An Immigrations and Customs Enforcement spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that the agency will be using the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, but the official could not say whether detentions there had already begun. Attorneys and advocates familiar with ICE’s operations in the state said the agency had started to temporarily detain people at the facility on Friday, citing communication with ICE officials in Georgia.

Irwin drew nationwide attention in the fall of 2020, when a number of detained women and a nurse-turned-whistleblower accused the facility of medical misconduct. After months of backlash, the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrant women there in 2021, and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations embarked on an 18-month investigation. Their 2022 report found that “female detainees appear to have been subjected to excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” and that there appeared to be “repeated failures” to secure informed consent for medical procedures for immigrant women detained at Irwin. 

The allegations also set off court battles, brought both by detained women at Irwin and a doctor who worked at the facility. Fourteen women sued ICE and Irwin officials over the allegations in 2021, and at least 40 women testified to medical misconduct, including non-consensual gynecological procedures. After all the plaintiffs were released in 2021, a federal judge dismissed many of their claims in 2024 on procedural grounds. Early this year, the lawsuit was settled with no admission of liability. 

A Georgia judge found last year that statements accusing a doctor at Irwin of performing “mass hysterectomies” were false in a defamation case against a news organization. The Senate report found the claims of mass hysterectomies could not be substantiated, but did underscore that other gynecological procedures on immigrant women appeared to have been conducted without proper consent. 

The use of the facility set off alarms for immigration advocates and a former Department of Homeland Security civil rights official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“It’s inhumane. It’s so bad,” said the official, who previously investigated the conditions at Irwin. Using the facility to detain immigrants again, they added, “would be an absolute mistake.”

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An immigration attorney and a person familiar with the developments told The Intercept that both women and men under ICE custody would be detained at the facility on a temporary basis for only 72 hours. The ICE spokesperson said the agency could not yet confirm those details.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed to The Intercept after this story was published that there was an agreement with Irwin County and the U.S. Marshals to use up to 1,2000 beds at Irwin.

The facility “has begun taking male adult detainees and will not be used for families,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The Irwin facility will be subject to inspection by the ICE Professional Responsibility Office of Detention Oversight and additional oversight by ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations custody management.”

The Trump administration’s use of Irwin comes as the White House pressures ICE and its partner agencies to speed up arrests to support President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. The increase in ICE-related arrests has overwhelmed the detention system.

The administration has, in recent months, expanded and signed new contracts with private prison operators to detain more immigrants caught in its dragnet. The Washington Post reported in September that ICE was looking to use Irwin again, along with other troubled facilities.

“This administration does not care about civil rights and they certainly don’t care about the conditions of these facilities,” said the former DHS official, who was among dozens of staff members removed from their positions this year by the Trump administration. “I think they’re just trying to round up as many people as they can and get rid of them without any due process and without any regard for conditions.”

Advocates and attorneys in the region are also deeply concerned.

“This shocking development is very much in line with this administration’s modus operandi of going to extreme lengths to dehumanize and brutalize migrants,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director at Project South, a civil rights group that played a major role in drawing attention to the conditions in ICE detention at Irwin. “We stand with migrant women who were subjected to medical abuse and other egregious human rights violations at Irwin.”

The facility, which is run by the private prison contractor LaSalle Corrections, has historically held local detainees, U.S. Marshals Service federal detainees, and people under ICE custody. After the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrants at Irwin in 2021, Irwin County and the USMS continued to detain people in their custody, according to a facility audit from earlier this year.

The Irwin County sheriff, the USMS, and LaSalle Corrections did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication. An Irwin facility employee, when reached by phone, referred all questions to ICE’s Atlanta office.

LaSalle Corrections, the prison contractor running Irwin, posted a number of jobs available at Irwin on Thursday.

The DHS Office of Inspector General, the agency’s watchdog, found in 2022 after its own investigation that medical care at Irwin, separate from gynecological procedures, was “inadequate.” Its findings regarding the allegations of nonconsensual gynecological procedures were not published, since they were taken on by another office within the OIG. DHS OIG did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

After the Biden administration stopped detaining immigrant women at Irwin in 2021, ICE began detaining and transferring women to the Stewart Detention Center, another troubled Georgia facility. An Intercept investigation in 2022 found that women detained at Stewart alleged sexual assault by a nurse contractor working there.

“The survivors of [ICE detention at Irwin] still bear the scars, and given the DHS’s termination of nearly every oversight mechanism available to monitor and ameliorate violations of their own standards, it will be difficult for those affected to prevent or correct harms in yet another remote detention center,” said Sarah Owings, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who represented immigrants detained at Irwin before they were transferred out in 2021. “Given Irwin’s history, I do not think it is a good idea to rekindle this contract.”

Update: October 14, 2025
This story has been updated with a comment from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

The post ICE Will Hold Immigrants in Jail Accused of “Excessive, Invasive” Gynecological Procedures appeared first on The Intercept.

Rubén Oseguera-Gonzalez is the U.S.-born son of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, who founded the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, and is Mexico’s most wanted man. While his father, alias “El Mencho,” is still at large, Oseguera, alias “El Menchito,” was convicted by a U.S. jury in September of conspiring to traffic cocaine and meth, and possessing weapons to further his drug trafficking operations.

Oseguera, 35, stood silently, with his left hand behind his back, as Judge Beryl A. Howell sentenced him to life in prison plus 30 years and ordered him to forfeit more than $6 billion. Oseguera refused to address the court when given the opportunity to do so. During the trial, prosecutors accused El Menchito of not only working for the criminal group, but also helping found it and co-leading it, alongside his father. In a sentencing document, prosecutors placed El Menchito at the same level as other cartel leaders, including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the former high-profile leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.

“This defendant helped build Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación into a brutal terrorist organization that pumps poison onto our streets and commits horrific acts of violence,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement.

Since President Donald Trump stepped into office, his administration has pushed for an even more aggressive approach to targeting drug smuggling organizations, as he also pressures the Mexican government to stem immigration and fentanyl trafficking by threatening tariffs. But the Trump administration’s actions, Oseguera’s sentencing, and major developments in judicial processes for over two dozen high-profile traffickers will likely do little to reduce drug trafficking and drug war-related violence. Rather, it may further splinter criminal groups, leading to further violence in Mexico.

“The capture and imprisonment of alleged bosses of drug organizations only serves the purpose of propaganda for the militarized ‘drug war,’” said Oswaldo Zavala, a professor at the City University of New York. “They never interrupt the trafficking of drugs, and in many cases, it has the opposite effect: cheapening drug products and decreasing their quality, endangering the lives of consumers even more.”

In recent years, the CJNG has been a high-priority target for the U.S. government. As a relatively new organization, the group, armed with weapons sourced from the U.S., has rapidly grown to be one of Mexico’s largest criminal groups, controlling large, sporadic swaths of territory, mostly in western, central, and southern Mexico, and engaging in battles with rivals. The CJNG has grown to be “arguably the most prolific and most violent cartel in Mexico today,” D.C. prosecutors said in Oseguera’s sentencing memorandum.

The history of CJNG can be traced through Oseguera’s short life. Compared to his aging former collaborators, he is quite young. But he has spent nearly a third of his life in detention, first in Mexico and then in the U.S.

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The CJNG organization was created after the 2006 launch of the U.S.–Mexico drug war. Its origins can be traced to the Milenio Cartel, which was once allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. After arrests and killings of top-level leaders, the group splintered, and a bloody war ensued in 2010. Eventually one faction, led by “El Mencho,” came out on top, with the group calling itself the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The organization took hold of old cocaine trafficking routes. According to court records, El Mencho and his son also controlled numerous meth labs in Mexico, importing precursor chemicals from China to manufacture the drug.

“They’re pioneers in synthetic drugs,” said Nathan P. Jones, an expert on Mexican organized crime and associate professor of security studies at Sam Houston State University. “And they were pioneers in fentanyl — if you know how to do one type of synthetic, you can do another type of synthetic. And we’ve all seen what fentanyl has done and the role it’s playing.”

The CJNG grew rapidly and attempted to elbow Sinaloa out of the way, leading to an eventual fissure between the two. The CJNG is known for its use of violence and propaganda efforts. In 2015, the organization made international news when it shot down a Mexican military helicopter, killing nine officials. And in 2016, as a show of force, CJNG members kidnapped two of El Chapo’s sons, then released them.

As a teenager, Oseguera began working with his father and other top Mexican organized crime leaders, prosecutors say. When he was arrested in 2015 in Mexico, the then-25-year-old threatened soldiers and cops with his rifle and grenade launcher that bore his moniker. “CJNG 02 JR,” his rifle read. While in Mexican prison, Oseguera continued to help run the organization, prosecutors alleged.

According to trial testimony and sentencing records, Oseguera was not just a typical “narco-junior” — the term used for the preppy children of Mexican drug lords who flaunt their wealth. Rather, he ran the organization alongside his father, using only the title of “Number 2” as a show of respect. Prosecutors highlighted his violent tactics, including a 2015 instance in which he allegedly slashed five men’s throats with a “half-moon-shaped knife.” Oseguera “is nothing less than a cold, calculated mass murderer,” the prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo.

But his defense attorneys attempted to paint a different picture of Oseguera. While his attorneys tried to poke holes at cooperating witnesses’ testimony, they also signaled that Oseguera had no choice but to live a life of crime. He did not choose to be El Mencho’s son, rather, he is “both a product and a victim of that environment.”

After Friday’s hearing, one of Oseguera’s attorneys, Anthony Colombo, said they would appeal the sentencing, adding that the case should have been tried in Mexico, not the U.S.

Oseguera was extradited in 2020 to the U.S. But his sentencing, along with the arrest of other top Mexican cartel leaders recently sent to the U.S., is unlikely to slow drug trafficking, drug consumption, and drug war violence.

“These are highly decentralized organizations, so any one person being removed, it requires a sustained succession of kingpin strikes or high-value targeting to actually dismantle these groups,” said Jones. “But even when they’re dismantled, they break up, fragment into different cells, and then they form up under new banners. And that’s the consistent thing that we’ve seen.”

“When that happens, one of the unintended consequences is increased violence,” Jones added.

In the past year, there have been major developments in drug war arrests and prosecutions, starting under the Biden administration. This will likely continue under Trump’s presidency, considering his desire to escalate the drug war and a raging civil war within the Sinaloa Cartel.

Last summer, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the former, elusive leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, who arguably wielded more power than El Chapo, was arrested by U.S. officials. One of El Chapo’s sons kidnapped the aging drug lord, flew him across the border, and turned him over to U.S. authorities. His judicial processes are just beginning in New York, where prosecutors may request the death penalty for him.

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In October, Genaro García-Luna, a former high-ranking Mexican official and the “architect” of the drug war, was sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison after being convicted in 2023 of working with the Sinaloa Cartel. For years, García-Luna served as one of the U.S. government’s closest drug war allies.

The Trump administration, pointing to the fentanyl overdose crisis in the U.S., is hellbent on increasing attacks on Mexican organized crime. Trump’s State Department placed several groups on the U.S.’s terrorist list, opening the door to further sanctions and possible military intervention. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently threatened military action on Mexican soil. And a Justice Department guidance document urged employees to work toward the “total elimination of cartels.” This has further placed a strain on Mexico, which views any potential military intervention as an attack on its sovereignty.

Trump is pressuring the Mexican government to further combat organized crime groups. Trump threatened and imposed tariffs on Mexico, and then postponed some of them until April 2.

Last week, in an unprecedented move, the Mexican government handed over nearly 30 major criminal leaders from various organizations to the U.S. government, including from the Sinaloa, Zetas, Beltran-Leyva, Jalisco New Generation cartels, and others. Among them was the 72-year-old co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel, Rafael Caro Quintero, who is accused of having participated in the 1985 murder of DEA special agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. The 29 men were not extradited but instead were sent to the U.S. for “national security” reasons, Mexican and U.S. officials said. Because the U.S.–Mexico extradition treaty is not at play, five of the men, including Caro Quintero, may face the federal death penalty.

On Friday morning, before Oseguera’s sentencing, the same federal judge held brief hearings for other CJNG leaders, including Oseguera’s brother-in-law, his uncle, and a cartel chemical broker. The latter two were part of the group of 29 men sent to the U.S. last week.

Don’t expect these steps to curb the flow of drugs into the U.S., Zavala argues, pointing to corruption among U.S. border agents, financial networks for criminal groups, and the lack of addiction treatment institutions in the U.S.

“The sentencing of ‘El Menchito’ means very little in this failed ‘war,’” Zavala said. “We have seen this movie many times before and I’m afraid we will keep seeing it in the near future to no effect.”

The post “Narco Prince” Sentenced to Life as Trump Ramps Up U.S.–Mexico Drug War appeared first on The Intercept.

“President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the US such as migration, security, and trade,” reads the document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Lopez Obrador’s meager investment in migration, security, and trade-related organizations will probably undermine Mexico’s ability to follow through on commitments to stem the flow of irregular migrants and fentanyl to the US and boost economic competitiveness in North America.”

López Obrador’s 2023 federal budget, presented to the Mexican Congress last fall, does increase funding for social programs, including a significant raise for the pension provided to older Mexicans. It also prioritizes large infrastructure projects, which are mostly concentrated in southern states of the country.

