer, “Guatemalan migration officials interview each individual and refer them to partner non-governmental organizations for services.”

Yet interviewees told Refugees International and Human Rights Watch that registration at the airport “took a cursory two-to-three minutes, during which transferees were not provided any information regarding what would happen to them in Guatemala.” Asylum-seekers had “72 hours to make the decision about whether they would remain in Guatemala, return to the countries they fled, or try to find refuge elsewhere.”

A psychologist who works in the only shelter receiving the asylum-seekers in Guatemala City said the rapid transfer of asylum-seekers compounded the trauma of their initial flight. “Those who arrive under the ACA are often suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic stress, as well as physical illnesses — respiratory infections, headaches, palpitations,” she told the report’s authors. Many of the asylum-seekers interviewed for the report were between 18 and 20 years old. “We are destroying a generation,” the psychologist said.

For most of the people transferred, staying in Guatemala was untenable. Guatemala’s capacity to take in asylum-seekers is limited for legal and practical reasons. First off, the gangs that operate in El Salvador and Honduras also have a presence in Guatemala, and many people fleeing the region say they do not feel they will be safe anywhere within it. Also, Guatemala has high rates of violence against women, with perpetrators enjoying relative impunity for those crimes, and today’s report notes that 75 percent of the asylum-seekers sent to Guatemala under the ACA were women and children.

Asylum law in Guatemala is “clunky and very politicized,” said Refugees International’s Yael Schacher, and there is little bureaucratic infrastructure. The report notes that Guatemala “received fewer than 50 new asylum claims per year from 2002-2014,” and that a June 2019 State Department cable claimed that Guatemala had not processed one asylum claim in over a year. And Guatemala is a very poor country, dealing with high levels of poverty and food insecurity that force thousands of its own citizens to emigrate each year. There are few shelters available to migrants in Guatemala. The ACA came without funding from the U.S. to care for asylum-seekers, and Guatemalan law was clear that money could not be spent implementing the agreement.

Just One Part of a Blockade

That lack of capacity is probably why more people weren’t sent, Schacher says. “The plan that the U.S. had for this was to be much bigger, they wanted to send hundreds of people each week,” she said. “But I think as more families began to be sent, the situation became untenable in Guatemala. There was no place for those people to go. It’s also clear that UNHCR” — the U.N. refugee agency — “was not going to sanction this, not going to facilitate. So lack of UNHCR support for it, criticism from the Guatemala side and from the press may have put some brakes on it.”

Dyman, the CBP spokesperson, said that “a core part of the bilateral agreement is that the United States will transfer only the number of individuals that Guatemala has the capacity to accept and process.”

But the need to transfer large numbers of people to Guatemala was also reduced by the success of the administration’s other efforts to severely restrict the options for asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. Tens of thousands of people have been thrown into the Remain in Mexico program, which forced them to wait — often in camps or on the street — in Mexican border cities while their case proceeded in the U.S. A transit bar blocked asylum for anyone who did not first ask for protection in the countries they passed through en route to the U.S., and other programs sped up the review and rejection of asylum claims at the border.

“The situation became untenable in Guatemala. There was no place for those people to go.”

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has brought asylum almost to a halt. Last week, the Washington Post reported that just two people have been granted humanitarian protection at the border since late March. Citing public health, the U.S. has expelled over 20,000 unauthorized border crossers, most of them directly to Mexico, where, as The Intercept has reported, they face a chaotic situation and few resources. Even children’s asylum requests are being blocked. The pandemic has created the perfect pretext for White House immigration adviser Stephen Miller and other anti-immigrant hard-liners to enact the election-year border blockade of their dreams.

Still, advocates such as Schacher worry that the U.S. will press on with implementing asylum cooperative agreements with El Salvador and Honduras — countries even less equipped to offer protection than Guatemala. Honduras, for one, has been a willing partner for the Trump administration, and Guatemala has pushed back against deportation flights from the U.S. during the pandemic, which have helped spread Covid-19 from U.S. immigration detention centers to Latin America. Schacher said if that continues and “if that gets annoying enough for the U.S., I can see the U.S. beginning to send Guatemalans to Honduras.”

She added that lawsuits against the ACAs, including one brought by the asylum officers’ union, are proceeding. “They may want to start quickly sending people to Honduras before they get stopped by the courts,” she said. “The goal of the Trump administration is to deport as many people as possible.”

Dyman said that “there are no imminent plans to begin ACA transfers to Honduras; when international travel conditions improve we will resume discussions about implementing these agreements.”

“They may want to start quickly sending people to Honduras before they get stopped by the courts.”

The program has been promoted by the administration as “burden sharing” to “control the flow of aliens into the United States” — a framing that ignores the cross-border ubiquity of violence in Central America, not to mention the disparate resources of a rich country like the United States and its historical role in generating instability in the region.

“From the U.S. perspective, this is just a burden shifting exercise, not a burden sharing exercise,” Schacher said. “This is a border enforcement policy rather than anything else.”

The post Redirecting Asylum-Seekers From U.S. to Guatemala Was a Cruel Farce, Report Finds appeared first on The Intercept.

Experts say that ingrained racism informed policymakers’ and the media’s favorable views toward European countries, and that even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary, those biases impeded important public health measures that would have kept people safe.

“Race and racism disallowed the U.S. from recognizing Europe as a threat,” said Khiara Bridges, an anthropologist and professor of law at University of California, Berkeley.

From the time President Donald Trump’s travel ban on China went into effect on February 1 until the ban on travel from Europe in mid-March, more than 10,000 flights from coronavirus hot spots in Europe came into the U.S., carrying some 2 million passengers, many of whom came through New York. Genome sequence mapping shows that most of New York’s cases came from Europe, and that other areas of the country also got the virus from New York. The CDC report was published more than two weeks after an Intercept report that analyzed flight data, as well as states’ coronavirus index cases and drew the same conclusions.

If travel from Europe had been halted three weeks sooner, the CDC report implies, the virus would not have spread so thoroughly in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and potentially tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. When asked for comment about the role race played in the timing of these travel bans, the National Institutes of Health said to contact the CDC, and the CDC said to contact the White House, which did not respond.

Early, frequent, and racist attempts by Trump and administration officials to blame China for the spread of Covid-19, like calling it the “Wuhan virus,” played an important role in establishing a narrative that excluded Europe. But the bias goes beyond him and is deeply ingrained in American society, explained Dr. Jennifer Tsai, an emergency medicine physician who has studied the impact of racial bias in American medical education.

“There’s a clear connection between xenophobia and ideas of the source and danger of threats, and how much more easily that maps onto negativity in China and foreignness, and how much less likely it is to map on to ideas of Europe and whiteness,” Tsai said. “It seems to me that it is certainly associated with the outcomes that we’re seeing in that regard.”

Chinatowns in the U.S. have been unfairly targeted as the source of the spread of disease in the past, especially during plague outbreaks at the turn of the 20th century in Hawaii and California. That racial bias has been on full display during this pandemic, to the point where UC Berkeley listed “Xenophobia: fears about interacting with those who might be from Asia” as a “normal reaction” to coronavirus. Articles that dissected how travel from China spread the virus were plentiful from the beginning of the outbreak, but the few stories that looked at European travel were mostly produced after scientific studies with ample proof of Europe’s role were published.

“Europe is equated with whiteness and civilization: a safe haven and therefore, not a part of a pandemic origin story.”

“It’s not uncommon that the places one finds empowering or affirming are also presumed safe, free from existential risk. Europe in the American imagination is a place upon which these presumptions are projected: a place to visit and explore as a heritage site, to be a part of and claim,” said Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. “A more insidious and implicit reading of that sense of belonging is that Europe is equated with whiteness and civilization: a safe haven and therefore, not a part of a pandemic origin story,” she added.

Some politicians have reacted with surprise to the CDC report. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in his May 6 press conference that “nobody said it was coming from Europe. People who visited from Europe walked right through the airport. Nobody said to New Yorkers, be careful if you were just with somebody who came from Italy, be careful, they may have the virus. Nobody said that. So it was totally new.” (Cuomo spokesperson Caitlin Girouard told The Intercept that the “nobody” in the governor’s May 6 statement referred to “the federal government.”)

In reality, news that coronavirus was spreading throughout Europe was a top media story worldwide in late February and early March. Italy had reported its first coronavirus death on February 22, and by March 1, it had 1,694 cases and quarantined 100,000 people. On March 3, the French government had closed more than 100 schools, as well as pillars of tourism like the Louvre and told its citizens not to kiss when greeting each other. On March 2, the European Union raised the level of risk of Covid-19 contraction from moderate to high.

Tsai said that the inability to recognize how European travelers could be potential vectors of disease is so deeply held, it cannot always be combatted effectively with facts. “People are so primed to go down certain mental pathways when they are exposed to things like race and identity, that are so ingrained and so embedded, even very frank data and evidence cannot pull them out of those modes of thinking or that kind of theorization,” she said.

Both the travel restrictions to China and to Europe were reactions to events that had already taken place and may have had limited effect overall, said Benton. China had already shut down flights from the Hubei region, where the outbreak began, on January 23, meaning that there was already a de facto travel ban in place by the time a formal one took effect on February 1. Travel from Europe had also already significantly dropped off by the time those bans went into place six weeks later.

Because of the disease’s incubation period, “much of these policy decisions are based upon old information. And that’s generally what happens with epidemics,” Benton explained. “The travel restrictions are to some extent part of the security theater,” she said.

“If people come to associate Covid-19 with nonwhite death, if it comes to be associated with black people’s deaths, any will that the U.S. had to competently and humanely manage the pandemic will just be lost.”

Racism has been evident in the domestic reaction to coronavirus, too, as seen in widely shared images juxtaposing police officers calmly handing out masks to white people sitting in a public park, while violently arresting black and Latinx people in other parts of the city. “What types of populations, identities, and phenotypes are deemed safe enough to be entitled to their liberation or not, for the purpose, ostensibly of social safety?” asked Tsai.

Racial bias also played a negative role in how basic health measures like wearing a mask were perceived early on. Americans “have always viewed the face masks as something that others do, that nonwhite people do and nonwhite countries do,” said Bridges.

The spread of coronavirus in the U.S. has deeply hurt black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, highlighting endemic racism in health care, the labor market, income, housing, and more. The danger that the virus itself will be racialized poses a direct threat to those communities and everyone else in the country, Bridges said. “My fear is that if people come to associate Covid-19 with nonwhite death, if it comes to be associated with black people’s deaths, any will that the U.S. had to competently and humanely manage the pandemic will just be lost.”

The post Racism, Rather Than Facts, Drove U.S. Coronavirus Travel Bans appeared first on The Intercept.

“This was not a game. I had enough proof, and I thought that I would be able to get across,” said Abigail, who is identified by a pseudonym for her protection. “When you face a serious risk, they usually go over your case.”

The coronavirus, which has infected over 4 million people, has also been the justification for historic immigration restrictions. In March, the U.S. government announced people who crossed the border unlawfully would immediately be sent back “to protect the public health.” Mexico, which eventually vowed to get all migrants out of its detention centers, suddenly had thousands more on its hands.

Since the U.S. began the expulsions, on March 21, it has sent over 20,000 migrants back, mainly to Mexico. About a third of them are Central Americans. The health of those migrants has been endangered for weeks, as they have been ping-ponged between detention centers, flown to countries they had fled, or bused to southern Mexican states with instructions to walk if they wished to get home. Mexico’s promise, which seemed like a blessing for migrants, for many became an ordeal.

Since March 21, the U.S. has sent over 20,000 migrants back to Mexico.

“They’re taking advantage of the pandemic in order to cleanse the country of migrants,” said María Magdalena Silva Renteria, the director of a shelter, CAFEMIN, said of the Mexican government.

As the Trump administration has made it harder to obtain asylum in recent years, Mexico has operated in lock-step. It became a waiting ground when the U.S. restricted the number of daily asylum requests at ports of entry. Last year, it became a temporary residence, as the U.S. forced thousands of people to wait for court dates under the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols. The expulsion order, which seals the border to asylum-seekers and other undocumented migrants, is the most extreme measure the U.S. has foisted onto Mexico.

When Mexico began emptying its detention centers in late March, it appeared to be one of the few countries that heeded advocates’ warnings about the risk the virus posed for incarcerated people. In the span of a month, Mexico dropped the nearly 3,800 migrants in its custody to a previously unimaginable 106. For some that was still too slow: Migrants desperate for release set fires in their detention centers, leading to one death. And by then, Central American countries had already closed their borders, slowing deportations and leaving many in limbo.

It had taken Abigail, a middle-aged house cleaner who had never before left El Salvador, 22 days to reach Texas. It would take her another 21 to get all the way home. She would go through stays in two crowded Mexican detention centers, a 24-hour bus trip, and a plane ride with deportees who sometimes slipped off their face masks before getting back to El Salvador, where she would be forced into a month-long quarantine.

If any detainee had the coronavirus during the weeks she was locked in with them in Mexico, Abigail imagines there was no way to avoid getting it. She had spent her nights, at best, a pinky’s distance from other migrants. For a time, she slept head-to-toe with another woman on the same mattress, trying to avoid the stranger’s breath. Other detainees had fevers and colds.

Abigail thinks that if her phone had been on during her travels, instead of turned off to save data, she would have seen the news that the U.S. border had closed. “Sometimes, when you’re walking, you lose your sense of time,” she said. “It was only when were in the mountains, to be precise, that we turned on our phones, and on social media we saw how the virus had spread.”

Several hundred people who were detained in Mexico were transferred to local shelters or granted housing assistance, but the vast majority — including Abigail — were not. Now, alone in a quarantine center on El Salvador’s coast, she is unsure what’s next. “All of my life has been dangerous,” she said, “but now the situation is critical, because the illness is everywhere.”

What happened to the thousands of people expelled by the U.S. over the last seven weeks, if they were not kept in Mexican custody? To some, Mexico offered a binary choice: wait for Mexican asylum, or go home. To others, it handed out temporary visitors’ permits, often only after sending them to Mexico’s southern border, which many saw as an invitation to leave.

Never, in advocates’ experience, had so many migrants, fearing contagion or homelessness, sought so swiftly to go home. Many of the individuals Mexican officials did hold, either before or after they crossed the U.S. border, were unsure if they’d be let out, even if they asked for asylum. The national asylum office, while still accepting applications, has ceased most other functions.

“Can you imagine the stress of being locked up in the middle of a ton of people? I thought about it for a long time, and then I decided it’s better to ask for deportation,” said Francisco Sánchez Rojel, 19, a Honduran held in one of the centers where detainees set fire to their mattresses.

But as Central America temporarily barred deportations, not even those who wanted to fly home could. One document, issued to a Honduran migrant in Reynosa, along the Texas border, says that once a bus left her near the Guatemalan border, she should “continue her trip to her country of origin.” Never mind that Guatemala had no public transport, and that she didn’t have permission to enter the country.

Advocates, who won a lawsuit demanding the release of at-risk migrants, struggled to find out where they went. Hundreds of migrants left in Mexico’s southernmost states were sighted walking. Some snuck through unofficial crossing points on foot, despite Guatemala’s refusal to accept them. Others begged for transport. They later popped up along on the Honduran border.

Harlin Antonio López, 22, a Honduran asylum seeker, said he was released from Mexican custody in February. He feared having nowhere to live during the pandemic. A shelter in Mexico City offered him a space, but the Mexican government did not approve his transfer. When he took a train north, he was caught, then bused with other migrants to Guatemala’s edge and left on the road.

“They let us off the bus five at a time, abandoning us,” he said. He was determined to stay in Mexico, but other people from the buses tried to cross into Guatemala. He said local Guatemalan residents threatened to beat them up, since they worried they carried the virus, and blocked their entry.

“We were like chickens in their cages in the plane. … We came as though we were not all living through a pandemic.”

People deported from the U.S. had already tested positive for coronavirus, and there were fears that people coming from Mexico could as well. Last week, the Guatemalan government reported that four minors deported from Mexico were infected, despite having no prior symptoms.

“Every day, we’ve got health personnel on the border to detect suspicious cases of Covid-19,” said Manuel Cardona Hernández, a public health official in the Guatemalan department of Petén. “But we’re a border region, in which you can cross over to Mexico by water or by river, and we have a ton of blind spots, where anybody can get through.”

Neighbors have heckled people coming home. Sánchez Rojel said that after he walked 18 hours from Honduras’s capital, after his deportation flight, he felt faint. Soldiers whom he asked for help made him wait days on the roadside for a coronavirus test. By luck, it was negative, but he understands why they — and his family — were suspicious.

“We were like chickens in their cages in the plane, and on the bus, too. We were on top of one another,” he said. “We came as though we were not all living through a pandemic.”

Mexico, in its announcement that it had emptied its detention centers, assured that the most vulnerable — children, families, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses — were the first to be sent home. Advocates fear that people who are left in Mexico, bereft of earnings and remittances due to the virus’s economic impact, will become undocumented mid-pandemic, whenever their temporary documents expire in the next few months.

“We fought for people to be let out of the detention centers, because we thought that the risks inside were greater inside, but there have to be alternatives, so they do not end up homeless,” said Sergio Otal Aznar, the project coordinator for the Jesuit Refugee Service in Mexico. “In the markets and streets, we see a degree of misery far higher than before.”

“In the markets and streets, we see a degree of misery far higher than before.”

Mexico’s mercurial strategy left many migrants thousands of miles from where they intended to be during the pandemic. The country has far fewer coronavirus cases than the U.S., but many migrants say that does not necessarily make it safer. They are likely to have split futures: some, like López, will work for coins. Others, with more money, will refuse to stay.