“The crisis of fentanyl is due to the negligence of pharmaceuticals in the U.S.,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City. “I don’t know what [the Director of National Intelligence] thinks the alternative is. Do they expect us to end our social spending and infrastructure policy to tend to a problem that belongs to the U.S.?”

The document, from February of this year, is part of a trove of records leaked to a Discord server, allegedly by Jack Douglas Teixeira, a member of the Air National Guard, and posted online by DDoSecrets, a collective that publishes leaked documents. While reporting on the documents has mostly focused on intelligence on the war in Ukraine, some records include U.S. insight into other regions. Last month, the Washington Post reported on documents showing U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted communication between Mexican cartel members. After the Drug Enforcement Administration carried out an operation in Mexico and U.S. prosecutors filed charges against 28 members of the Sinaloa Cartel, López Obrador responded with anger toward the U.S. intelligence gathering efforts, saying it was “abusive, arrogant interference.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did López Obrador’s spokesperson.

During his tenure, López Obrador has done away with much of the security collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico — a decadeslong relationship that ramped up in the mid-2000s — by placing stringent limits on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and other U.S. law enforcement agencies operating in Mexico. Yet the Mexican president has continued to closely cooperate with the U.S. on migration. Just this month, he reached a deal with the Biden administration, allowing the U.S. to deport non-Mexicans to the country.

“It seems a little naive,” said Pérez Ricart of the Director of National Intelligence’s apparent frustration with Mexico’s approach to migration. “Mexico, in a large part, is doing the U.S.’s dirty work in terms of migration.”

López Obrador took office in 2018 in a landslide victory, calling his populist political project “the Fourth Transformation,” a reference to three major leaps in Mexican history: the independence from Spain, the Reform (a mid-1800s war between conservatives and liberals), and the Mexican Revolution. His election was a welcome change for many Mexicans, who had grown tired of the decadeslong rule of the two center- and right-wing parties.

Since then, his relationship with the U.S. has been erratic and wracked with contradictions. López Obrador has spent the past five years walking a tightrope: He has had to balance the interests of the U.S., the Mexican business class, and his base — providing concessions to all. Support for López Obrador among Mexicans remains relatively high, with approval ratings at 65 percent, most likely due to the social welfare programs he has introduced. López Obrador’s government has raised the minimum wage and provided cash and food assistance to older Mexicans, as well as scholarships for students nationwide.

López Obrador’s government has also placed major emphasis on infrastructure and development projects in Mexico. The projects include a new international airport and a railway that will connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which seeks to compete with the Panama Canal. Another major project, called the Maya Train, is reaching completion. The controversial project, which seeks to traverse the Yucatán Peninsula, has received ire from left- and right-wing critics alike for its environmental damage. It has already taken out vast sectors of the rainforest.

“What AMLO has been doing has been investing in infrastructure projects in the south of the country,” Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015, told The Intercept. “That’s less of a priority for us” — the United States — “because we trade mostly with the center and northern parts of the country where all the productive enterprises are.”

Mexico’s president has also continued to acquiesce to the U.S. government’s demand for migration enforcement, at much risk to migrants and asylum-seekers. In 2018, his government created the National Guard — replacing the Mexican Federal Police, a force historically plagued with corruption — and later tasked it with stopping migrants from traveling north.

His government also readily agreed to Remain in Mexico, a policy that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their day in court — risking kidnapping, extortion, rape, torture, and death — and accepted migrants expelled from the U.S. under Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed U.S. officials to turn away asylum-seekers to supposedly prevent the spread of Covid-19. President Joe Biden kept Title 42 in place for the first three years of his presidency, finally lifting it this month.

Meanwhile, López Obrador’s investment in social programs could also be seen as a way to curb migration, even if the U.S. doesn’t see it that way. “What is most striking is they’re not linking social spending to migration,” said Stephanie Leutert, the director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to the Director of National Intelligence document. “They’re not thinking about the many Mexican migrants who still have to leave because of a lack of security in parts of the country, but also a lack of development and lack of opportunity.”

Leutert speculates the Director of National Intelligence’s frustration could be toward the Mexican government’s meager funding of refugee programs and minimal attempts to root out corruption within the migration enforcement apparatus and the trafficking networks. Former ambassador Wayne agrees.

“Would it be better if they invested more in their refugee and migration services? Yes,” said Wayne. “So it is certainly true that there’s room for more investment in their whole migration services and how they handle this.”

As the fentanyl epidemic continues to ravage the U.S., with nearly 71,000 overdoses in 2021 alone, the U.S. government wants Mexico to more aggressively combat criminal and narcotrafficking organizations.

In 2006, when the Mexican drug war was launched, the Mexican government deployed the military to the streets to combat organized crime. The U.S. agencies played a leading role in operations against criminal groups and also supplied weapons and training to Mexican forces.

López Obrador ran on a campaign to reduce the country’s militarization and declared the Mérida Initiative, a 2008 security agreement, dead. In 2021, however, the Biden administration and the Mexican government signed a new security agreement called the Bicentennial Framework, similar to the Mérida Initiative.

Still, López Obrador has indeed limited U.S. security involvement in Mexico. In 2021, he did away with the leading unit that was trained by, and collaborated with, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The dissolution of the Sensitive Investigative Unit, which was part of the Mexican Federal Police, was a major blow to the bilateral security cooperation. The Mexican Congress also significantly limited the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies’ operations in Mexico after the attempted arrest and prosecution of the former secretary of national defense. The reduction in bilateral security collaboration has led Republican representatives to call for U.S. military intervention in Mexico to combat cartels and to designate them as terrorist organizations.

Under López Obrador, the Mexican government has also given a lot more power to the Mexican armed forces, which have historically been plagued with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses. The armed forces are now in charge of airports, hospital construction, and other civilian institutions, along with major infrastructure projects. Last fall, the National Guard, which was supposed to be under civilian control, was integrated into the military under the secretary of national defense. It was a significant step forward toward the further militarization of the country.

“The impression I have is that for many years, the bilateral cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico prioritized the interests of the U.S.”

Violence in Mexico, meanwhile, continues to soar, in part a consequence of arms trafficking from the U.S. to Mexico.

“The impression I have is that for many years, the bilateral cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico prioritized the interests of the U.S. It prioritized that drugs do not reach the U.S.,” Pérez Ricart said. Yet the U.S. has offered little to address Mexico’s concerns, such as the flow of weapons into the country. “This is called ‘cooperation?’”

The post The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.

For years, García Luna was the U.S. government’s most trusted ally in the war on drugs. As public security secretary, he wielded incredible power, overseeing Mexico’s Federal Police, the prison network, and a vast intelligence-gathering infrastructure, while working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security in the fight against Mexican cartels.

“García Luna, who once stood at the pinnacle of law enforcement in Mexico, will now live the rest of his days having been revealed as a traitor to his country and to the honest members of law enforcement who risked their lives to dismantle drug cartels,” said Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

For experts and human rights advocates watching, however, the trial was ultimately underwhelming, revealing little about how the U.S. government and other Mexican politicians are implicated in the war on drugs. Rather, the case portrayed García Luna and his network of corrupt officials as a handful of bad apples, and what U.S. officials knew about García Luna’s illicit activities went mostly unexplored, despite the government’s role in providing funding, equipment, and training that has fueled drug-related violence. The ongoing conflict has led to 400,000 people killed, 82,000 disappeared, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

García Luna was found guilty of all five charges, including drug trafficking and continuing a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors alleged that he received around $274 million in bribes from the cartel from 2001 to 2012, first as head of the Federal Investigative Agency, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI, and then as secretary of public security.

García Luna was known to show off how close he was with U.S. officials: He held photo-ops and meetings with top U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Attorney Eric Holder. Within the first couple years of his tenure as Mexico’s top cop, a glowing New York Times Magazine profile called him “The Fixer.”

Despite hints during the trial at how U.S. government officials may have known about García Luna’s dealings with the cartel, the dearth of physical evidence meant that the verdict largely relied on witness testimony and secondhand information. At one point, the prosecution even moved to stop the defense from asking questions about García Luna’s high-level meetings in Washington, D.C.

Though no solid allegations against the U.S. and Mexican governments emerged from the trial, experts say the verdict should be considered as a wider indictment of political corruption on both sides of the border, at the expense of victims of the militarized drug war.

“García Luna’s guilty verdict confirms the legacy of corruption in the governments of Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox left in the wake of the U.S.-backed ‘war on drugs,’” said Oswaldo Zavala, a professor at the City University of New York and author of “Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture.” “It should also be understood as a condemnation of decades of violent anti-drug policies that only enriched a few, while hurting the most vulnerable and disenfranchised.”

In 2001, under Mexican President Vicente Fox, García Luna became the head of the Federal Investigation Agency, known by its Spanish acronym AFI. At the time, the Sinaloa cartel was divided into factions: One was led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and another by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, Guzmán’s cousin.

According to the prosecution’s first witness, Sergio “El Grande” Villarreal Barragán, a former leader in the Beltrán Leyva faction, cartel members would pool money together to bribe García Luna and other top AFI officials, and, in exchange, AFI assisted the Sinaloa cartel in its war against rival groups. AFI also supplied cartel members with fake AFI uniforms, credentials, and vehicles, Villarreal Barragán said, and AFI agents would help conducts raids against rivals. The relationship allowed the cartel to traffic drugs and expand its territory within Mexico, while García Luna and AFI officials enjoyed the spoils of the cartel’s success.

In 2006, the new President Felipe Calderón appointed García Luna as secretary of public security, a cabinet-level position. When the Sinaloa cartel learned of the imminent appointment, Jesús “El Rey” Zambada, a former top cartel leader and brother of Ismael Zambada, testified that he and the cartel’s attorney delivered $3 million and $2 million to García Luna on two separate occasions.

That same year, the Mexican government launched the war on drugs. As the top law enforcement official in the country, García Luna became the face of the war, helping Calderón forge a new relationship with the U.S. to combat organized crime. As the drug war got underway, Jesús Zambada testified, Mexico’s Federal Police, who operated under García Luna, was helping the cartel traffic drugs through the Mexico City airport.

In 2008, the U.S. intensified its role in the drug war with a $1.5 billion security cooperation agreement with Mexico called the Mérida Initiative. The U.S. began sending weapons and money, and providing training to Mexican security units, as part of the effort to stop drug trafficking into the U.S. The Mérida Initiative approached the drug war using what is known as the “kingpin strategy” to arrest and extradite leaders of the major drug trafficking organizations; Guzmán was among the cartel leaders taken down as part of these efforts.

U.S.-trained units have been implicated in grave rights abuses and organized crime. Throughout the trial, prosecutors alleged that Ivan Reyes Arzate, a former top Federal Police official, worked with García Luna and undermined operations against criminal groups. But what flew under the radar was that Reyes Arzate, who is now in a U.S. federal prison, was the top commander of the DEA’s most-trusted unit inside the police force and received specialized training in Quantico, Virginia.

“When the U.S. had the most influence over security policy in Mexico — because the Federal Police was something we were deeply invested in — the whole system was corrupt and flawed,” said Michael Lettieri, a senior fellow for human rights at University of California, San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

During the trial, a DEA agent testified that the U.S. government knew of his alleged ties to organized crime since 2010, two years before he stepped down from office. The agent said that Villarreal Barragán — the former Beltrán Leyva lieutenant — had provided him information on the bribes to García Luna. In 2009, the DEA’s chief of intelligence operations, Anthony Placido, said in a public interview that the agency suspected García Luna of having ties to organized crime. Despite the DEA’s suspicions, the U.S. government continued working with him for at least three more years.

When a former U.S. ambassador took the stand, more questions were raised than answered about the U.S. government’s work with García Luna. Earl Anthony Wayne served as U.S. ambassador in Mexico starting in 2011. He met García Luna multiple times, Wayne testified, but said that “no one from law enforcement” ever told him García Luna was corrupt. When the defense asked Wayne about high-level meetings in D.C. with former officials, the prosecution objected, ending the line of questioning.

Some witnesses made charged but unsubstantiated allegations about top Mexican officials, including Calderón and current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Edgar Veytia, a former attorney general from the Mexican state of Nayarit who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for working with cartels, testified on February 7 that the state’s governor told him that, in a meeting in Mexico City, Calderón and García Luna had said he needed to ally with Guzmán. At that time, the Nayarit state government was allied with Beltrán Leyva.

Calderón took to Twitter to deny Veytia’s allegations. “What he says about me is an absolute lie. I never negotiated nor made a pact with criminals,” he wrote. A poll from the Spanish-language newspaper El País found last week that 84 percent of Mexican respondents are in favor of an investigation into Calderón’s alleged ties to organized crime.

García Luna’s defense threw a political jab of its own when cross-examining Zambada. Defense attorney Cesar de Castro asked him about a $7 million bribe he allegedly made to Gabriel Regino, who served as Mexico City’s public security chief when Lopez Obrador was mayor, claiming the money was for Lopez Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign. Regino has denied the allegation, and Zambada denied that the money was for Lopez Obrador or his campaign.

The probing into García Luna’s alleged financial dealings does not end with Tuesday’s verdict, as the Mexican government is plowing ahead with civil charges that he stole money from Mexico.

García Luna left public office in 2012 following a change in presidency and moved to Miami where he started a security consulting company and lived a lavish lifestyle. Judge Brian Cogan barred any information about García Luna’s life post-2012 from being presented during the trial. (García Luna’s wife testified that their homes and assets in Mexico prior to the Miami move were purchased legitimately.)

In 2021, the Mexican government filed a civil lawsuit in Florida against García Luna, alleging he took over $700 million from government contracts; that case, experts hope, may reveal physical evidence of bribes that did not appear in the New York trial.

“I think that there may have been a lot more opportunity for documentary evidence, especially given the Mexican civil suit and what their financial crimes unit has been doing,” said Nathan P. Jones, a nonresident scholar in drug policy and Mexico studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “That may have resulted in a case that may have had more paper documentation to back up the witness statements, if it hadn’t been limited to the pre-2012 period.”

While García Luna faces up to life in prison, the drug war shows no signs of ending.

Since he stepped down from office, the U.S. and Mexico’s “kingpin strategy” has led to the splintering of organized crime groups. Under Lopez Obrador, the Mérida Initiative was declared dead in 2021, but the Mexican president and U.S. President Joe Biden signed a similar security cooperation agreement later that same year. Despite Lopez Obrador’s campaign promise of “hugs, not bullets,” the National Guard — which replaced the Federal Police — along with the Army and Navy, continue to patrol the streets in the fight against organized crime. Lopez Obrador has also backed constitutional reforms for the continued militarization of public security until 2028.

On the U.S. side, 21 state attorneys general submitted a letter to Biden this month, requesting that Mexican cartels be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a move that would only heighten militarized action against drug trafficking groups and civilians.

“The actual verdict does matter, at least for the next three to four years while people still remember that it happened,” said Lettieri. “And then, 15 years down the road, it’ll be, ‘Garcia Luna who?’ And we’ll be exactly where we were — doing the same thing, losing the same battles, fighting the same war.”

The post Trial of Mexico’s Former Top Cop Neglected U.S. Role in War on Drugs appeared first on The Intercept.

For years, everything worked smoothly. Then something went wrong.

Between 2007 and 2008, for a period of six to seven months, the powerboats and submarines were intercepted by U.S. officials. The cocaine was confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, leaving the Beltran Leyva Organization and the brothers at its helm without their precious supply. The brothers were certain: There had to be a snitch.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the leader of the group, ordered his lieutenants to root out the leaker, and sought the help of corrupt, high-level Federal Police officials. The Mexican officials arrived at a meeting with the narcos, holding a cardboard binder with a photograph and the identity of the snitch: a Colombian man working as a DEA informant. Enraged, Beltrán Leyva ordered the informant be kidnapped, tortured, interrogated, and killed.

As with many of his diktats, Beltrán Leyva’s orders were followed to a T.

“It’s a massive betrayal of the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico and the law enforcement cooperation.”

According to testimony in an American court, one of the key, yet little noted, figures implicated in the killing was a top-ranking Mexican security official: Genaro García Luna.

A so-called architect of the drug war, García Luna oversaw the Federal Police, prisons, and a vast intelligence network as President Felipe Calderón’s secretary of public security. Not only was he Calderón’s right-hand man, but Washington also viewed García Luna as its trusted ally in the fight against drug trafficking.

According to court records reviewed by The Intercept, which were first reported by Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández, a top-ranking former cartel member pointed the finger at García Luna as one of the officials responsible for leaking the informant’s identity. (García Luna’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment.)

This week, García Luna’s trial on charges of collaborating with the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva cartels got underway in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Among the potential embarrassing revelations for Mexican and American officials, García Luna’s role in the murder of the DEA informant may arise: The narco who testified in U.S. court about communication between the killers and García Luna is expected to testify in the former top cop’s case as well. (Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.)

Among other drug-related charges, García Luna is being hit with the so-called kingpin law: engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise. (García Luna has denied the charges.) While he is not being charged with murder, the allegation of tipping off cartels to the DEA informant could fit under the statute. The indictment accuses García Luna of giving a cartel “access to sensitive law enforcement information about law enforcement operations.”

“It’s a massive betrayal of the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico and the law enforcement cooperation,” said Nathan P. Jones, a nonresident scholar in drug policy and Mexico studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Informants are American law enforcement’s most closely-guarded secrets.”

DEA’s Mexican “Allies”

García Luna’s alleged role in the DEA informant’s death came to light during the sentencing of another Mexican security official accused of crimes in the U.S.: Ivan Reyes Arzate, also known as “La Reina.”

According to over 200 pages of court records, La Reina was a Federal Police officer from 2003 to 2016. He rose through the ranks and in 2008, was promoted to commander of the Federal Police’s Sensitive Investigative Unit, also known as the SIU. La Reina’s top boss, as with all Federal Police officials, was the secretary of public security, García Luna.

The SIU was the premier Federal Police unit working with the DEA in Mexico — or it was supposed to be, having been specially created for that purpose. All SIU members, including La Reina, received special training from the DEA in Quantico, Virginia. The DEA relied on the SIU for operations, surveillance, and high-profile arrests.

“We have very special or specific people that we work with who we have tried to vet and make sure that we can trust them,” one DEA agent said in court, “because of the corruption that we know sometimes exists in those other countries and around the world.”

Hardly reliable, the SIU leaked like a sieve, with horrific consequences. In 2011, cartel gunmen massacred an entire town, Allende, on the southern side of the Mexican border. ProPublica reported that the village was targeted on account of an SIU leak. That year, the Justice Department released a scathing report highlighting problems with SIUs around the world. (In 2022, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador shuttered the SIU program.)

La Reina personified corruption in the SIU. In 2017, he was indicted and later sentenced in Chicago for providing sensitive information to organized crime in Mexico in exchange for bribes. Last year, he was sentenced to another 10 years in prison in a Brooklyn federal court.

La Reina was caught in Mexico after American agents discovered he was providing sensitive surveillance information to a cartel. When a DEA agent and close friend confronted him in a hotel room in Mexico City, La Reina broke down crying, admitting his secretive cartel alliances.

“It was like getting punched in the stomach,” a DEA agent involved in the case testified. “It was very, very difficult to hear that — to know that one of the most wanted men in the world and most violent, notorious criminals in the history of drug trafficking was talking to our SIU commander and that there was a relationship that they had.”

La Reina flew with his DEA friend to Chicago, where he turned himself in.

The Witnesses

During La Reina’s sentencing hearing, Sergio “El Grande” Villarreal Barragán took the stand. El Grande, who owes his nickname to his 6-foot-8 stature, was a high-ranking narco with the Beltrán Leyva Organization.

The Beltrán Leyva Organization had been aligned with the Sinaloa cartel, forming a powerful drug trafficking monopoly called “The Federation.” They officially split, however, in 2008, after one of their leaders was arrested, seemingly at the behest of Sinaloa leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was found guilty by an American court of cartel-related charges in 2019. A brutal war between the two organizations broke out.

According to court testimony from El Chapo’s trial, during this time, García Luna was taking bribes from both organizations. One of El Chapo’s top lieutenants alleged that the Sinaloa cartel gave García Luna up to $6 million, while Beltrán Leyva gave him $50 million. (The Beltrán Leyva Organization was notorious for allegedly paying off public officials and police throughout Mexico, including a federal anti-drug prosecutor and the head of Interpol.)

In 2007 and 2008, when the Beltrán Leyva Organization’s cocaine was being seized by the DEA, the cartel was on high alert. According to El Grande’s testimony, he attended a meeting with high-ranking narcos and a “very high official in the federal police” to discover how the drugs were being intercepted. The official, he said, was Luis Cárdenas Palomino, one of García Luna’s co-defendants, who is currently incarcerated in Mexico.

In his testimony, El Grande says that, in Miami, the DEA had detained a Colombian man but then released him “for purposes of providing information regarding drug shipments.”

The Beltrán Leyva leadership then met with La Reina, Cárdenas Palomino, and other officials at a ranch in central Mexico. Cárdenas Palomino told the group he had spoken with his boss and good friend, García Luna. (The DEA, lawyers for La Reina, Cárdenas Palomino, and El Grande did not respond to request for comment.)

“Now, at that meeting, Cárdenas Palomino told the group that he had spoken to his compadre, Genaro García Luna?” the attorney asked.

“That’s correct, sir,” El Grande replied.

“And he had been informed that there was a Colombian informant working within the Beltrán Leyva cartel?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“And then Cárdenas Palomino provided the informant’s name and nickname; is that right?

“That’s correct, sir.”

El Grande also said that García Luna accessed the informant’s identity through a Mexican Federal Police officer stationed in Colombia.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva, seeing the informant’s photograph, ordered his lieutenants to kill the man. Two high-ranking Beltrán Leyva lieutenants kidnapped the informant from a city in central Mexico and tortured him.

“And you learned that the informant admitted he’d been arrested in Miami and was cooperating?” an attorney asked El Grande in the hearing.

“That’s correct, sir,” El Grande replied.

Both El Grande and La Reina are expected to testify in García Luna’s trial, along with other former top narcos from Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva.

In a ruling on Thursday, the judge in the García Luna case ruled that the former security chief’s attorneys could raise inconsistencies in El Grande’s past statements to authorities — presumably an effort to discredit the potential witness. What those inconsistencies refer to, however, remains unclear.

The post Did Mexico’s Top Cop Play a Role in the Killing of a DEA Informant? appeared first on The Intercept.

With his white hair, navy suit, and gray tie, García Luna looked every bit of his former job: being a top cop in Mexico. Now, federal prosecutors are accusing him of colluding and collaborating with drug cartels.

The trial holds the potential for explosive revelations about the brutal 16-yearlong drug war in Mexico. Though the proceedings may not receive as much fanfare as that of the notorious kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, García Luna holds an insider’s knowledge of the conflict in all its unflattering detail, including potential criminal behavior by top Mexican and U.S. officials.

García Luna was the top security official under former President Felipe Calderón, who launched the Mexican drug war in 2006. Fueled by U.S. funds, equipment, and support, the violence has only deepened in Mexico. The conflict has seen some 400,000 people killed, 82,000 have disappeared, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

García Luna, who flaunted his relationship with the U.S., has long been a confidant and right-hand man to Mexican leaders, including former presidents, amassing a collection of Mexican government and U.S. intelligence. At the same time, prosecutors say García Luna worked with the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels by accepting bribes, establishing protection rackets, providing sensitive information, arresting rival cartel members, and helping them traffic drugs into the U.S., in addition to immigration-related charges.

“This just shows the power of organized crime and the futility of the strategy we’ve pursued for the past 40 years.”

García Luna’s defense attorneys deny any wrongdoing by their client. At the close of the first day of jury selection, one of the lawyers told reporters outside the court that García Luna had not been offered a deal by the U.S. government and that they would continue with the trial: “There’s been no offers, there’s been no deals. We’re not interested unless they want to dismiss the charges,” said César de Castro, García Luna’s lead attorney.

For close observers of Mexico, García Luna’s trial could provide not only a glimpse into the inner workings of the failed drug war, but also some high-level accountability — a vanishingly rare occurrence for the many families touched by the war’s violence.

“This just shows the power of organized crime and the futility of the strategy we’ve pursued for the past 40 years,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America. “The only way there would be justice for the victims is if not just García Luna, but an entire class of corrupt Mexican and perhaps U.S. political and law enforcement leaders get named and have charges filed against them.”

Before taking his seat in the presidential cabinet, García Luna began his law enforcement career in 1989 at the Center for Investigation and National Security, an agency created with the help of the CIA. He worked in counterterror and counterinsurgency before joining the Federal Preventive Police in 1999, where he grew close to the inner circle of newly elected President Vicente Fox.

A year later, Fox dissolved the Federal Preventive Police and replaced it with the Federal Investigation Agency, or AFI, with García Luna at the head. The AFI, modeled after the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, had a budget in the millions. At his new perch, García Luna showed a flare for the dramatic: Some AFI operations were broadcast on live television. In one instance, after a high-profile kidnapping rescue, an AFI official gave the victim a T-shirt to wear that read “THANK YOU AFI.”

In 2006, when the right-wing Calderón assumed office, García Luna was again promoted, this time appointed secretary of public security. He was now Mexico’s top law enforcement official and Calderón’s closest confidant. He oversaw the country’s prisons and a sprawling intelligence-gathering network. In short order, Calderón launched the drug war, and García Luna sent the Federal Police and military into the streets.

His roles in security brought García Luna into close contact with his U.S. counterparts. Robert Mueller, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, and others were all on his meeting agenda. As The Intercept previously reported, U.S. State Department cables called García Luna a “trusted liaison, partner and friend of the FBI.” Another cable outlines a meeting between John Brennan, who would later become director of the CIA, and García Luna: “Garcia Luna expressed his appreciation for President Calderon’s undivided commitment to fighting organized crime and his satisfaction with U.S.-Mexican cooperation, suggesting if both sides held firm we would see a reduction in violence.”

“Having someone like García Luna is extraordinarily beneficial, and they” — U.S. officials — “were not going to stop having the benefit of that huge open door just because the guy was most likely taking money, or extorting money, out of traffickers and committing all kinds of crimes,” said Oswaldo Zavala, a journalist and professor at the City University of New York.

Prosecutors have asked the court to reject evidence “depicting meetings between him and senior U.S. government officials.” They’ve also asked that there be no mention of Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, the former Mexican secretary of national defense who was arrested by the U.S. in 2019 but whose charges were later dropped in a diplomatic scandal that shook the U.S.-Mexico security relationship.