The routes frequented by migrants are nearly empty now, just like Mexico’s detention centers. But 24-year-old Bryan, whose name has been changed due to fear of repercussion by U.S. authorities, said migrants like him can’t wait. He was deported to Honduras in March after living in the U.S. for twenty years. He headed north within days, was caught in Mexico and sent to two detention centers before being released. Last month, he crossed the border near Reynosa.

U.S authorities turned him back after finger-printing him. Three days later, he planned a second attempt. “The coronavirus does not scare me. I don’t know if it’s real, if it’s a lie. I haven’t seen anyone who has died of it,” he said. “My biggest concerns is my daughter and my mother. I want to get to them.”

The post With Coronavirus Spreading, Mexico Vowed to Empty Detention Centers — But Migrants Were Thrust Into Chaos and Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s hard to weigh competing emotions — the current misery of confinement, the fear of future death — as detained asylum-seekers are forced to do. Humans recoil from death as well as from captivity. We want to live and we want to live free. We want both.

Since detention standards were changed in 1996, the U.S. government, in direct refutation to the 1951 Refugee Convention, has locked up hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers who have broken neither domestic nor international law. The idea is to use them as an example of the misery the government is willing to draw on the bodies and minds of those seeking its protection, in order to convince future asylum-seekers from even trying.

When former White House chief of staff John Kelly first introduced the idea of separating migrant families in 2017, he said, “Yes, I’m considering” family separation “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network. I am considering exactly that.” But deterrence — prolonged detention, family separation, or forcing migrants to walk through the remote deserts — doesn’t work. Bertha, for example, a 63-year-old Honduran grandmother fleeing to save her and her granddaughter’s life, came to the United States knowing that they would likely be detained. And they were. Even after Bertha’s granddaughter was released, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Bertha locked up for almost two years.

Humans recoil from death as well as from captivity. We want to live and we want to live free. We want both.

I met Bertha in a small echoic room in the El Paso Processing Center, in her 18th month of detention. Boggled as to why ICE would detain, for such a long time, a shy grandmother with developing health complications who poses neither flight risk nor security concern, I asked her lawyer, Ed Beckett, if he knew why the government hadn’t released her.

They’re just assholes, Beckett told me. Cruel and unusual punishment, that’s about it. I think she’s a prime example of deterrence.

At her first asylum hearing in the low-ceilinged court inside the El Paso Processing Center, Bertha was denied asylum but was offered protection and relief from deportation through the Convention Against Torture. But then, a few days after the hearing, and before she was released, the judge suddenly changed his mind and reversed his decision. As Beckett helped Bertha appeal, she was kept in detention.

I’ve been in here 18 months, she told me in the spartan interview room. I’m from the department of Cortés. I came to the bridge on November 18. We were in the hielera — an icebox, and the common Spanish name for freezing-cold holding cells — for one day, and then they sent us here. I came … I fled. We came together. My granddaughter was only 14, her name is Yariela. The gangsters wanted her to be their wife. But I couldn’t let that happen. And then they wanted to kill me. They said they were going to kill me. We left the next day. I knew … well, I’m scared to return to my country, that’s what I told them.

I asked her what the security situation was like in her hometown.

I lost my grandson on October 11, 2013. They disappeared him. We don’t know where he is. I raised them both. Their mom was already here, in Houston. And when we had to leave, we just left, without hardly anything. We ran out of money in Guatemala. We had to go asking for money, asking for alms, for food. I was asking God for help. We traveled by bus. I wouldn’t know how to take a train. We were hungry sometimes, but people treated us OK. They gave us food.

They respected me because of my age. An abuelita. A little grandmother.

That’s why we left. Because a gangster was trying to make my granddaughter his wife. I turn to ice when I think about going back there.

I came to ask for protection. I didn’t kill anyone, she says. She began counting on her fingers, starting with her thumb, then index finger. I didn’t rob anyone. I don’t do drugs, don’t have anything to do with drugs. She held up all five fingers to me, and then dropped her hand. I’m clean. A good woman. My daughter is the only one who helps me with some money, for the vending machine, for phone calls, but I can’t stand anything from the vending machines anymore. I can’t stand the soda … I’m just asking God to get me out of here. And my granddaughter. She asks me, she’s so sad, she asks me, Mami, she calls me, why don’t they let you out? And she starts to cry. You raised me. Please come here with me.

You can’t make a complaint or go to the police back in Honduras, Bertha told me, because they’ll know. They have a system, they can track you. I was looking for my grandson after he disappeared, but trying not to make too much noise. And we never found him. I imagine that they killed him, dropped him off somewhere, in some ditch, that’s how they do it. You can’t try to talk to the police or they’ll disappear you. If you see something, she said, and then zipped her lips with a finger.

I don’t know why there’s so much violence. I can’t explain it. It started around, around 2000. It wasn’t like this when I was a girl. Everything was much calmer. But it’s so bad now. Everybody, so many people are leaving. They told me they had to separate us, but they didn’t tell me where they were taking her. I was so … I never expected to be here so long.

To kill time I read the Bible. I also like to play Monopoly. I used to play with this other woman, from Honduras. We played a game last night. But she left today.

I asked her who won.

She smiled, embarrassed. I did, she said. I’ll miss her a lot. She went back to Honduras, just today. I lie in bed and read the Bible. The Psalms. My dad died when he was 91 years old, and he told me, hija, for this, your tongue, she said, and stuck out her tongue, they’ll kill you … for talking, for saying what you see. The gangs, they were taking money, war taxes. They charge you for everything. There wasn’t any more money for food.

Here, in detention, we wake up at five, we have breakfast. Lunch at 11. And dinner at 4:30. But sometimes I’m hungry at night. At home we ate at nine. I get hungry at midnight. Sometimes I buy something from the vending machine, but I don’t like those crackers or cookies anymore. I don’t even like soda. I go to bed hungry. Lights out at nine o’clock. There’s count three times a day. At 10 in the morning, at 3:30, and at nine. At count we have to be quiet. We have to lie in our beds and we can’t talk. If we make noise we get in trouble. At night though, it’s hard to sleep. If someone’s snoring, she says, laughing and putting her hands on her cheeks, we have to deal with it. There’s always someone in the barracks with us. One of the guards. They’re not mean, but they talk strong if we’re loud, if someone’s talking during count. She paused to think. Sometimes, to pass the time, I draw. I draw flowers, princesses, little animals, things like that. Curlicues. Just to pass the time.

It’s not good to be in here. This situation … it’s like a purgatory. It’s like we’re never going to leave. I just think I’m never going to leave. If I get out I’m going to do what I always do, follow the right path. Be good. Do right. We’re all the same. You have to treat people nice. I hope, I hope that God forgives the United States. They have no heart. We’re people. We’re old women. We can’t be here. I don’t know why they don’t let us go. I just don’t know why.

Bertha started telling me about her favorite Psalms, but then one of the guards interrupted us. Our time was up. I told her I would read a couple of her recommendations, and, as I scribbled into my notebook and the guard stood watching us, she told me to read Psalms 23, 91, 102, 27, and 71.

“This situation … it’s like a purgatory. It’s like we’re never going to leave.”

It had been a long time since I read any of them, and, at my hostel later that night, as I began to read them on my computer, I wondered at first if all the Psalms referred to danger and searching for refuge in times of trouble and old age, or if she had just selected those that so precisely fit her situation.

I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress. Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler. He shall cover you with His feathers, and under his wings you shall take refuge. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday. For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned like a hearth. My heart is stricken and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread. My bones cling to my skin. I am like a pelican of the wilderness, I am like an owl of the desert. I lie awake, and am like a sparrow alone on the housetop. Do not cast me off in the time of old age. Do not forsake me when my strength fails. You prepare a table before me. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over.

In the summer of 2018, after 20 months of detention, Bertha lost her appeal and was deported alone back to Honduras. When I think of her now, I think of another poem, the line from Keats — “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow” — and of Saint Oscar Romero, who was reading the 23rd Psalm, one of Bertha’s recommendations, during mass on the day he was assassinated in the cathedral in El Salvador’s capital. “May God have mercy on the assassins” were the archbishop’s last words.

Sixteen hours after a Salvadoran army sniper pulled the trigger and killed Romero, on March 24, 1980, the U.S. House Foreign Operations Subcommittee began hearings on the $5.7 million in military aid that the archbishop had begged President Jimmy Carter not to send, which Romero said would “surely increase injustice here and sharpen the repression that has been unleashed.”

Though the vote was postponed, the military aid was eventually approved.

Joan Didion described the administration’s account of the Salvadoran government’s progress toward human rights, on which the U.S. aid depended, as hallucinatory. The adjective also would apply to ICE’s self-proclaimed compliance with its own standard of guaranteeing “safe, secure, and humane environments” for what it calls “custodial supervision.”

The post “It’s Like Purgatory”: How the U.S. Has Undermined the Promise of Asylum appeared first on The Intercept.

With new immigration restrictions just announced by Donald Trump in response to the spread of the coronavirus, the family now find themselves facing ever-mounting hurdles to their simple goal of being all together again.