García Luna is no stranger to headlines. Sinaloa leader El Chapo’s 2018 trial saw a raft of bombshell allegations against García Luna. Jesús “El Rey” Zambada, one of El Chapo’s closest collaborators, testified that the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels gave García Luna nearly $60 million. Court records suggest El Rey will be a key witness at García Luna’s trial.

García Luna denied the accusations, threatening to sue El Rey for defamation. He tweeted old pictures of himself with Hillary Clinton, who at the time was secretary of state, and other U.S. officials.

The allegations against García Luna in El Chapo’s trial were only the most recent. For close to two decades, Mexican journalists have published books and investigations, exposing the alleged links between García Luna and organized crime. As secretary of public security, García Luna was also the subject of multiple investigations by Mexican officials.

Meanwhile, calamity tended to befall those who could potentially damage García Luna’s standing. Two officials who began probing his alleged links with the Sinaloa cartel died in an airplane crash in 2008. That same year, Javier Herrera Valles, a top Federal Police official, wrote Calderón a letter accusing García Luna of ties to organized crime. Herrera Valles was arrested shortly thereafter on unsubstantiated charges that he was working with the Sinaloa cartel and tortured in prison. He was exonerated and released in 2012.

With a change in presidential administration in 2012, García Luna left Mexico for Miami, where he lived a lavish lifestyle. He established a security consulting company called GL & Associates Consulting, or GLAC. Former law enforcement officers served on the board of GLAC, including Jose Rodriguez, the former top CIA official who ordered the destruction of CIA torture tapes. In December 2019, García Luna was arrested in Texas. (García Luna’s lawyers said in court filings that he made his wealth through legitimate means after arriving in the U.S.)

With his drug war machinations, close relationships with top officials from both sides of the border, and contacts with a raft of drug cartel operatives, García Luna left in his wake a host of potential witnesses against him. Many are themselves narcos who were arrested and turned on the cartels, such as Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal, who wrote in a 2012 public letter that García Luna had taken bribes.

“If he becomes the scapegoat for everything wrong with Mexico’s system and the rise of organized crime in Mexico, then they’re doing it wrong.”

According to previously sealed sentencing records, first reported by Aristegui Noticias and reviewed by The Intercept, between 2008 and 2010, La Barbie, who found Christianity after his arrest, fed information to the DEA, the FBI, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as “possibly communications with intelligence services in the United States.” Little is known of what La Barbie fed U.S. officials. His contact with the American agencies suggests the U.S. government may have known of the allegations against García Luna a decade before his indictment.

“This is all guesswork,” said Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America. “I suspect that the DEA may have still found him useful for some things. You have several cartels in Mexico and some of them are clearly not working with García Luna — a sort of ‘enemy of my enemy’ situation.”

Other narco witnesses expected to testify include Sergio “El Grande” Barragan, a former lieutenant for the Beltrán-Leyva Organization, and Ivan “La Reina” Reyes Arzate, a Federal Police officer with close ties to the DEA, who was sentenced for feeding information to organized crime.

The DEA and the CIA referred all questions about García Luna to federal prosecutors. The Justice Department declined to comment. ICE and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests.

The Mexican government, under the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, launched its own investigations into García Luna. In 2021, the government filed a lawsuit against the former security chief, his wife, and several associates, alleging that they stole $250 million in contracts with the government and laundered the money. (His defense lawyers in the Brooklyn case asked the court not to allow any evidence related to García Luna’s post-2012 life in Florida, saying it’s irrelevant to the charges.)

Last June, the Mexican government obtained its own arrest warrant for García Luna, alleging association with criminal groups and illicit enrichment. The arrest warrant included charges of illegal arms trafficking related to Fast and Furious, the botched operation in which the U.S. government attempted, but failed, to track firearms sold to Mexican organized crime. In December, during a presidential morning briefing, a top security official presented a slideshow describing who García Luna allegedly conspired with during his time in office.

Whether García Luna’s trial will implicate top Mexican or U.S. government officials remains to be seen. Critics of the drug war worry that if the focus remains narrowly on García Luna, the larger import of holding him to account will be missed, even as the conflict continues to become more militarized and the death toll mounts.

“He’s clearly the tip of a much larger iceberg,” said Isacson. “But if he becomes the scapegoat for everything wrong with Mexico’s system and the rise of organized crime in Mexico, then they’re doing it wrong.”

As Zavala, the CUNY professor, put it, “This is much more horrible, much more endless, much more difficult to stop than just one guy in a high office taking some bribes.”

The post Mexico’s Former Top Cop Is on Trial in New York. Will the U.S. Be Implicated? appeared first on The Intercept.

Two of the internal complaints, one in late December 2021 and one in January 2022, were revealed last week in a letter alleging sexual misconduct by the nurse made to the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or CRCL, at the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. The letter was first reported by The Intercept. Two other women who did not file internal complaints also came forward in the letter, meaning that with the revelation of the third internal complaint, a total of at least five women have made sexual assault allegations against the nurse at Stewart.

“These allegations are part of a systemic problem. ICE detention fosters mistreatment and abuse.”

The documents and interviews also demonstrate that CoreCivic gave at times incorrect information to news organizations.

“Whether it was two or three or five reports that they want to acknowledge, it is far too many to ignore,” said Erin Argueta, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the groups that organized the letter to CRCL. “This is not an isolated incident, and these allegations are part of a systemic problem. ICE detention fosters mistreatment and abuse. We join the survivors in demanding a thorough investigation and swift action to protect immigrants from further harm.”

The new complaint became apparent when testimony in the letter to CRCL, medical records, and an internal CRCL database obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request did not line up. The third official complaint was then confirmed by CoreCivic when The Intercept requested comment. The database, which lists complaints related to Stewart and includes Prison Rape Elimination Act complaints, listed two allegations of sexual assault against medical staff at Stewart.

With the letter of allegations from the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups looming earlier this month, The Intercept asked CoreCivic about the two complaints about the nurse through official channels. A spokesperson for the company acknowledged the two official complaints and said they had been investigated and closed: The company’s probes found one complaint to be “unsubstantiated” and another “unfounded.” The spokesperson added that the nurse had “no prior allegations.” That turned out not to be true.

In response to questions by The Intercept about the new revelations, the CoreCivic spokesperson confirmed that one of the internal reports took place in late December, before the two complaints that the company had initially confirmed. “As we continued to review the matter, we found one additional complaint made on a separate occasion.” The spokesperson added that CoreCovic’s investigation also found the additional complaint to be “unsubstantiated.” In a phone call, the CoreCivic spokesperson confirmed that all three complaints were against the same nurse, whose identity, nursing license, and employment at the facility were previously confirmed by The Intercept.

Though only the two January complaints were listed in the CRCL database, another woman’s CoreCivic medical records, which were reviewed by The Intercept, show that there was a previous complaint, originally reported on December 31. That woman, identified in the letter to CRCL as Maria Doe and whose name The Intercept is withholding to protect her privacy, spoke with The Intercept earlier this month but did not realize that her complaint was not listed in the CRCL database. Her internal complaint was confirmed by medical records and in an interview.

In the email to The Intercept, CoreCivic said it followed all of its protocols in response to the December complaint. The company did not elaborate on why the complaint never appeared in the CRCL database and referred the matter to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition to the incorrect information provided to news media by CoreCivic, a statement by ICE appeared to contradict CoreCivic’s statements, suggesting that there may have been other internal reports against the nurse.

The day after The Intercept published its investigation into Stewart, ICE sent a statement to CNN saying that its administrative investigation into the initial allegations determined they were unsubstantiated but that “two allegations remain under investigation.” ICE did not clarify which two allegations remain under investigation and declined to comment further to The Intercept. The CoreCivic spokesperson, responding to questions about the discrepancy between the company’s own and ICE’s statements, told The Intercept they did not know what allegations ICE is investigating.

There is no evidence to suggest that the ongoing ICE investigations are related to the nurse. ICE’s national detention standards, which apply to private contractors, say that when a staff member is suspected of sexual assault, they “shall be removed from all duties requiring detainee contact pending the outcome of the investigation.” The nurse has continued to give medical attention to women at Stewart as recently as July 2, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which reviewed medical records for that date. There are no public allegations of misconduct related to the July 2 medical records. (Neither CoreCivic nor ICE responded to follow-up questions from The Intercept on whether the nurse has been placed on leave during ICE’s ongoing investigations.)

Public records and reporting by The Intercept indicate that there were at least 11 sexual assault complaints against staff at Stewart from May 2021 to May 2022. With at least five of those allegations against the nurse, The Intercept has been unable to specify how many, if any, of the remaining six allegations were against medical staff at Stewart.

The post Fifth Migrant Woman Alleges Sexual Assault Against Nurse at ICE Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the next approximately 30 minutes, according to a letter detailing her and other women’s allegations submitted to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or CRCL, the nurse inappropriately touched Maria’s breasts, rubbed his penis against her hand, made repeated uncomfortable remarks, resisted her attempts to push away his hand, and blocked her from leaving. She told him to stop multiple times and asked to leave the examination room.

The nurse did not let her leave, according to the complaint to CRCL. At one point he told Maria, “Me encantas,” or Spanish for, roughly, “I’m crazy about you.” He led her to another office, where he complimented her, told her that he needed to check her menstrual cycle, and insisted on seeing her vaginal discharge, the complaint reads. After Maria insisted again that she wanted to leave, the nurse eventually let her go and told her to tell her friend to come see him as well.

“I was shaking, I was scared, I wanted to leave,” Maria told The Intercept. “It was the worst day of my life.” After she reported the incident, she said, she was accused of lying and was threatened with retaliation for reporting the incident.

Maria is one of four women who spoke out about sexual assault and harassment by the nurse in the complaint. Three other women, who are also asylum-seekers, reported similar treatment in the complaint.

The nurse “has repeatedly taken advantage of his position as a medical professional to isolate women at Stewart in curtained-off medical examination rooms, force or coerce them into giving him access to private parts of their body without medical justification or need, and [assault] them during his ‘medical exams,’” the CRCL complaint reads.

The allegations of sexual assault and harassment are part of a broader series of troubling complaints levied by women who have been detained in the facility, raising a concern that there is a pattern of medical neglect and abusive conditions.

The nurse did not respond to multiple phone calls or a mailed list of questions. CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs Stewart and is the nurse’s employer, said in a statement that it completed an administrative investigation in January after two women reported allegations of sexual assault by the nurse. According to CoreCivic, its investigation found that one report was “unsubstantiated” and that the other was “unfounded.” ICE did not provide a comment by the time of this story’s publication.

That changed after the Irwin County Detention Center, a facility in Georgia that housed female immigration detainees, was partially shut down following numerous allegations of abuse and medical neglect. After the partial closure, ICE began sending female detainees to Stewart.

Stewart is known as the “black hole” of the immigration detention network.

With the arrival of women at Stewart in December 2020, a new pattern of abuse allegations is emerging. This investigation is based on internal Homeland Security records, public reports, sheriff’s department documents, emergency call records, and interviews with nearly a dozen sources. Records reviewed by The Intercept indicate that there were at least 17 sexual assault allegations in the 11-month period between May 2021 and May 2022, 11 of which allege abuse by facility staff.

Four separate women, in the CRCL complaint, are alleging sexual assault and harassment by the nurse employed at the facility. The Intercept spoke with all four of them.

Two women told The Intercept that when they initially made complaints through official channels inside the detention center, CoreCivic staff threatened them with retaliation for attempting to speak out. A Department of Homeland Security database tracking accusations, which was reviewed by The Intercept, shows two women made complaints of sexual misconduct by medical staff at Stewart during the same period covered by the letter to the CRCL.

“I’m scared,” Maria recalled, telling an official who interviewed her the day after the assault. “I’m scared, I’m scared.”

“They said I was lying,” Maria later told The Intercept. “They said I could go to prison for seven years if I filed the [internal] complaint.”

Advocates for the detained women lauded them for coming forward despite the threats and lack of consequences resulting from their previous complaints.

“We’re blown away by the bravery of these women, to open themselves up like this and tell these stories,” said Erin Argueta, lead attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. “Even when detained, and threatened with retaliation, they showed amazing bravery coming forward.”

The sexual misconduct allegations are part of a broader set of charges made by detainees and advocates of medical misconduct and abuses related to health and hygiene — allegations repeated in public records from a variety of sources that point to neglect and unhealthy conditions. Stewart has the capacity to hold nearly 2,000 detained people, but, as of June 13, it has an average daily population of 1,092.

The internal complaint database from the CRCL office, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows 30 complaints made to CRCL about Stewart between August 5, 2021, and April 13, 2022. Many of the complaints detail a lack of medical attention. Others allege rotten food, prolonged detention, and correctional staff misconduct.

In addition, 911 call records obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, from late December 2020 — when women started being held in Stewart — through late June of this year, show there were 118 emergency calls made to 911 from the facility. At least 23 calls were specified to be for detained women experiencing medical emergencies, although it could be more, since some notes from the emergency calls do not specify a gender.

According to the 911 records and interviews with women in the facility, two women have attempted suicide while in Stewart. Three women The Intercept spoke with said they witnessed or heard about suicide attempts while detained at the facility. “Many of us were really marked by seeing that,” said Diana, another asylum-seeker who, along with other detainees, witnessed one of the attempts. “Many couldn’t sleep, were depressed.”