“I don’t know what should I do. Because when you don’t know when you can go completely from one country to another country, you cannot plan for your life,” said Masoud from isolation in Iran, the site of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the Middle East.

Masoud and his father are part of a lawsuit challenging Trump’s travel ban — famously enacted when he took office and amended until it was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018. It barred, to different extents, people from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Chad from visiting or immigrating to the U.S. The suit challenges the waiver process, which in theory allows people to circumvent the ban but in practice is often incomprehensible and inconsistent. From an original group of 25, plaintiffs have melted away as their waivers have been belatedly granted while litigation drags on, leaving only three families, including the Shamelis.

“Every time somebody got it, we were hopeful that, OK, next round is our turn,” said Ehsan, the second oldest brother. Watching the dwindling group gave the family hope that Masoud could soon be next, even as the agony of waiting continued.

“They have the travel ban. They have the actual borders closed between Turkey and Iran. They have the Covid-19 ban that came out last month. And now they have this one.”

Those hopes took a hit as the health crisis shut down travel and the operations of U.S. consulates abroad. At the end of February, Trump signed a proclamation specifically barring people who had spent the prior 14 days in Iran from traveling to the United States, with a few exceptions that did not apply to Masoud.

Then, last week, Trump issued another proclamation, this time generally suspending immigrant visas for people outside the United States. The order is framed as a way to address the “risk to the labor U.S. labor market” that has resulted from the pandemic’s hit to the economy. Again, Masoud did not qualify for any of the exceptions the White House allowed.

These cascading legal obstacles mean that even if tomorrow Masoud is issued a waiver under the travel ban, or wins his legal case challenging it, the other two presidential orders will block him from receiving an immigrant visa or traveling to the United States. And that’s setting aside the difficulty of leaving Iran in the first place.

“They have the [original] travel ban. They have the actual borders closed between Turkey and Iran. They have the Covid-19 ban that came out last month. And now they have this one. So this is a fourth barrier,” said Curtis Morrison, an attorney representing the family in the federal case.

Masoud is left in limbo. “He wanted to do a Ph.D. in Iran,” said Reza, his father. “But he said, ‘Perhaps tomorrow I will come to the United States and I prefer to continue my education there. Or we insisted to him to get married. And he said, ‘If I want to come to the United States, what happens to my wife?’”

The family is about as good an example as you can find of the United States’ complex and multifaceted immigration system. Two of the brothers, Amin and Ashkan, went the employment immigration route, getting visas through their jobs; parents Reza and Zahra won the diversity visa lottery, bringing with them Ali, the youngest of the sons at 28; and Ehsan came through family reunification via his wife, whom he met while traveling on business to California. Masoud is being sponsored by his father for a family visa.

“In this lockdown, I’m completely at home alone. … If something happened, there is no one here to help me.”

The five brothers bear a strong resemblance to each other and to their father. All have technical degrees in science or engineering. The only difference between Masoud, a civil engineer, and the six members of his nuclear family who have made it to California appears to be bad timing. “If this proclamation was not in place, he would have been here for more than a year now,” said Ehsan, referring to the original travel ban.

The urgency to have Masoud join them stateside isn’t just sentimental in nature. The family lives in fear of an escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Reza specifically mentioned Trump’s recent remarks about firing on Iranian boats. Ehsan said his father had started taking antidepressants after a recent skirmish between U.S. and Iranian sailors. There’s also the ever-present specter of the pandemic. “In this lockdown, I’m completely at home alone. … If something happened, there is no one here to help me, you know?” said Masoud.

Trump’s latest order technically only lasts for 60 days, but it could be extended. Unlike prior travel bans that were framed around national security and public health, this one explicitly ties itself to labor, claiming to protect jobless Americans, which is probably a signifier that the White House’s immigration restrictionists — in particular, Trump adviser Stephen Miller — will try to make it permanent. Miller said in a call with conservative supporters this week that the order was a step in the process “to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.”

“Mission accomplished,” he said, adding that additional restrictions on temporary guest workers — excluded from this order after outcry from business groups — were still a priority. Indeed, the order includes a section titled “additional measures” that leaves the door open for expanded restrictions.

The latest proclamation doesn’t include any kind of waiver process. Asked if there were any provisions for applicants to override the ban, a State Department spokesperson reiterated the exemptions already set forth in the order.

Kia Nasseri, another plaintiff in the travel ban case, didn’t sleep last Monday night, when Trump tweeted that he’d be signing an executive order “to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” Nasseri is a U.S. citizen married to an Iranian woman whose daughter, now 19, fled her abusive father in Iran about three years ago. Nasseri has been trying to bring his stepdaughter to the U.S., but his efforts were thwarted by the travel ban. She has passed through Turkey, Armenia, Ecuador, and Georgia, running out tourist visas while waiting for a resolution.

She is now in Ankara, Turkey, where she overstayed her visa because the pandemic prevented her from leaving. To make matters worse, Nasseri’s wife went to visit her, and is now also stuck. At the moment, it’s Turkish, not American, travel restrictions leaving his wife stranded; permanent residents like her are exempt from Trump’s new order. So are children under 21 with U.S. citizen parents, like his stepdaughter, though she is still blocked by the original travel ban. Nasseri fears that Trump’s newest could be amended or expanded, putting even more obstacles in his family’s path.

“She’s not studying, she’s basically wasting her life,” said Nasseri of his daughter. He has had three surgeries that have decreased his lung function, and he has high blood pressure. “If I catch coronavirus, there’s a big possibility I’m going to pass. So I’m going to pass without seeing my daughter. And if they get it, I’m going to take the first plane there to take care of them, and I’m going to risk my life for them,” he said. “All I want is an answer, a yes or no answer. If it’s a no, that’s fine with me. I’ll just retire and cash out everything I have and move to another country and take my family with me.”

The post First the Muslim Ban, Now Coronavirus — Iranian Families Separated by One Trump Order After Another appeared first on The Intercept.

With Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, Joe Biden has become the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. The almost-octogenarian old-guard white male has nearly 40 years of seasoning in Washington, stewing in the Beltway’s conventional foreign policy wisdom. It’s a school of thought that overlooks corruption and human rights abuses when it’s convenient, prioritizes aid to police and militaries, relies on international development bank loans contingent upon strict austerity measures, and favors corporate-friendly policies which often include natural resource extraction. When it comes to Latin America, Biden’s campaign platform is particularly uninspiring and, indeed, downright damaging.

No one denies that the Trump administration has been uniquely calamitous for Latin America — both with regards to foreign policy and to Latin American migrants who want to make a life in the United States. Trump and his acolytes have caged children, slashed refugee and asylum protections, forced people into dangerously squalid camps in northern Mexico, and detained more migrants in the United States than ever before. They’ve also cut aid to Central America, forced regional governments to receive asylum-seekers when they are clearly unable to offer safety, looked the other way in the face of serious human rights violations and rampant corruption, and emboldened aspiring autocrats like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to lash out at the media and tighten their grips on power. Slamming the brakes on these policies must be a priority for a Democratic administration, but it won’t be nearly enough. If Biden wins the nomination and the presidency, he will also face a region suffering the impact of the novel coronavirus (spread, in some cases, by deportations from the United States) and crippled by economic recession, as well as the drying up of remittances from outside.

Biden once said, “The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America.

Yet Biden, in promising a return to what he recalls as the golden days of the Obama administration in which he served, and in touting that administration’s approach to migration and the region’s multifaceted crises, all while reaching further back to claim credit for the multibillion-dollar anti-drug campaign Plan Colombia, offers a return to a status quo that was rank with its own problems. Biden’s rubric of stratagems may not be as bitterly cruel as those of the Trump administration, but it still supports short-term American interests, overlooks serious human rights abuses, relies on militarized “security” responses to instability, and promotes an extractive neoliberal agenda.

Biden’s plan for Central America — one of 28 “bold ideas” featured on his campaign website — dressed up in left-tilting rhetoric for primary season, harkens back to the same, often failing and sometimes flailing, strategies he espoused as vice president and as a senator.

As Biden put it to Politico in 2014,“The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand.” Nowhere is that clearer than in Latin America.

Plan Colombia

Though a senator since 1973, Joe Biden only began marking his “brand” in Latin America with Plan Colombia, a massive foreign and military aid package aimed at taking down the illegal drug trade that was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 2000. Biden championed the legislation as member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, in a way, the plan was a continuation of the anti-drug measures he’d promoted throughout the 1980s as a member of the Judiciary Committee. Domestically, as a tough-on-crime senator, Biden pushed for more policing, even criticizing Reagan for not locking up enough people. In Latin America, efforts Biden backed played out as whack-a-mole strategies, with the Drug Enforcement Agency and international partners chasing drug traffickers from one route to another, but doing little to curb total production, demand, or the northward flow of drugs. Plan Colombia only increased the emphasis on a heavy-handed, militarized response to the drug problem, pushing production and trafficking routes from more isolated to more populated parts of Colombia. As Steven D. Cohen put it recently in The Baffler, “Plan Colombia was in effect to Global South pacification what the 1994 crime bill had been to domestic policing.”

This past January, during a primary campaign stop, Biden said to the Des Moines Register, “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia,” which, given the legacy of the plan, might sound like a confession, but was certainly meant as a boast. Though it effectively achieved none of its original objectives, the plan continues to be lauded by some American politicians, including Biden, as an exemplary success — embodying the establishment’s tunnel-vision focus on military expenditures and open markets. John Kerry called Colombia, in reference to the plan, “one of the great stories of Latin America.” The plan has also served as a model for other such “security” policies throughout the region: in Mexico and in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the northern triangle of Central America.

“These human costs were never part of the policy calculus for Joe Biden.”

María Teresa Ronderos, a Colombian journalist who has written extensively on politics and war in the country, told me the plan was “a disaster — not something to be proud about.” Dawn Paley, author of “Drug War Capitalism,” explained that the plan was a “success” only in “in terms of opening up the country’s economy and laying the groundwork for the Colombia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement,” which was signed in 2006. In perhaps the most obvious sign of failure, after the implementation of the plan, cocaine flowed northward at higher rates and lower prices than ever before. The other clear result was an increase in violence: Between 2003 and 2007, the Colombian army, funded and emboldened by the United States, killed thousands of civilians and falsely claimed they were guerrilla soldiers killed in combat, in what became known as the “false positives” scandal. During the same period, as John Lindsay-Poland, author of “Plan Colombia,” explained, more than 7 million Colombians were displaced by the armed conflict. “These human costs were never part of the policy calculus for Joe Biden,” Lindsay-Poland said.

From 2000 to 2008, as Paley recounts in her book, “the Colombian military received $4.9 billion worth of U.S. State Department and Defense Department assistance, the majority of which was provided under the rubric of Plan Colombia.” Paley also notes that the CIA operated in the country with a “multibillion-dollar black budget,” and that “battalions of the Colombian army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to U.S. companies.” During the same period, there were more homicides counted than ever before in the nation’s history.

“If it was meant to put an end to the guerrilla armies, it wasn’t effective. If it was a plan to stop drug trafficking, it just pushed [trafficking] to more populated areas, which was overall worse for Colombia,” Ronderos told me.

Besides its anti-narcotics focus, Plan Colombia also helped speed along privatization and other neoliberal reforms. The International Monetary Fund, along with the World Bank, began working in Colombia to restructure its economy in 1990; in the following decade, the unemployment rate went from just over 10 percent to nearly 20 percent. In 1999, the IMF loaned the country $2.9 billion dollars that was contingent on strict austerity measures, including “severe cutbacks in public investment in basic social services-health care, education and social security.” Another $2.1 billion loan went through in 2003, along with another wave of austerity measures, including “the restructuring of the pension program, cuts to the public sector workforce, and the privatization of a major bank,” Paley wrote. (While not officially a part of Plan Colombia, the Colombian government leveraged the plan to push for the IMF loan.)

Paley also traces the benefits reaped from the plan by palm oil companies, mining companies, and major transnational corporations like Chiquita. Lower-class and especially rural Colombians saw little to none of those benefits, and millions of hectares of land were stolen from mostly Indigenous communities.

In 2020, Biden is again promoting, via his campaign platform, the so-called development banks as a key part of his Latin America policy, calling on the World Bank to prime Latin American countries to engage “with the private sector” and “promote foreign investment.” And he’s proudly claiming Plan Colombia as something that “strengthened that government out for a long while,” even as the country continues to teeter on the edge of war and the peace process signed in 2016 continues to unravel. In 2019, according to the U.N., there were between 107 and 120 human rights defenders killed in Colombia.

Alliance for Prosperity

The other major Latin American policy that, despite its towering failures, Biden boasts of being an architect of, was called the Alliance for Prosperity. It came in 2014, on the heels of an increase in the arrival of Central American children at the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom came alone, seeking asylum. Biden referred to the children at the time as a “dangerous surge of migration.” Dana Frank, professor emerita of history at University of California Santa Cruz and an expert on Honduras, sees that framing as “fanning the flames of hysteria, and setting the stage for Trump” to invoke anti-immigration sentiment and ride it to victory in 2016.

The money went to “increasingly militarized police forces and military forces involved in countless human rights abuses.”

Biden was dispatched by Obama to address the crisis and responded by requesting a billion dollars to supposedly tackle the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The money — $750 million was eventually approved — primarily went to security assistance, which increased from $161 million in 2015 to $252 million in 2016. As Alexander Main, of the Center for Economic Policy Research, put it, the money was for “increasingly militarized police forces and military forces involved in countless human rights abuses, including the assassination of activists like Berta Cáceres in Honduras,” which involved at least three active and retired military officials.

Frank sees the aid as “just a front for how U.S. officials want to shore up these regimes … basically giving even more money to the perpetrators.” She pointed out that there’s no way Biden and others in the U.S. government didn’t know about rampant corruption in the region. Juan Orlando Hernández, elected as president of Honduras in disputed elections in 2013, for example, has since been accused by U.S. prosecutors of taking drug money for both his 2013 and 2017 election campaigns. His brother has been charged with drug trafficking, his wife has been implicated, and Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán allegedly gave him $1 million in exchange for protection. In 2014, in celebration of the Alliance for Prosperity, Biden, bearing his signature alligator grin, posed with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador. Biden and Hernández were both giving thumbs-up. (Last August, Biden called Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro “a tyrant, who has stolen elections, abused his authority, allowed his cronies to enrich themselves.” He has offered no such condemnation of Honduras president Hernández, who has done all of the same.)

Despite an ongoing exodus from the region, Biden claims that “the Biden approach” to Central America “reduced violence and helped to ensure that families and children remained in their home countries.” Though emigration from Central America dipped briefly in 2015, it has continued at 2014 levels or higher ever since, with record numbers of people seeking asylum since 2014. Asylum claims at the southern border increased fourfold from 2014 to 2017. And while some statistics point to a decrease in homicides in Honduras, for example, Peter Hakim, president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, is dubious of that accounting. “They fudged figures in the election,” he said. “Why couldn’t they fudge homicide statistics?”

“Particularly troubling,” Main of CEPR told me, “is the fact that according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, there has been ‘no real assessment of outcomes’ for most of the over $2 billion worth of U.S. assistance programs since 2013, and the few assessments that the GAO obtained showed, at best, ‘mixed results.’” CEPR showed in a 2016 report that the one study frequently pointed to as proof of a positive outcome from security aid was “based on flawed statistical analysis, and its findings therefore had no validity.”

Still, in 2020, the Biden campaign proposes more of the same: a four-year, $4 billion investment plan for Central America, with a few new details thrown in. In acknowledging the destabilizing and migration-driving effects of climate change in the region, for example, the only response the Biden plan offers is support for unspecified “clean energy” and a vague throwaway line about “adaptation and resilience.” This relegates one of the most severe problems in the region — a ravaging yearslong drought that is pushing huge tracts of Central America to desperation — to an imprecise talking point.

“Many people are leaving Honduras in part because their electrical bills have shot up dramatically.”

As with Colombia, Biden claims the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank can develop infrastructure in the region. To cite Honduras again, the country has relied on multimillion-dollar loans contingent on austerity before, with the government using the money to build infrastructure for export-oriented sweatshops that have since spawned gang-ruled slums in their circumference. Honduras also succumbed to IMF pressure to privatize energy companies. In 2019, “many people are leaving Honduras in part because their electrical bills have shot up dramatically,” Frank told me.

It’s also revealing to look at what’s not in Biden’s current proposal for Central America. “There is nothing in there about the enormous human rights crisis, and little to offer about building a functional state that should provide health care and other basic services. It’s all about extraction,” Frank said. Biden, she said, “has been a key cause in producing and exacerbating the very problems he is now claiming to address.”

Migration

Any assessment of foreign policy in Latin America cannot ignore U.S. immigration policy. Remittances from Salvadoran and Honduran migrants living in the United States account for around 20 percent of each countries’ GDP. Overall, hundreds of thousands of migrants are deported to the region every year, and hundreds of thousands also migrate to or toward the United States. Migration from the Northern Triangle “cannot be effectively addressed if solutions only focus on our southern border,” another “bold idea” from Biden’s 2020 campaign website correctly remarks.

But Biden’s ideas for what lies beyond the southern border still prioritize stopping migration over improving lives. Along with the Alliance for Prosperity, the Obama administration pushed Mexico to establish the Programa Frontera Sur, funding and inciting Mexican officials to crack down heavily on Central American migrants in southern Mexico. As a result, migrants were pushed into more dangerous territory, where notoriously abusive Mexican agents hounded, arrested, abused, and sometimes killed them with blanket impunity. (Trump took a similar approach, though he has threatened rather than funded the Mexican government to crack down on U.S.-bound migration.)