Four women at the facility reported their experiences with the nurse to immigration attorneys and advocates, who on July 12 filed a letter of complaint to the CRCL. The complaint uses pseudonyms for the women, who are named in the complaint as Maria, Viviana, Laura, and Marta. The Intercept has confirmed the names and identities of the women and is also withholding their names out of respect for their privacy because they are victims of an alleged crime.

The complaint was co-signed by civil rights and immigrant advocacy organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, El Refugio, the Georgia Human Rights Clinic, and Owings MacNorlin LLC. The organizations also filed complaints against the nurse, one for each woman, to the Georgia Board of Nursing.

The Intercept reached out to ICE, CoreCivic, the Stewart County Sheriff’s Office, Homeland Security’s CRCL office, and the nurse for comment on the CRCL complaint and allegations of misconduct. In a statement, CoreCivic said the two women who reported sexual assault allegations in the facility were offered medical, mental health, and emotional support services during the administrative investigation and that they were released from the facility before the investigation was completed.

“The investigation regarding [the nurse] determined one woman’s claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was unfounded,” CoreCivic said in a statement, saying that no further allegations had emerged. “The safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority.”

“It is CoreCivic policy to aggressively investigate all allegations, regardless of the source, and support prosecution for those who are involved in incidents of sexual abuse,” the company said. “Alleged victims of sexual abuse will be provided a supportive and protective environment.”

The CRCL office and the Stewart County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to detailed questions.

After he took her to another office, where he continued to touch her, the complaint reads, the nurse allowed her to leave, and Maria reported her experience to a CoreCivic staff member.

“I thought it was the worst that could have happened to me,” Maria said. “But the days ahead were even harder.”

In the following days, Maria describes in the complaint that she was interviewed by CoreCivic and ICE officials. According to the complaint, she says a CoreCivic official accused her of lying, and an official allegedly said she would be given “seven years in prison” if she continued with her report, also accusing her of lying. According to the CRCL complaint, a CoreCivic employee also hit the table in front of her during an interview, and, over the course of a week, “she was subjected to repeated interrogations and accusations that she was lying.”

While there are systems ostensibly in place for detained women to file internal complaints with separate ICE and DHS offices, Maria told The Intercept that the phones intended to connect women to reporting hotlines were not working.

An internal review by the Southern Poverty Law Center of detainee medical records showed the nurse was seeing patients as recently as late as May of this year.

For some medical professionals, abuses tied to the provision of medical care constitute particularly grave violations. “You go to a medical provider with a sense of trust,” said Amy Zeidan, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine who has reviewed dozens of medical cases at Stewart and looked over the testimonies of the four women. “And that person completely abuses that trust.”

Laura, another woman detained in Stewart who also tells her story in the complaint, had been suffering from severe stomach pain and made multiple requests for medical attention. She said she was not seen by medical staff for a month. (She also asked to see a psychologist and was made to wait months before she was seen.) Attending to her medical request, after the monthlong wait, was the same nurse who allegedly assaulted Maria.

During the course of his examination, Laura said, the nurse put a stethoscope under her bra, touching her breasts with the stethoscope and his hands in a manner that she said deviated from past procedures she had experienced. He then told her to pull her pants down and put the stethoscope near her groin. As he touched her, he repeatedly pulled down his mask and chuckled, and she felt like he was “flirting,” she told The Intercept. She also said he looked at her in what she described as a sexually suggestive way while examining a painful bump on her leg. “The way he looked at me, it was so gross,” she said. During a second examination, she said, the nurse again instructed her to lift her shirt up and lower her pants, touching her chest and below her waist.

Documents reviewed by The Intercept show that Laura reported her allegations to at least three health care staff members, independent of each other, in early January. The medical records read that Laura was independently “evaluated by Mental Health, LIP” — a licensed independent practitioner — “and nursing staff.” Laura described her allegations in depth to all three staff members, with one even noting her fear of retaliation: “[Patient] said she did not alert security because she was afraid of getting in trouble.”

After speaking with the three health care staff members, officials were alerted of a possible violation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, the complaint says. Laura said that in the days that followed, two ICE officials threatened her, saying that there would be consequences if she was lying, and, again, that she could face seven years in prison for doing so. CoreCivic officials also began an investigation and interviewed Laura. Due to the ICE threats and her fear of retaliation, she decided that she didn’t want to proceed with an official complaint, she told The Intercept.

“The employee was placed on administrative leave until the investigation was completed and facts determined, as is standard practice,” CoreCivic said in its statement. “The two detainees making these claims were offered appropriate medical and mental health services, emotional support services, and answers to any questions they had about the investigative process.”

In her remaining months at Stewart, Laura said, “I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat. I had fallen into depression. I was sick. The treatment is terrible.” Records obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request show — the DHS database — that officials at CRCL were notified of two reports from two women, alleging sexual abuse by a medical staff member.

The two other women in the CRCL complaint, Viviana and Marta, also allege similar behavior by the nurse. For both Viviana and Marta, he had them remove their shirts during an exam. With Marta, the complaint says, he also told her to remove her bra.

“The manner in which he engaged with patients was not indicated, outside the scope of his practice, and in violation of the medical ethics required of a healthcare professional during patient-provider encounters,” the CRCL complaint reads. “While it is common to auscultate (listen) to heart and lung sounds with a stethoscope, it does not require a patient to remove or lift up their shirt and expose their breasts and certainly does not require removal of the bra.”

According to an internal DHS Office of Inspector General document from a 2017 inspection, guards at Stewart “lacked in-depth training” in guidelines laid out in the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act, which sets standards to prevent and address sexual assault in carceral facilities. Since its opening in 2006, Stewart has undergone two PREA audits: one in 2017 and one in 2021.

According to the Stewart Detention Center’s contract, ICE and the Stewart County Sheriff’s Office must be notified of all PREA-related reports. In response to a public records request submitted to the sheriff’s office, The Intercept found that there have been at least six official reports of alleged sexual assaults in an eight-month period, from July 2021 until April 2022. The sheriff’s office did not provide records for the other eight cases of alleged sexual assault at Stewart listed in the ICE inspection report.

The only way detainees could press charges was if a CoreCivic official drove them to the sheriff’s office.

Four of the complaints obtained from the sheriff’s office explicitly state that they were investigated “in house,” meaning that outside authorities did not get involved. In one report, it is written “no charges filed at this time” and on another, simply and with no further detail, “reported Prea case to Sheriff office by phone.”

On March 24, a complaint was shared with the sheriff’s office that merely stated: “Staff v Detainee Prea Case. Case handled in house.” CoreCivic said in its statement that their internal investigation into this complaint found the allegation to be “unfounded.”

During a phone interview, Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones confirmed that CoreCivic investigated these six cases on their own, stating that the sheriff’s office would only get involved if someone wanted to press charges. The only way they could press charges, however, was if a CoreCivic official drove them to the sheriff’s office. “We don’t like going in and out of the facility. We try to stay away from there as much as possible because of Covid,” Jones said. He added, “Basically, there were so many small cases, PREA cases, it was overloading the court. [CoreCivic] suggested they would handle as many cases as possible within the facility.”

Since Stewart began locking up immigrants in 2006, advocacy groups have continually called for it to be shuttered, pointing to its harsh conditions. From 2008 to 2012, a series of advocacy reports and internal reviews found poor conditions at the detention center, with issues in medical care to abuse of discipline and lack of food quality.

In 2017, Project South published a report highlighting the worsening conditions, especially with medical care and guards’ use of solitary confinement. For years, the facility has been criticized for being understaffed, with DHS Office of Inspector General reports in both 2017 and 2021 highlighting the lack of qualified medical professionals.

In 2018, CoreCivic was hit with a lawsuit by people detained in Stewart and advocacy organizations, claiming that detained immigrants were forced to labor inside the facility for as little as $1 a day, and that those who refused were threatened with solitary confinement. (The lawsuit is ongoing; CoreCivic denied the labor abuses.) Today, much of the work to clean, cook, and maintain the facility is still performed by detained people.

In the past five years, Stewart has had the greatest number of deaths of any facility in the entire ICE detention network. Deaths at Stewart have steadily mounted for its entire decade-and-a-half history, stemming from alleged negligence, medical issues, mental health issues that did not get the proper attention, and more.

In 2008, two years after Stewart opened, Pedro Gumayagay, a migrant from the Philippines, died while in custody there. The following year, Roberto Medina-Martinez, also detained in Stewart, died of a heart condition, which was due to, according to a lawsuit, the “federal government’s negligence.” (The government settled with Medina’s widow; the terms are undisclosed.)

In 2017, after spending 19 days in a tiny solitary confinement cell, 27-year-old Jean Jimenez-Joseph died by suicide despite a call to a hotline for mental health help, demonstrating that CoreCivic and ICE officials knew of his worsening mental health. Months later, 33-year-old Yulio Castro-Garrido died of pneumonia, a lung infection, and viral influenza, despite having no health problems when first being transferred to Stewart.

Related

ICE Review of Immigrant’s Suicide Finds Falsified Documents, Neglect, and Improper Confinement

In July 2018, Efraín Romero de la Rosa died by suicide in Stewart after correctional staff placed him in solitary confinement without following proper protocols, neglected his mental illness, and falsified documents. (In its statement, CoreCivic said: “Solitary confinement, whether as a term or practice, does not exist at any of the facilities we operate.” There is overwhelming documented evidence of solitary confinement cells in Stewart, including housing plan records as well as photos and videos of solitary units and cells obtained and published by The Intercept.)

During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, officials counted at least 1,400 confirmed cases in Stewart — at one point, nearly 20 percent of the detainee population was infected. At least four people died of complications from the virus while detained at the facility.

In addition to the highest number of Covid deaths of any ICE detention center, officials in Stewart regularly ignored basic health protocols meant to keep people from contracting the virus. When the virus began to spread, migrants demanded personal protective equipment and basic hygiene items. On two occasions, in a two-week period, guards responded to the demands by deploying a SWAT-like “special response” unit, which then pepper-sprayed migrants, fired pepperball ammunition, and placed people in solitary confinement.

Another investigation from The Intercept found that a number of those officers joked about the use-of-force on social media and celebrated the violence. ICE launched an internal investigation into the force and inappropriate social media usage. The findings have not been shared with the public.

“It’s really unfortunate that the administration has taken the decision to keep this place open when it was fully aware of the tragedies that have taken place at this ICE prison over the years, whether it be deaths or human rights violations,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director at Project South. “It is on them to prevent future tragedies, and it’s fully in their control to shut this place down.”

Maria, Viviana, Laura, and Marta, the women in the CRCL complaint, are out of detention, waiting for their immigration cases to proceed. Despite Maria and Laura’s initial reports of misconduct, and despite CRCL being made aware of  allegations against the nurse in January, the women say they have not been contacted by DHS, ICE, nor CoreCivic officials to continue the investigation into the alleged assault and harassment.

“What I want, most of all, is that if the nurse is there, what I want is for him to not be there. Because I don’t want anyone else to go through that,” Viviana said.

Maria echoed the sentiment: “I sometimes think I would have preferred staying in my country than to have this memory for my entire life. My country — where we don’t have food, where you have to stand in line to eat, where I had to end my studies. I would prefer to go through all of that rather than being abused again.”

The post ICE Jail Nurse Sexually Assaulted Migrant Women, Complaint Letter Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Following Romero’s death, ICE’s External Reviews and Analysis Unit, a nominally impartial body within the agency, opened an investigation that found that staff had falsified documents; improperly dealt with Romero’s medication; neglected to follow proper procedures for his care; and improperly placed him in disciplinary solitary confinement — despite multiple warnings of Romero’s declining mental health.

“The real question is, why would the government imprison an individual with a documented mental health illness in a deadly detention center?”

“The real question is, why would the government imprison an individual with a documented mental health illness in a deadly detention center?” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of the Atlanta-based civil rights nonprofit Project South, after reviewing the report. “And why would they repeatedly subject him to solitary confinement instead of providing him with the mental health care that he desperately needed?”

The investigative unit’s Detainee Death Review, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Intercept, lists 22 separate violations of both ICE and Stewart Detention Center rules by staff during Romero’s four months in ICE detention. It also lists eight separate “areas of concern.” ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Deadliest Immigration Jail

The Stewart Detention Center, owned and operated by private prison company CoreCivic, is one of the largest immigration jails in the country — and the deadliest. Since 2017, eight people detained at Stewart have died: four from complications with Covid-19 and two by suicide, including Romero. Two others died of pneumonia and a heart attack.

Romero had been diagnosed with schizophrenia prior to being detained by ICE. During his time at Stewart, he spent time in an external mental health facility for schizophrenic delusions. In 2019, The Intercept and WNYC’s The Takeaway released an investigation into Romero’s death demonstrating a stunning level of neglect toward Romero in the months leading up to his death. The newly revealed review document confirms our previous reporting and adds more detail to Romero’s time in ICE custody.

The Detainee Death Review raises questions about the quality of care for people detained at Stewart. Two inspection reports by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight earlier this year, although limited from constraints to the investigation due to the coronavirus pandemic, highlight some of the same concerns listed by the 2018 death review, including deficiencies in Stewart’s proper use of solitary confinement and incomplete records by medical and correctional staff. Both the oversight and review offices operate under ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

The use of solitary confinement in ICE detention centers has been subject to extensive scrutiny. In 2019, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Intercept, and other news organizations published an investigation based on thousands of internal documents demonstrating the agency’s widespread use of solitary confinement. A watchdog report in 2019 found that some 40 percent of detainees in ICE solitary confinement had mental health issues.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General published a report on ICE’s use of solitary confinement that said the agency did not have clear policies on the practice — and even when it did, ICE did not always comply with them. The report also said ICE did not comply with reporting and proper record-keeping practices, including the unlawful destruction of files.

In 2017, 14 months before Romero’s death, Jeancarlo Alfonso Jimenez-Joseph, a 27-year-old longtime U.S. resident, died in Stewart under similar conditions. Jimenez-Joseph also had diagnosed schizophrenia; he had expressed to staff that he was undergoing mental health crises and took his own life after spending 19 days in a solitary confinement cell.

Last year, Romero’s family filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic, claiming wrongful death and disability discrimination. “In this case, CoreCivic had the benefit of hindsight: The company knew everything about its operations that failed to save Jean’s life; but elected not to address those systemic failures because to do so would render its contract to operate the Stewart Detention Center financially unviable,” the lawsuit says. CoreCivic denied the lawsuit’s allegations in a court filing.

“The safety and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority,” a CoreCivic spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement. “We take seriously our obligation to adhere to federal Performance Based National Detention Standards in our ICE-contracted facilities, including the Stewart Detention Center (SDC). Our immigration facilities are monitored very closely by the government, and each and every one is required to undergo regular review and audit processes that include ensuring an appropriate standard of living for all detainees.”

Three Stints in Solitary

The ICE Detainee Death Review summarizes Romero’s time in the U.S. criminal justice system and in immigration detention. Romero crossed into the U.S. in 2000 and, starting in 2004, spent years in different carceral facilities following convictions on various charges including carjacking, possessing burglary tools, receiving stolen property, and driving under the influence. In 2013, the Virginia Department of Corrections transferred him to a mental health facility, where, due to his schizophrenia, Romero was “found to be mentally incompetent and was therefore unable to participate in his criminal proceedings,” according to the review.

Romero was released from the state-run mental health facility in 2017 and was rearrested in 2018 for larceny in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was in that jail that ICE took custody of Romero and sent him to the Stewart Detention Center in March 2018.

Throughout his time in ICE custody, staff members were aware of Romero’s diagnosis. Not only did staff have Romero’s health documentation, but he also spoke with them numerous times about it, discussed medications, and repeatedly expressed that he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. He also expressed his fixation on death, which worsened during his time in solitary confinement.

InGenesis, a health care company that contracts with the government to staff a variety of facilities nationwide, was helping provide care at Stewart at the time of Romero’s death. Health care at Stewart is now solely run by CoreCivic itself.

Romero was in solitary confinement three times during his stint at Stewart: the first time for “disciplinary segregation”; the second time for suicide watch; and the third time again for “disciplinary segregation.” For the two times he was sent to solitary on disciplinary bases — both times for making inappropriate sexual comments to staff — he was committed for 30 days.

The three stints in solitary were all marked by repeated failures to adhere to rules and standards around detention and, particularly, solitary confinement.

The three stints in solitary were all marked by repeated failures to adhere to rules and standards around detention and, particularly, solitary confinement. Romero spent his first 15 days in solitary without being taken by staff to shower, despite a rule requiring offers of at least three showers per week. In other cases, paperwork by staff went uncompleted. All the while, Romero’s mental health, particularly his delusions, continued and worsened.

At different periods during Romero’s time on suicide watch, until May 4, medical staff reported checking on him, but the ICE review unit investigation found that documentation was incomplete and that one nurse “did not sign her note until July 19, 2018” — nine days after Romero died.

From May 4 to June 12, he was taken to the Columbia Regional Care Center, a mental health facility, where he was given antipsychotic medications and regularly evaluated by a psychiatrist. The review said Romero continued to experience delusions and was fixated on death during his time at the facility.

The Last Three Weeks

After over a month at the mental health facility, Romero was set to be discharged, despite continuing delusions. The psychiatrist’s discharge summary said his “insight and judgment were chronically impaired.”

Despite his time at the mental health facility, and despite being previously placed in solitary confinement at Stewart, when he returned, security staff did not classify him during the intake process as someone with a “special vulnerability,” according to documents viewed by The Intercept in 2019.

After returning to Stewart, Romero was prescribed three medications but refused to take them, regularly telling staff they were not needed. The Detainee Death Review says there is no record that medical staff followed up to address the refusal.

A nurse practitioner at the facility was informed 17 times that Romero was refusing medication after his return from the mental health facility, but the nurse never saw Romero, citing “staffing issues” for numerous follow-up appointments being rescheduled.

On June 19, Romero was placed in disciplinary solitary confinement after approaching a female guard, rubbing his foot on hers, and making inappropriate comments. A supervisor, identified by The Intercept in 2019, sent him to solitary confinement for 30 days without making note of his history of mental illness, as required by ICE standards.

During the disciplinary process, there was “no documentation that security staff consulted a mental health professional prior to disciplinary hearings on April 6 and June 21, 2018, or that the hearing officer considered the degree to which DE LA ROSA’s mental illness may have contributed to his behavior,” the review said. (ICE used the latter surname, de la Rosa, to identify Romero, while representatives for the family told The Intercept the former surname was preferred.)

Despite a social worker’s warnings about Romero’s “serious mental illness” the day after being placed in solitary, he remained there until he died 20 days later.

On June 22, after three days, an ICE agent completed a form requiring Romero to stay in solitary confinement. The review report says there was no note on the form or in Romero’s detention file that indicated that he had been interviewed. A higher level ICE official approved the continued confinement.

Five days later, Romero’s detention records note that a nurse administered night doses of his medication, but ICE investigators were unable to corroborate the account because InGenesis, the company helping provide healthcare at Stewart, had “separated her from service” at the detention facility. According to the review, InGenesis discovered she had falsified an entry on Romero’s medical records on July 10, 2018 — the day he died.  The document said that, given Romero’s refusals to take medication, it was “highly unlikely” that he was actually administered the doses recorded by the nurse.  The review found that medical staff, including workers operating under the aegis of InGenesis, had violated detention rules. (InGenesis did not respond to requests for comment.)

The review said that during his time in solitary confinement, nurses on rounds did not note any hallucinations by Romero but added that “all notes are virtually identical and did not include subjective information reflecting DE LA ROSA’s answers in response to queries.”

The Final Neglect

The day Romero died, a social worker conducted a mental health assessment and once again documented that Romero met “serious mental illness” criteria. She noted that he “presented as pleasantly delusional.”

That night, correctional staff neglected to check on Romero from 8:40 p.m. to 10:33 p.m., despite ICE rules requiring checks every 30 minutes. For the three required cell checks during that time, the officer in the unit falsified a document, signing off as if he had looked inside Romero’s solitary confinement cell, according to the review as well as internal security videos obtained and published by The Intercept in 2019. CoreCivic told The Intercept in 2019 that the officer was fired after Romero’s death.

It was during this period that Romero took his own life. When another officer found Romero at 10:33 p.m., he called for a medical emergency. Other officers rushed to the solitary unit, moved Romero, and began performing CPR.

When nurses arrived five minutes later, they could not locate the automated external defibrillator. They also had a nonfunctioning oxygen tank.

Emergency services arrived, placed Romero on a gurney, and took him to the ambulance — all the while telling staff that he “was clinically dead” but that “they were going to do everything they could to reverse that,” according to the review. Emergency medical services took Romero to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:29 p.m.

The report ends, noting that with so many illegible signatures in Romero’s detention file, “there is no way to account for actions and decisions.”

“The system works like this because it’s designed and allowed to do so.”

Romero’s family’s lawsuit against CoreCivic is ongoing. Andrew Free, one of the attorneys representing Romero’s family, said that ICE’s death reviews often fail to hold broader policies and higher-ranking officials to account. “Accountability flows down the chain of command to the lowest paid, most vulnerable workers at the facility,” Free said, “while profit flows up in the billions to the private prison companies whose facilities keep breaking the rules and claiming human lives with impunity. The system works like this because it’s designed and allowed to do so.”

Stewart, for its part, is seeing an influx of new detainees. Though the facility has previously been used to house male immigration detainees, a number of women have been transferred to Stewart. Some of the women were sent to Stewart from another ICE detention center in Georgia, the privately run Irwin County Detention Center, following allegations of widespread medical misconduct at the facility.

With a rising number of women detainees being held at Stewart, advocates fear that more detainees will be mistreated at the facility.

“Instead of transferring additional people to Stewart,” said Shahshahani, of Project South, “the administration must immediately shut Stewart down before we witness even more tragedies.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 1-800-273-8255.

The post ICE Review of Immigrant’s Suicide Finds Falsified Documents, Neglect, and Improper Confinement appeared first on The Intercept.

Internal ICE records and emails, as well as a deposition by an ICE officer in a court case, show the agency referring to an advocacy group as a “known adversary” and closely surveilling the immigration and civil rights activists’ activities, both online and in person.

“ICE’s pattern of surveilling and targeting immigrant rights organizers demonstrates how afraid the agency is of being held accountable for its actions.”

“ICE’s pattern of surveilling and targeting immigrant rights organizers demonstrates how afraid the agency is of being held accountable for its actions,” Alina Das, a law professor at New York University and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, who has closely studied ICE surveillance and retaliation against activists, told The Intercept. “Government agencies should be protecting these voices, not silencing them.”

The groups that were surveilled by ICE include Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, El Refugio, and others, as well as individual activists. The immigrant advocates have all worked to bring national and international attention to alleged abuse at ICE’s Stewart Detention Center and the Irwin County Detention Center, both in Georgia. Stewart is one of the largest ICE facilities in the nation, and it is also the facility that has seen the most deaths of detained migrants over the past five years.

The emails show that in one instance, ICE considered retaliating against the advocacy group El Refugio, an immigrant rights organization and ministry that focuses on visiting and supporting people detained in Stewart. ICE was monitoring a vigil planned for one of the men at Stewart who had died in custody. When informed that the main organizer of the vigil was not El Refugio, an ICE official wrote, “If it was El Refugio I was going to have to put some effort into getting them out of their visitation program.”

“We are concerned to know that ICE is surveilling community members, activists, and organizations like ours because we are concerned about the well-being of people in their custody,” El Refugio Executive Director Amilcar Valencia said. “As an organization that walks alongside those affected by immigration detention, we are obligated to report issues of poor treatment, medical neglect, and other abuses suffered at Stewart Detention Center.”

In a statement, an ICE spokesperson did not respond to questions about the discussion of retaliation. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Like all other law enforcement agencies, ICE follows planned protests to ensure the safety and security of its infrastructure, personnel, officers and all those involved.”

While ICE has a history of monitoring and intimidating its critics — a practice that falls within a long pattern of the U.S. government surveilling activist groups — the agency’s surveillance of the groups first took place in Georgia following the 2017 death by suicide of Jean Jimenez-Joseph in Stewart. Advocates alleged that CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs Stewart, and ICE didn’t properly monitor or care for Jimenez-Joseph, noting that he was placed in solitary confinement for 18 days prior to his death, despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a history of mental illness, and a recent suicide attempt. (An internal ICE review obtained by CBS News confirmed that staff engaged in improper mental health care and failure to conduct routine health and safety checks in the days leading up to his death.)

Project South, a human rights group that has been at the forefront of investigating and exposing allegations of medical abuse in immigrant detention centers over the past year, shared the documents exclusively with The Intercept. The documents revealing the surveillance practices came from a larger trove of records accessed by Jimenez-Joseph’s family through the Freedom of Information Act as they prepared a wrongful death lawsuit against ICE. (In the statement, an ICE spokesperson told The Intercept, “ICE continues to place a greater focus on suicide prevention, working to improve its suicide risk assessment tools and providing more robust suicide prevention training for detention center staff.”)

When Georgia Detention Watch and other groups organized the vigil to honor Jimenez-Joseph, ICE monitored the vigil closely, exchanging multiple emails and counting attendees as they RSVP’d online. The documents indicate that ICE monitored the real-time presence of advocates at the vigils, resorting to militant language in their descriptions of them. ICE officials referred to Georgia Detention Watch as “a known adversary” and ordered the preparation of a “SIR,” or Significant Incident Report, for a candlelight vigil involving 19 people.

An ICE spokesperson, in an internal email the day after Jimenez-Joseph’s death, claimed that activist groups were trying to “exploit” Jimenez-Joseph’s death “by making a lot of false claims.” It is unclear what claims the spokesperson was referring to.

Andrew Free, the attorney representing the Jimenez-Joseph family, contrasted the efforts toward surveillance with a litany of what he considered failures by ICE leading up to and after the death.

“ICE didn’t bother to conduct the forensic autopsy their standards required, correct the false record of Jean’s criminal history, or reveal to Congress and the American people that he held valid DACA status up until the moment he died. But they found time to digitally surveil his memorial in Kansas City and a protest in Nashville against the CEO of a private prison company,” Free told The Intercept. “Even in death, ICE officials found ways to wantonly torment Jean and his community. We hope the evidence Jean’s family has gathered will end this toxic agency’s stranglehold on the truth.”