At the same time, though deportations from the United States dropped in 2014 and 2015, there were still significantly more deportations under Obama and Biden than during any other administration. If Obama was the deporter-in-chief, as critics and immigrant rights activists took to calling him, Biden was his deputy. While Trump has deported fewer people in his first three years in office than the same period under Obama, he has locked up significantly more. And yet, as Christina Fialho, co-founder and co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, told The Intercept, “The expansion of immigration detention since the early 1980s has been a bipartisan initiative. Where we are today is the result of three decades of increasingly aggressive policies under both parties’ leadership.”

Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, emphasized the fact that “the Obama administration greatly increased the immigration detention infrastructure.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Shah added. “With Covid-19, the demand to end immigration detention has become clearer and more urgent. The billions of taxpayer dollars used to fund ICE’s detention system should instead be used to fund critical healthcare, education, and housing programs that support our collective wellbeing.”

“We cannot just undo the Trump administration’s policies or revert to the Obama administration’s policies. We must end the whole system.”

As Shah’s comment reflects, the Democratic Party during Trump’s presidency has moved left on immigration, and Biden has tried to claim that he has too. His campaign website states that as president, he would “immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies,” listing off the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols, asylum bans, family separation, and expanded detention among other policies he plans to end. In the last debate with Sanders, he committed to a temporary moratorium on deportations.

But the anti-immigration momentum built up by the Trump administration — with immigration judges, the Supreme Court, and attorneys general locking in xenophobic policies; the continued construction of wall and fencing infrastructure along the southern border; and an emboldened ICE and Border Patrol — cannot be “immediately” done away with. And given Biden’s history, advocates are skeptical that he will carry through with his left-leaning promises.

“If we truly want to be a country that lives by its values of ‘liberty and justice for all,’ we cannot just undo the Trump administration’s policies or revert to the Obama administration’s policies. We must end the whole system,” Fialho added. Building a more just and human system of immigration will require ideas outside the Biden brand.

The same is true of foreign policy. As Paley put it, “Biden’s plan represents the continuation of the same model of military and private sector intervention in Central America that has displaced and harmed so many.” While there’s nothing bold in his plans for Latin America, there is plenty that is old, and Biden’s position is clear: He promises more Biden.

The post We Need to Reverse the Damage Trump Has Done in Latin America. Biden’s Plans Don’t Cut It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet as the coronavirus pandemic rages around the country, killing thousands of people per day and spreading among Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees, Lorena is free, staying at a friend’s house in Arizona, while María remains detained at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, growing ever more fearful that the virus will take her health, and maybe her life.

Pressure is growing on ICE to quickly release as many detainees as possible, as migrants stage protests and a flurry of legal actions bear down on the agency. Yet ICE remains recalcitrant, opaque, and unpredictable in its decision-making. One side effect of the coronavirus outbreak may be a growing awareness of just how many people in ICE detention simply don’t have to be there.

ICE has full discretion to unilaterally release people in its custody who are not otherwise subject to mandatory detention, through humanitarian parole, bond, or own their own recognizance. Of the roughly 34,000 people in ICE custody, the majority are not subject to mandatory detention, and about 6,000 of them have completed the initial step toward seeking asylum. Nonetheless, ICE is reportedly only considering the release of about 600 detainees it deems vulnerable.

While there are some top-down directives supposedly guiding these decisions, it’s long been known that each ICE field office can operate like its own little fiefdom, with wildly different standards for release that can shift at the drop of a hat, even depending on the day or whether an officer is keen on antagonizing a specific detainee. A field office may decide one day that migrants newly barred from seeking asylum are no longer eligible for parole at all. Another may decide that detainees can only be released if they have immediate family in the United States, despite there being no such requirement under the law.

Before the pandemic, this arbitrariness kept otherwise releasable people in detention for longer, hampering their cases and sometimes leading them to accept deportation rather than remain indefinitely in jails or detention facilities that very much resemble jails.

One side effect of the coronavirus may be a growing awareness of just how many people in ICE detention simply don’t have to be there.

In the midst of an aggressive and uncontained contagion that thrives on physical proximity, the inscrutable processes that result in detention determinations are tantamount to life-or-death decisions. ICE currently acknowledges 72 confirmed cases of detainees with Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The fact that some of those who remain in detention will die is not really up for debate. The coronavirus has already killed inmates in jails and prisons around the country, including multiple in a single facility.

“Jails, prisons, and the immigration detention facilities are overcrowded. They are too crowded for people to practice social distancing, they are unhygienic, and they do not have the medical facilities to manage intensive care,” Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Intercept.

Beyrer explained that because the facilities are often in rural areas with limited health facilities, an outbreak could quickly overwhelm the local health system, which would likely be facing escalating numbers of cases both in and out of detention. “There’s lots of people in and out, and also out in the community. In the prison outbreaks that we know about — there was a major one in Wuhan, and there is now a major one underway on Rikers Island — it has been staff and guards who have been the vector for introducing this into the detention facility,” he said.

The threat of contagion is there even in the best of circumstances, and detention conditions certainly are not the best of circumstances. “The only additional precautions they’ve taken is putting a little bit more soap in the bathrooms so we can wash our hands. But it runs out because we’re like 50 women in this dorm, and so we’re without soap for a couple days until they refill it,” María said in a telephone interview from detention. (María and the other asylum-seekers interviewed for this story are identified by pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.) “We are very afraid. The officials here aren’t taking steps of any kind.”

On March 20, detainees at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana drafted an open letter to ICE and its supervisors at the Department of Homeland Security. “We, The Immigrants, detained for a very long period of time in the named detention center, request to you for freedom under any condition and supervision terms, parole, bond, bail or GPS tracker,” they wrote. “We are not criminals, our unique crime was to come to this country looking for asylum, and in this moment our biggest fear: we haven’t the sanitizer-hygienic conditions needed if the Virus would get into the center.”

“We are afraid because it’s about our life what we are talking about, nobody can minimize that,” the letter continued. “We want to touch your Human Sensibility to find the best answer to our cases and also we want to know who is the one with such responsibility.” A total of 179 detainees from South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia signed the letter.

A search of ICE detainee records shows that some of the letter’s signatories are no longer in the system, meaning that they have either been released or deported, while others remain at Richwood, and some have been transferred to detention centers that now have confirmed Covid-19 cases, like the LaSalle ICE Processing Center.

The answer to the detainees’ last question, about who bears the crucial responsibility to decide their fates, seems to be each individual deportation officer, operating in a separate context in each different field office.

“The discretion that ICE officers in particular have is longstanding. It’s baked into the Immigration and Nationality Act, into federal federal immigration law,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an author and law professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law who has long studied immigration detention. “When you transpose the very clear expectations articulated by the president and the heads of [the Department of Homeland Security] and ICE repeatedly for three and a half years, then the incentive is to take a more limited view of who merits release, rather than the view of the public health community.”

Sometimes, even the circumstances that led people to flee can end up damaging their chances of release once they reach the United States. María’s attorneys — Liza Doubossarskaia and Bridget Crawford of Immigration Equality, an organization dedicated to representing LGBTQ and HIV-positive immigrants — believe that, had she and Lorena been in a heterosexual relationship, their client might have already been out.

Crawford said it wasn’t the first time the organization had represented a same-sex couple in which one person was able to leave detention and the other was not. “If it was a heterosexual couple, I don’t think you’d necessarily have the same results. They would have been able to get married. But there’s a kind of discrimination that plays into some of these decisions,” she said.

“Currently, there is not a precedence within ICE to release detainees due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads an email sent April 8 by an ICE official in Georgia to attorneys with the Innovation Law Lab. The email came four days after ICE Assistant Director of Field Operations Peter Berg distributed guidance to field personnel directing them to “re-assess custody” of detainees with medical vulnerabilities — including those who were pregnant, over 60 years old, or had chronic conditions including blood disorders and lung disease — and the day after ICE assured congressional staffers that it would be following this policy.

Whether or not there’s a presumption to reconsider the release of at-risk detainees seems to depend on who you ask within ICE’s sprawling national bureaucracy. A Venezuelan asylum-seeker who spoke to The Intercept from the Krome Detention Center in Miami last week — a facility that has since had a confirmed case — was abruptly released on Saturday. Two days earlier, a detainee at the El Paso Processing Center in Texas was denied parole. “After reviewing all available information, you have failed to establish that to establish that parole is warranted based on urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” reads a denial letter signed by Field Office Director Corey Price.

Things can shift around quickly and without much explanation. Attorneys for Immigration Equality submitted a March 18 parole redetermination request for an HIV-positive client at the Richwood Correctional Center who had already been denied parole in February, writing that “he must be released due to the grave and imminent danger posed to him by COVID-19.”

ICE denied his parole redetermination request because a global pandemic, apparently, did not constitute a significantly changed circumstance.