During proceedings for Jimenez-Joseph’s wrongful death lawsuit, Free asked Stewart Detention Center’s ICE Officer in Charge John Bretz about the agency’s surveillance practices.

“Once we get a — once we hear, or get a report that there is going to be a demonstration, past practice was that we had to do a Significant Incident Report,” Bretz said in the deposition. “But that’s no longer the case, we discontinued that several years ago. That’s no longer a requirement.”

Besides ICE closely monitoring, accusing, and vilifying the human rights organizations, the documents reveal the close coordination between ICE and CoreCivic, the for-profit corporation running the detention center.

Members of El Refugio had asked to visit Jimenez-Joseph shortly before his death but were denied.

Records show that in addressing why Jimenez-Joseph was denied a visit shortly before his death, an ICE spokesperson wrote, “I’ll simply explain denying the visit was a CoreCivic decision… My sole intent here is to protect ERO” — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations — “and I’ll be as sensitive as possible to not criticize CoreCivic in doing so.”

In another email, ICE’s then-Assistant Field Office Director Sean Ervin implies that he and CoreCivic are “on the same page” and that “we are trying to allow CoreCivic the opportunity to explain why they refused visitation to Jimenez.” When ICE realized that CoreCivic wouldn’t be making a public statement, Ervin proposed ICE spokespeople simply tell reporters, “ICE cannot comment on operational decisions made by Core Civic employees and defers questions to CoreCivic for response.”

“Our organization provides social visits at SDC” — Stewart Detention Center — “as a way of accompanying people who are detained,” Valencia, of El Refugio, told The Intercept. “This role does not prevent us from speaking up when we are made aware of neglect and abuse.”

As other vigils for Jimenez-Joseph were planned, according to a deposition from the wrongful death suit, Bretz, the ICE official, wrote in an email that ICE continued to monitor groups by doing “a little research on facebook,” noting the number of participants who were signing up to attend. Another email noted that the importance of the vigil, for which 19 people were planning to attend, was “high” — the same vigil for which the assistant field office director ordered someone from ICE to prepare the Significant Incident Report.

Earlier this year, ICE settled with the Jimenez-Joseph family, paying the family $925,000.

“Our family struggles everyday to cope with the fact that the only way ICE could resolve Jean’s death is with a settlement. We want change beyond that,” said Jean Jimenez-Joseph’s family in a statement addressed to ICE. “Jean is gone because of ICE. Gone because of carelessness. Gone because when he cried out for help you threw him into isolation. Gone because Stewart Detention Center was not staffed correctly. You are all complicit and to blame for Jean’s death.”

The monitoring of immigrant advocates, and interventions by ICE officials, continued into spring of last year.

On March 26, 2020, the advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Mijente, Georgia Detention Watch, and Siembra NC organized a virtual press conference to bring attention to hunger strikes taking place at Stewart due to the lack of Covid-19 safety protocols.

When Project South’s Legal and Advocacy Director Azadeh Shahshahani tweeted about the hunger strike, ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams sent an email to Shahshahani claiming that there were no hunger strikes happening and demanding that she “edit/delete your posts.” (Twitter does not give users the option to edit posts.) Williams chastised Shahshahani: “Persons who spread misinformation are engaged in irresponsible behavior by needlessly spreading fear, and they do a disservice to the communities they claim to represent.”

Shahshahani did not delete the posts, and Project South pushed back against ICE’s request. She noted that Project South goes through a corroboration process to verify its information from multiple sources and that there was indeed a hunger strike taking place at Stewart.

“It’s very much in line with what you’ll find in totalitarian regimes.”

Shahshahani told The Intercept that the incident was an example of “ICE not only monitoring your speech, but telling you what to do.” She added, “It’s very much in line with what you’ll find in totalitarian regimes.”

Twice in two weeks during April 2020, correctional staff at Stewart pepper-sprayed immigrants who were demanding improved conditions and protections from Covid-19. Advocates and family members of people detained have continued to speak out about alleged abuse at the facility.

Shahshahani told The Intercept, “The response of ICE is to dismiss abuses, not to do anything to address abuses.”

ICE monitoring of and use of scare tactics and retaliation against advocates is not new. As previously reported by The Intercept, New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic documented more than 1,000 incidents of alleged retaliation against immigrant rights groups, individual activists, and journalists. Most of the incidents occurred from 2016 to 2020, but some go back as far as 2012, while others have been documented in recent months.

Rachel Maremont, an NYU law student and member of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, told The Intercept, “ICE is going after movement-based groups, knowing that these are the people who have the most contact with the folks in detention who are the most marginalized and vulnerable.”

Chiraayu Gosrani, also an NYU Law student who helped document the incidents of retaliation, noted a pattern in ICE’s monitoring of and actions against advocates. “ICE surveillance leads to more egregious forms of retaliation,” Gosrani said. He pointed to the arrest and attempted deportation of Ravi Ragbir, one of the leaders of the New Sanctuary Coalition, and the targeting of Maru Mora Villapondo, of La Resistencia in Washington state. Both high-profile activists were surveilled and eventually targeted by ICE. Gosrani asked, “What business does ICE have in monitoring people investigating human rights abuses?”

From the Obama administration through the Trump administration, and continuing today, the NYU Law group has witnessed ICE seeking to silence dissent within detention centers and deporting government informants, witnesses of mass shootings, and witnesses of medical abuse.

“Instead of addressing the grave issues advocates are raising,” Shahshahani and Priyanka Bhatt, both attorneys from Project South, said in a statement to The Intercept, “ICE is using intimidation in an attempt to silence us.”

The post ICE Discussed Punishing Immigrant Advocates for Peaceful Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently announced that the agency would be severing its contract with the private prison company that runs Irwin, LaSalle Corrections. The facility in Ocilla, Georgia, had become the subject of controversy and questions about rights abuses after allegations surfaced that detained women underwent unnecessary gynecological procedures — allegations that the orders to shut the facility obliquely mentioned.

“This facility, which has a long and well-documented history of inflicting horrific abuse and neglect on people held there, should be immediately closed once and for all.”

“This facility, which has a long and well-documented history of inflicting horrific abuse and neglect on people held there, should be immediately closed once and for all,” said Diego Sánchez, a Georgia-based direct services attorney with Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. “It is beyond disappointing that nearly two weeks since the directive to close Irwin as soon as possible, ICE continues to confine immigrants at Irwin and other horrific facilities across the country. Enough is enough.”

Whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at Irwin, detailed a host of medical abuses to The Intercept last fall, bringing international scrutiny and prompting congressional investigations into the facility.

One detainee currently housed at Irwin told The Intercept that it’s been “business as usual” in the facility since Mayorkas’s announcement of the closure. Benjamin Edetanlen, 43, who has been detained at the facility for almost 16 months and faces imminent deportation to England, confirmed that other people have been transferred into Irwin during the past week but could not specify the number. “Nothing has changed, nothing is changing,” Edetanlen said, describing the prevailing mood in Irwin.

Edetanlen also relayed an account given to him by two guards at the prison of an all-staff meeting called by David Paulk, the detention center’s warden. He said that guards have been claiming that the warden told them that “the newspapers are lying” and that staff have no need to worry about Irwin closing.

According to a source familiar with day-to-day operations at Irwin, who requested anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, guards and other staff members are saying that the closure of Irwin was a “rumor” and that operations would continue as usual. (ICE, Paulk, and LaSalle did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the timing of Irwin’s closure nor the continued arrival of immigration detainees there.)

After publication of this story, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security pointed The Intercept to remarks made by Mayorkas in the May announcement of impending detention center closures. “We have an obligation to make lasting improvements to our civil immigration detention system,” Mayorkas said in the statement. “This marks an important first step to realizing that goal. DHS detention facilities and the treatment of individuals in those facilities will be held to our health and safety standards. Where we discover they fall short, we will continue to take action as we are doing today.”

Whether ICE seriously pursues ending its contract with LaSalle to house immigration detainees at Irwin raises thorny questions about the Biden administration’s promises to rein in abuses in immigration enforcement and, more broadly, in private-run federal detention.

“They don’t have the political will,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group, expressing skepticism about the Biden administration’s sluggishness to act on the pledges to close Irwin and roll back private detention. “Immigrants may still be detained there. They just want to perform. ICE is saying they want to back out, but what does that actually look like? It’s sort of a flimsy thing.”

U.S. Marshals Contract

Following Mayorkas’s announcement, ICE could have ended its operations at Irwin by Friday, June 18, according to the contract and a legal analysis of it performed by an advocacy group. The memo, in which Mayorkas announced the shuttering, originally posted by CBS News, calls on acting ICE Director Tae Johnson to prepare to discontinue use of Irwin by, among other things, facilitating “the movement to a different facility or facilities those detained individuals whose continued detention is needed to achieve our national security, public safety, and border security mission.”

ICE’s agreement with Irwin is based on a rider in a contract between LaSalle, the private prison firm, and the U.S. Marshals Service, a law enforcement agency operating under the Department of Justice. The Marshals Service, which is in charge of holding federal pretrial detainees, does not own any facilities. Instead, the agency holds people in a network of around 1,200 county jails, local facilities, and private prisons that have contracts with the Marshals Service. According to the contract, LaSalle is currently earning $71.29 per person per day for detaining migrants — solely referred to as “prisoners” in the contract — for the government.

It is not uncommon for ICE to detain people through rider clauses in Marshals Service contracts. According to a January report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in 2019 ICE was detaining people in 185 facilities throughout the country. Of those, 62 of the facilities were through riders in Marshals Service contracts. In total, the report found that 17 percent of the average daily ICE population is detained in facilities through riders in Marshals Service contracts.

The Intercept reviewed the Irwin contract between LaSalle and the Marshals Service, as well as a legal analysis of the contract commissioned by the #DetentionKills program at Al Otro Lado, an immigrant advocacy group. The contract has no specified end date for the intergovernmental service agreement, but the Marshals could issue notice and terminate the contract within 30 days. The advocates’ legal analysis concluded that there was “no potential liability for the US Marshals Service to terminate and end the agreement under this provision.”

If ICE follows through on ending its contract with Irwin, detention operations may continue with pretrial federal detainees still being locked up in the facility under the custody of the Marshals Service, according to that agency’s contract with LaSalle. There are currently 124 people under the Marshals’ custody detained at Irwin, according to the agency.

“This calls into question what the EO actually stands for. This flies in the face of what Biden has claimed.”

“Generally speaking, the U.S. Marshals Service makes housing decisions based upon various factors such as security, availability of bed space in a particular facility, court appearances and other factors,” a spokesperson for the Marshals Service said. “The U.S. Marshals Service has no responsibility for, or involvement in, the custody of ICE detainees. While the U.S. Marshals Service allows ICE as an authorized agency on some of our intergovernmental agreements for detention services with state and local jail facilities, ICE can operate under those agreements and/or separate agreements, of which we have no involvement.”

An arrangement continuing federal detention at Irwin would seem to run afoul of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on January 26. (Biden’s order did not address private immigration detention companies.) In Youngstown, Ohio, the Marshals recently renegotiated a contract with for-profit prison company CoreCivic to hold federal detainees, seemingly in direct contravention to Biden’s order.

“This calls into question what the EO” — executive order — “actually stands for,” said Shah, the Detention Watch Network official. “This flies in the face of what Biden has claimed.”

Agony at Irwin

Biden’s federal government budget for the fiscal year 2022 increased funds for ICE oversight but maintained nearly identical levels of funding for immigration detention as the Trump administration. Biden’s budget funds 32,500 detention beds; last year’s budget, under Trump, funded 34,000 beds.

For advocates working on immigrants’ behalf, the continued massive capacity, coupled with the news that Irwin was still accepting detainees, raised alarms.

“Given what we have learned about the systematic violence against immigrants’ bodies at Irwin, we need ICE to come clean about what is happening at ICE prisons nationwide,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South, an advocacy group based in Georgia. “Immigrants cannot have their bodily integrity at the mercy of ICE and the private prisons corporations the agency contracts with.”

Advocates and a detainee also spoke of continued troubling reports from inside Irwin with regard to medical issues, particularly the coronavirus pandemic. The alleged medical abuse is what brought Irwin under scrutiny in the first place, after The Intercept first wrote about Wooten, the whistleblower who detailed abuse and neglect. Wooten initially spoke out to bring attention to the poor implementation of protocols related to the pandemic.

“It’s classic Irwin, flouting whatever is coming down from the top.”

Edetanlen, the detainee, said that Covid-19 protocols are still being flouted, with guards packing people detained there into rooms where it is impossible to socially distance, as well as staff ignoring sick call requests, even from people with Covid-19 symptoms. Edetanlen also told The Intercept that the medical ward remains filthy, with roaches, other insects, and mold. “It’s classic Irwin,” Edetanlen said, with the facility “flouting whatever is coming down from the top.”

After The Intercept published Wooten’s allegations about medical misconduct, primarily related to the coronavirus pandemic, widespread national attention turned to detained women at Irwin who described being subjected to unnecessary gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, without their informed consent. So far, 57 women have spoken out about the gynecological procedures they were subjected to. Fourteen women have filed a class-action lawsuit against ICE, LaSalle, and the doctor responsible for the procedures. (The Marshals Service did not respond when asked whether women in their custody would still be detained in Irwin.)