On March 30, New Orleans field office director signed a form denying the parole request because, among other reasons, “ICE previously provided you with a written decision declining to grant parole, and you have failed to provide additional documentation or to demonstrate any significant changed circumstances which would alter ICE’s previous determination.” The global pandemic, apparently, did not constitute a significantly changed circumstance.

Less than a week later, the detainee was released, along with a handful of others. While his attorneys are glad that he’s out, they don’t seem entirely sure of what changed or why he’s out and others are still in.

In a statement, an ICE spokesperson wrote that “ICE makes custody determinations every day on a case-by-case basis. … When making such decisions, ICE officers weigh a variety of factors, including the person’s criminal record, immigration history, ties to the community, risk of flight, and whether he or she poses a potential threat to public safety. In response to this global pandemic, ICE has instructed its field offices to further assess and consider for release certain individuals deemed to be at greater risk of exposure, consistent with CDC guidelines. … Additionally, efforts to identify other individuals who may be more vulnerable to COVID-19, based on risk factors identified by the CDC, other than age and pregnancy, are ongoing.”

On March 26, Jaime was supposed to have a bond hearing, but it was cancelled when the clerk was unable to locate his file. “I felt so bad that morning, without hope. I felt like I was going to die in that place,” he said.

He had been detained at the Hudson County Correctional Facility in New Jersey for about three months. According to Jaime, the detainees had all been moved from a dormitory-style section of the center to a cell block on about March 10, but no one had told them why. It wasn’t until they started refusing food that the jail administration informed them about the pandemic raging outside its walls. “There were guys losing control, hitting the doors, some were screaming, some fainted,” he said.

Jaime had been hospitalized for pneumonia years earlier — before he, his wife and their three kids traveled from Central America to the U.S. southern border to seek asylum last year — so he knew that he was at greater risk. Despite that, his attorneys hadn’t managed to get even a response to several attempts at bond or humanitarian release.

The evening that his bond hearing had been canceled, Jaime was freed, but not by ICE. He was one of 10 people ordered released by a federal judge in New York, in response to a request filed by attorneys with the Brooklyn Defender Services. ICE and DHS “have exhibited, and continue to exhibit, deliberate indifference to Petitioners’ medical needs. The spread of COVID-19 is measured in a matter of a single day—not weeks, months, or years—and Respondents appear to ignore this condition of confinement that will likely cause imminent, life-threatening illness,” wrote District Judge Analisa Torres in her order.

The case is part of a battery of legal motions being brought around the country against ICE in federal court as a result of its inflexibility during the pandemic, which have so far been largely successful. Despite some losses, dozens of detainees have been ordered released.

These cases have mostly argued that continued detention is unconstitutional under the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, which ensure due process and prohibit cruel and unusual punishment. Attorneys are essentially arguing that at this point, no one in ICE detention is really safe, whether or not they have any particular vulnerability.

Attorneys are essentially arguing that at this point, no one in ICE detention is really safe, whether or not they have any particular vulnerability.

It’s a view with scientific support. “One of the things we’ve seen with this virus is that, yes, there are lots of people with preexisting conditions who do badly. There also are perfectly healthy people who are brought down by this. So it’s not enough to say a public health response is to get the people with underlying conditions out of there. That is absolutely essential, but it is insufficient,” said Beyrer, the epidemiologist.

Already, there are indications that ICE is not giving up the fight. In a response to a motion brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center seeking new parole decisions for any detainee who has passed a credible fear interview, ICE attorneys insisted that “parole is to be assessed on a ‘case-by-case basis,’” and “whether a medical condition warrants parole in any specific individual situation is a determination entirely within ICE’s discretion.”

In her own state of self-isolation, Lorena has plenty of time to worry about María, sitting in detention by herself. They speak frequently, and Lorena feels her partner growing frantic. She doesn’t understand the obscure forces that have acted to keep María in detention and can’t accept that maybe it doesn’t make sense. In dark moments, she wonders whether they made the right decision to come to the U.S. But then her resolve strengthens.

“Sometimes I feel that I’ve lost the battle, but then I think about everything I’ve been through and left behind, and it gives me the desire to keep fighting, even if I haven’t gotten to my goal,” she wrote in a text message. “I don’t want to do it without her, because only she and I know what it’s cost us to get where we are.”

The post Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, ICE Has Life-or-Death Power to Release Detainees appeared first on The Intercept.

Jasmine, a Cameroonian asylum-seeker who had been held at the facility since September of last year, said there were “no health services.”

“You’ll be sick, but people will say you are pretending,” she said. (Like other detained women interviewed for this story, she is identified by a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation from ICE.) Sarah, another Cameroonian asylum-seeker, said she had developed anemia while in detention and was given nondescript drugs that didn’t help. “It’s not changed. They have done no checks to see what’s the problem, and I’ve been living with that for three months, four months,” she said.

The women decided they’d had enough. Some of them drafted an open letter, and a group of more than 40 joined the sit-in. “The Cameroonians protested, saying, ‘We don’t want to live here any longer. The suffering is too much,’” said Jasmine.

A month later, the women have been separated, scattered by ICE to detention centers in the South where they are cut off from lawyers, support networks, and the group that had joined together in protest. And ICE is still refusing to consider their release — even in the midst of a global pandemic that could have deadly ramifications if it spreads in detention.

Jasmine said that if she’s going to be deported, she wishes that ICE would at least speed up the process, rather than leave her in detention.

“You don’t want to give us parole, let us go home. Give us court dates so that we can attend our court proceedings,” she told The Intercept by phone from the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, where she is now being held.

Earlier this month, The Intercept reported that migrants in various detention centers in South Texas were being denied parole as a result of the “transit bar,” a Trump administration policy that says migrants cannot access asylum if they did not try to first obtain it in any of the countries they crossed on their way to the U.S. Critics have dubbed it an asylum ban, due to its wide application. By default, it makes most non-Mexican asylum-seekers ineligible and forces them to apply for lesser forms of protection, such as withholding of removal or protections under the Convention Against Torture.

In denying parole to anyone subject to the transit bar, ICE seems to be relying on the logic that they are no longer asylum-seekers, who generally qualify for humanitarian release. Immigration lawyers have argued that such blanket denials are illegal since parole decisions are supposed to be made on a case-by-case basis.

Hutto was one of the detention centers where migrants were subjected to the blanket denials. The facility was holding a group of over 100 women from Cameroon, a country which has recently seen an exodus of refugees escaping an internecine conflict partially set off by U.S. intervention.

After the protest on February 24, in apparent retaliation, ICE transferred more than 160 Cameroonian women to separate detention centers in Texas and Louisiana (including some who had not been part of the protest.) The transfers began shortly after the sit-in, beginning with 47 women sent to Laredo Detention Center in Laredo, Texas, on February 27. Sarah was among this first group and said that the agents who moved her “didn’t say anything, they just chained us and transferred us,” in vans with their hands, feet, and stomach chained together.

About a week later, 120 more women were divided into three groups and sent to South Louisiana, Jackson Parish Correctional Center (also in Louisiana), and Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi. Such a transfer is more than a geographic move — it forces a change of venue for the detainees’ removal proceedings, canceling already-scheduled hearing dates, and putting them in areas where the courts are actually tougher and legal representation is harder to come by.

Women who were transferred, as well as attorneys and other representatives, told The Intercept that parole is still not being granted and that the transfers have plunged them into greater uncertainty about the state of their legal cases and future in the United States.

Marcel, a Cameroonian who arrived in the U.S. in 2016 and was granted asylum, has been trying to get his cousin Sophie released from Jackson Parish. “All the rape and killing in Cameroon — that caused a lot of people to be displaced, both internally and externally. She happened to be one of those people displaced externally,” he said.

“We would be done with this all. And now she’s in Louisiana, away from her counsel … so she really is being denied the right to have an attorney.”

Sophie arrived in Ecuador and made her way north through Central America and Mexico before arriving at the U.S. border around December. Marcel and other members of Sophie’s family live in Indiana and unsuccessfully attempted to get her paroled while she was still in Hutto. “So far, we have been able to establish the fact that we can accommodate her and give her some financial assistance and establish her identity. I don’t know why [ICE] is holding them,” he said. If Sophie was able to leave detention and start working, it would help her family afford a lawyer and make a stronger case for her to stay, he added.

“To raise five, six, seven thousand dollars for a lawyer is not easy. … I need to pay my bills, I can’t really put in a lot,” he said.

Jasmine had a hearing date to plead her case for protections set for April 21, at which point she would have been in detention for seven months. But since the move, she hasn’t received a new court date. “It has been postponed, but it’s indefinite. We don’t even have any information yet about the hearing. … They’re saying our documents have to be transferred here [from Hutto],” she said. She has not been able to get an attorney. “I tried some pro bonos, to no avail. I don’t have any. I’ve been trying to have one, I struggle to have one, but I don’t have any.”

Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at University of Texas School of Law, is having an inverse problem. She has a client who was moved from Texas to Louisiana and is unsure whether her team will be able to keep representing her. The client had a final hearing scheduled for March 25. “We would be done with this all,” Gilman said. “And now she’s in Louisiana, away from her counsel. We cannot, given the communication difficulties, prepare her for a final hearing … so she really is being denied the right to have an attorney.” Gilman is hoping to submit a new parole request but hasn’t even been told who to send it to.

Deborah Alemu, a community organizer who has been in touch with a number of women transferred from Hutto, said that “some of the women in Laredo have resubmitted for parole and been denied a second time,” adding that ICE had been asking detainees to prove they had close family in the U.S. in order to be considered. Jasmine also said that she had heard “if you don’t have a direct family member here, like brother, sister, father, mother, you cannot be eligible for parole.” In fact, while ICE may take into account whether a detainee has financial support or somewhere to go if paroled, there’s no statutory or regulatory requirement that they must have a nuclear family member in the U.S.

An ICE spokesperson told The Intercept that “in general, parole requests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on the totality of the circumstances.”

Access to humanitarian release has taken on added significance as the world grapples with the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus, an aggressive pathogen that is especially deadly for those with preexisting conditions, like Sarah and others in detention. ICE ramped up arrests earlier this year just as the virus was spreading and last week confirmed the first case of Covid-19 — the disease caused by the virus — among its detainee population. Advocates have been calling for ICE to release all detainees it is not required to hold by law, which is the majority of the roughly 37,000 people in custody.

“All these people have the prerequisites for parole release, and they should be released because the government has no ability to keep them safe right now.”

The ICE New Orleans office was the subject of a lawsuit, Mons v. McAleenan, which resulted in a judge ordering that ICE evaluate parole requests on a case-by-case basis (for the second time, as he had already issued a similar order in a prior lawsuit). Victoria Mesa, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said her team is getting ready to file a preliminary injunction request seeking to force ICE to release all of the detainees it can from its Louisiana detention centers.

“Our argument is very straightforward. All these people have the prerequisites for parole release, and they should be released because the government has no ability to keep them safe right now,” she said, pointing to the fact that Louisiana detention centers have dealt with various outbreaks of infectious disease recently. “The flu moves from dorm to dorm and then they go back to the same dorm again. So imagine that — they don’t even have control over the spread of the flu. What can we expect with Covid-19?”

Jasmine said that she and other detainees “are being provided with clothes and face masks, and being quarantined by dormitory. … We stayed inside, got our food inside,” said Jasmine.

Mesa’s team has been taking declarations from other women in the same dorms. According to her, they have described guards coming into the facilities straight from outside, with no special controls, at-risk women with health conditions not moved away, and difficulty in accessing legal counsel on account of strict limitations on movement.

The ICE spokesperson said that “ICE has taken extensive precautions to limit the potential spread of COVID-19,” including testing and screening of detainees, visitors, and staff at all facilities.

The post ICE Transferred Cameroonian Women After They Protested Their Detention. Now, Despite Coronavirus, It Won’t Grant Them Parole. appeared first on The Intercept.

In New York, however, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is bucking this trend, pushing for a new law that would roll back newborn bail reforms that went into effect in January and instead expand judges’ power to put defendants in jail. Cuomo has backed this agenda for years, but his evident insistence on including it in the state’s budget negotiations amid a public health crisis is nonetheless remarkable.

“Every other elected official across the country is thinking about how they can reduce their jail and prison population,” Rena Karefa-Johnson, the New York state director for criminal justice reform for the advocacy group FWD.us, said in an interview. “But in New York, we have elected officials still trying to change legislation that would put thousands more people back in jail and slowing up an emergency budget process to do it. It’s wildly out of step with what’s happening across the country, and it’s wildly at odds with this narrative of New York taking Covid-19 seriously and keeping people safe. It’s bonkers.”

The governor’s move comes as his power is ascendant. Cuomo has always wanted to be a crisis governor, engaging in well-documented disaster heroics whenever roadways get slippery. But that instinct, risible in peacetime, is playing differently in the pandemic. People in New York and around the country are terrified, and the erratic federal response under President Donald Trump has been far from reassuring. Cuomo’s sober, authoritative daily briefings have filled the vacuum. In the last weeks, Cuomo has become America’s Governor, its crisis daddy. In recent days the hashtag #PresidentCuomo has been trending on Twitter. With his popularity soaring, and his constituents preoccupied with looming mass fatalities as the coronavirus threatens to overwhelm the state’s health care capabilities, Cuomo is well positioned to drive through his preferred agenda with hardly anyone noticing.

“It’s wildly out of step with what’s happening across the country, and it’s wildly at odds with this narrative of New York taking Covid-19 seriously.”

Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but in recent weeks the Governor has repeatedly declared his intention in to put changes to bail reform in the budget.

In New York, state budget negotiations are opaque at the best of times. The governor and the leaders of the two houses of the legislature — the proverbial “three people in a room” — hash out a series of horse-trades and concessions, which are then presented to legislators as an omnibus mash for a single take-it-or-leave-it vote.

These are not the best of times. Several legislators have already been diagnosed with coronavirus infections, and the statehouse has been evacuated, with legislators sent home to shelter in place, unable to meet or debate. They’ve been told to be ready to return to the state capitol in Albany on short notice to approve a budget they’ve yet to see and are unlikely to have a chance to even read before they vote on it.

For the advocates and legislators who helped pass New York’s landmark bail reforms last year, Cuomo’s drive to reverse those gains by slipping language into an under-scrutinized, must-pass disaster budget is the height of antidemocratic shock-doctrine misgovernment.

“If we’re going to talk about this, then let’s talk about it when everyone is in Albany, when everyone is at the table,” said Assembly Member Latrice Walker, who sponsored last year’s bail reforms. “These backroom deals just don’t make sense.”

But with the help of Democrats in the state Senate, there’s a good chance Cuomo is about to have his way.

In the first weeks of this year, a coalition of police, prosecutors, and state Republicans, aided by a fear-mongering news media, launched a coordinated campaign against the new bail laws, which eliminated money bail for most offenses, meaning that instead of going to jail, most defendants would be released to prepare for their trials from home. The campaign seemed to be effective: a January 21 poll showed popular opinion, which had backed the reforms, swinging the other way.

Clearly frightened, Democrats in New York state Senate announced legislation to reverse the reforms they’d approved the previous year, granting judges the power to lock defendants up before trial if the judges deemed them “dangerous.” Now the possibility that some version of the Senate initiative winds up in the budget bill has become very real. But the details remain fuzzy: Would this new “dangerousness” standard be based on algorithmic predictive tools, which have been shown to produce racist outcomes? Or would judges have free reign to use their discretion, the same discretion that they used to fill New York’s jails by setting unaffordable bail? Just what Cuomo and Senate Democrats want is unclear, because the precise shape of this proposal remains a closely held secret. If the Senate has draft legislation it’s bringing to budget negotiations, it hasn’t been publicly released. Even among legislators, few will admit to having seen anything specific.

“It is undemocratic to slip policies into a budget that cannot be discussed by stakeholders who visit Albany or debated on the floor.”

Senate Democrats’ insistence on rolling back bail reforms is especially perplexing because the political forces that had driven them to scuttle their own landmark achievement have, for the moment at least, dissipated; as the pandemic set in, state Republicans appeared to ease off their efforts to paint the Democrats as soft on crime.

In a March 17 statement, state Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan called on the legislature to hold off on controversial policy debates during the pandemic. “It is undemocratic to slip policies into a budget that cannot be discussed by stakeholders who visit Albany or debated on the floor,” Flanagan wrote. “We can pass a streamlined budget that deals solely with the finances of the state and that pertains solely to the coronavirus crisis and go no further than those bounds.”

But Senate Democrats seem to have worked themselves into such a frantic lather defending against Republicans’ Willie Horton attacks that they’re now unable to stop. They’re chasing their own tails in a self-sustaining panic of triangulation even as there’s no one left to surrender to.

If criminal justice reformers are able to stave off the imposition of a dangerousness standard, it will likely be thanks to State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Heastie has declared his unwillingness to undo last year’s bail reforms before any data on whether they’re working can be gathered. That may involve other concessions though — perhaps expanding the list of alleged crimes for which judges would still be able to set money bail and jail defendants who can’t afford to pay it. That would be a bitter disappointment to criminal justice reformers, who foresee relentless efforts by opponents in coming years to nibble away at bail reform, adding bit by bit to the list of offenses for which a defendant’s wealth can determine her freedom. Still, reformers say, that compromise would be far preferable to a dangerousness standard, which many consider even more pernicious than money bail itself.

With so much confusion swirling around the New York capitol, it’s still possible that the governor and Senate Democrats will relent and put off debate on bail reform until a time when it can be thoroughly discussed. If not, Cuomo will have to figure out how to balance his new status as America’s Governor with a reputation as the man who, with the help of fellow Democrats, took advantage of the coronavirus crisis to strangle criminal justice reform in its crib.

The post America’s Crisis Daddy Andrew Cuomo Exploits Coronavirus Panic to Push Bail Reform Rollback in New York appeared first on The Intercept.