Viridiana Fuentes, a community organizer who has protected immigration status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and who visits people detained at Irwin, told The Intercept: “The federal government owes a debt it has not begun to pay to victims of ICE.” Fuentes added that many of the victims in Irwin “risked everything to expose abuse and all of whom should be free.”

Update: June 4, 2021
This story has been updated to include remarks Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made at the announcement of detention center closures, which a department spokesperson pointed The Intercept to after publication.

The post “Nothing Is Changing”: ICE Sends Detainees to Irwin Prison Despite Pledges to Close It appeared first on The Intercept.

The memo, sent by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, instructs U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terminate the contract with the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, according to the Washington Post, along with another detention center in Massachusetts. Both facilities are under federal investigation for detention practices.

“This victory, brought about through years of organizing and exposing the abuses, is momentous,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, a civil rights organization based in Atlanta.

“This victory, brought about through years of organizing and exposing the abuses, is momentous.”

The detention center, run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections, was the focus of widespread criticism last fall when Dawn Wooten, a nurse and subsequently whistleblower at the facility, came forward with allegations of pervasive medical neglect and misconduct.

“For over a decade, LaSalle and ICE have ignored, threatened, and even attacked immigrants at Irwin in an attempt to silence them,” said Priyanka Bhatt, a staff attorney at Project South. “Today matters because the people suffering abuse at Irwin have been seen.”

In her whistleblower allegations, Wooten detailed how the facility’s staff ignored serious medical complaints and failed to take proper precautions against Covid-19 both for the staff and the people detained at the prison. Wooten also alleged detained women were subjected to hysterectomies and other, sometimes unnecessary, gynecological procedures performed without proper informed consent, allegations that spurred widespread international criticism, including congressional investigations.

According to the Washington Post, Mayorkas’s memo said Homeland Security “will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention.” In a statement to the Post, Mayorkas said, “DHS detention facilities and the treatment of individuals in those facilities will be held to our health and safety standards. Where we discover they fall short, we will continue to take action as we are doing today.” (ICE and LaSalle Corrections did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the closure memo.)

Mayorkas’s memo closing Irwin also instructed ICE not to renew its contract with the Bristol County immigration detention center in Massachusetts. In December, the Massachusetts attorney general said the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the facility, violated the civil rights of detained immigrants last year, when officials fired pepper spray and pepper projectiles and illegally unleashed dogs on detainees who were demanding Covid-19 protections.

The closures of the Irwin and Bristol detention centers come as the total number of people detained by ICE has increased in recent months, to over 20,000 as of May 14, a high for the Biden administration, but still far lower than the more than 55,000 people who were detained at any given time during the peak months of 2019. It is not clear when the facilities will be officially shuttered, but the Post reported that the Bristol contract would be terminated immediately and DHS would work to sever its contract with Irwin as quickly as possible.

“The closure of the Irwin County Detention Center marks a decisive victory in the long war against white supremacy in the U.S. south and across the globe,” said Kevin Caron, a steering committee member of Georgia Detention Watch. “While they have yet to receive justice, today those who suffered at Irwin have been vindicated. The abuses at Irwin are emblematic of our urgent need to end immigrant detention and abolish ICE.”

Last September, Wooten blew the whistle about conditions at the facility amid the Covid-19 pandemic, first reported by The Intercept. With the assistance of attorneys from the Government Accountability Project, Wooten sent a letter to Congress detailing “misconduct and failures to provide medical care in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.” With Project South, she also submitted a complaint to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

Part of the complaint said that women in detention were being subjected to often unnecessary gynecological procedures conducted without proper consent. Later, in a closed-door meeting with senators on Capitol Hill, attorneys confirmed at least 57 women were subject to the reproductive-system procedures since 2018.

The story, especially the gynecological procedures allegedly performed without consent, was widely covered. Public officials demanded an investigation. A number of the women subjected to the gynecological procedures were subsequently deported, even as advocates demanded that ICE cease the deportations of victims and shutter the facility. The DHS Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into the allegations; its findings have not yet been released. (The DHS OIG also launched an investigation into prenatal and gynecological care in other ICE facilities, the findings of which have also not been released.)

Last December, 14 women filed a class-action lawsuit alleging abuse during their time imprisoned in Irwin. The lawsuit claims that the women received nonconsensual procedures performed by Mahendra Amin, a doctor based in rural Georgia who was sent patients from the nearby detention center. Both Amin and his attorney have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. The women claim that ICE and Irwin County Detention Center officials were made aware by detainees of alleged misconduct.

“In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault,” the lawsuit says. “After Petitioners spoke out, or attempted to speak out, about their abuse, Respondents retaliated against them in order to silence them.”

ICE stopped sending immigrant women to Amin after the allegations of nonconsensual and unnecessary procedures came to light. The FBI is currently investigating Amin for a series of unnecessary, rough, or abusive procedures, according to a report in Prism by Tina Vásquez earlier this month.

Last week, a group of 29 formerly detained immigrants sent a letter to President Joe Biden denouncing abusive practices in immigration detention. In the letter, they also demanded that the Irwin County Detention Center be shut down and all contracts with LaSalle and other for-profit detention companies be terminated.

“Many women faced retaliation from ICE, with some even being deported to prevent them from testifying in any investigations, a tactic frequently employed by ICE to silence and disappear its victims,” the letter reads.

The shuttering of Irwin does not mean that people currently detained in the facility will be released from detention.

Another detention center in rural Georgia, the Stewart Detention Center, has received an influx of women detainees since December 2020, many of them transfers from Irwin. Stewart, which has exclusively detained men for over a decade, is one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country. It is also, according to advocates and nongovernmental trackers, one of the deadliest.

“Transfer of women from one corporate-run detention center with a track record of human rights violations to another deadly one is not going to get ICE off the hook.”

Stewart, which is run by the private prison company CoreCivic, has come under fire by, among others, the DHS Office of Inspector General, for alleged violent abuse against people detained there. Since 2017, eight detainees at Stewart have died. Two men died by suicide after being held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods of time, despite diagnoses of mental health disorders.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, The Intercept reported that detainees in Stewart demanding improved medical care were pepper-sprayed twice in two weeks by a special unit of private correctional officers akin to a SWAT team. The Intercept also reported that three detainees in wheelchairs were hurled to the ground after asking for better medical care amid the pandemic. According to ICE’s tracker, four people detained at Stewart died from complications after contracting Covid-19.

“We will not rest however until Stewart is also shut down,” said Shahshahani, of Project South. “Transfer of women from one corporate-run detention center with a track record of human rights violations to another deadly one is not going to get ICE off the hook.”

Update: May 20, 2021, 1:04 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from Kevin Caron of Georgia Detention Watch.

The post ICE Detention Center Shuttered Following Repeated Allegations of Medical Misconduct appeared first on The Intercept.

The new numbers of relevant cases and women who remain in detention were included in the materials submitted to the closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill about the ordeal over women’s medical care at Irwin. Organized by the Senate Democratic Caucus, attorney Sarah Owings of Owings MacNorlin law firm in Atlanta, two women previously detained in Irwin, and four independent doctors presented recent findings, including more than 60 pages of written materials, in a Monday briefing for the senators. The briefings came as part of Congressional investigations into the allegation, which Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress have pledged to look in to.

As the number of women alleging medical misconduct at Irwin, which is run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections, grows, advocates for detainees worry that there may never be a full accounting. The numbers presented to the Senate on Monday were limited to only those cases lawyers could identify, the advocates said. Because of the opacity of the immigration system and the constant flux of detainees — as well as the deportation of witnesses and survivors — a comprehensive review is unlikely.

“It pains me to know that there could be many more women out there who will never be able to talk about what happened to them.”

“It pains me to know that there could be many more women out there who will never be able to talk about what happened to them and the abuse that they suffered while at Irwin, let alone receive a measure of redress, while living with the life-long damage to their bodies and spirits,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director of Project South, which first raised the issues in a whistleblower complaint. “ICE and the private prison corporation LaSalle must be held to account.”

In the Senate briefing, the doctors and former detainees outlined a pattern of gynecological operations conducted by Dr. Mahendra Amin, the doctor at the center of the allegations, and the “uniform absence of truly informed consent,” according to materials submitted on Capitol Hill by the coalition of attorneys, advocates, and women recently detained in Irwin. After allegations of the medical abuses came to light in September, following the whistleblower complaint first reported by The Intercept, ICE said it stopped referring patients to Amin.

The materials submitted to Congress were compiled by on-the ground organizations; attorneys, including Owings; and advocates, led by the South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Georgia Detention Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative.

In response to an inquiry from The Intercept about the growing numbers of women alleging medical misconduct and congressional interest in the case, Amin’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, sent a statement responding to a Los Angeles Times story published last week about a medical review of some of the immigration detainees’ cases. In the statement, Grubman, who said the doctor could not comment on individual cases because of privacy regulations, claims that there are “serious questions to the veracity” of the LA Times reporting, specifically citing that the team of medical experts didn’t request medical records from Irwin County Hospital or Amin himself. (Records of medical procedures are also maintained by ICE and can be requested by attorneys or detainees.)

Grubman, who did not respond to specific follow-up questions from The Intercept, has maintained throughout the ordeal that Amin is cooperating with investigators and that the doctor will be cleared of any wrongdoing.

Mounting Allegations

The widespread attention on the women at Irwin has amplified calls for better medical care in immigration detention, where there has been a dramatic increase in deaths over the past year. Advocates for immigration detainees have long complained of dangerously poor medical care in the sprawling patchwork of often privately run detention facilities.

Initial reports estimated that 20 or more women detained in Irwin had undergone full or partial hysterectomies in the last six years. Amin and his attorney dispute the claims. New information collected by attorneys and advocates who spoke with The Intercept — and who presented their findings to the Senate, including the written materials, which The Intercept reviewed — points to a broader pattern of women being pressured to undergo potentially unnecessary procedures.

Overall, the attorneys counted 57 confirmed patients of Amin, 17 of whom remain at Irwin as of October 25. (The Intercept was able to speak with attorneys who represented at least 52 of those women.) None of them have received any follow-up gynecological care since ICE stopped sending patients to Amin five weeks ago.

“The recent allegations by the independent contracted employee raise some very serious concerns that deserve to be investigated quickly and thoroughly,” said Tony Pham, ICE’s acting director, in a statement to The Intercept. Pham said ICE welcomes efforts of both the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, as well as the department’s Office of Inspector General to investigate. The statement concluded, “If there is any truth to these allegations, it is my commitment to make the corrections necessary to ensure we continue to prioritize the health, welfare and safety of ICE detainees.”

The Senate briefing comes on the heels of an independent medical review led by the ALLGOOD Foundation. The review, which was first reported in the LA Times article, was conducted by nine board-certified OB-GYNs and two nursing experts who reviewed over 3,200 pages of medical records for 19 of the women who had alleged medical misconduct by Amin. The team, according to their report, found “a disturbing pattern of aggressive treatment, including ‘overcalling’ the need for invasive surgeries, unwarranted pressure to undergo surgery, and a failure to obtain informed consent.”

“Not Something You Can Go Back From”

Over the past five weeks, since the whistleblower complaint emerged, a steady stream of women who visited with Amin have shared their stories with the press. One, Jamileth, whose name has been changed for fear of retaliation, told The Intercept that Amin did procedures on her without getting her permission. In May, amid a nine-month stint at Irwin, she began experiencing stomach pain and irregular periods. The ICE detention center sent her to Amin.

“He treated me in a very — well, in a very rough way.”

“He did a vaginal ultrasound, but he didn’t ask me if I wanted one or not. He just did it,” Jamileth told The Intercept in Spanish. “I don’t know, he treated me in a very — well, in a very rough way.”

According to Jamileth, Amin said she had an ovarian cyst. She said he asked if he could give her an injection — Jamileth does not know for what — and then suggested surgery to remove the cyst. Jamileth refused both the injection and the operation, saying she needed to consult with her family first. In the end, she refused to see Amin again.

“I didn’t want to return, because I had seen other examples,” Jamileth said, explaining that she had seen other women in detention after visits with Amin. She described, in one instance, seeing a woman return from surgery: “She was bleeding through the wound, she was purple, black in her stomach, and it looked really bad.”

Several women told their attorneys they were prescribed Depo-Provera, a hormonal birth control shot with sometimes serious side effects, without their consent. One woman, after her operation and shot of Depo-Provera, was “still unclear what exactly happened to her body,” according to the briefing materials provided to Senate Democrats. There were a number of cases that resulted in lasting confusion. One woman was deported to El Salvador and thinks that she had a hysterectomy but remains unsure, according to the materials provided to senators.

Another woman went to Amin for pain she suspected resulted from having fibroid cysts removed from her uterus before her time in detention, according to the Senate briefing. Amin administered three shots to her, explaining they were “for the pain,” according to her recollection in the briefing. Only after she was returned to Irwin did she learn from a nurse there that she had been given Depo-Provera.

When the woman asked about the shots at a follow-up appointment, Amin got defensive. “I’m trying to help you,” he said, according to the testimony in the briefing. He later pressured her into submitting to a hysterectomy, the testimony said, telling the detainee, “You’re an old woman, why would you want to have more babies?” She refused the surgery.

Yet another woman said she felt lucky when she was diagnosed with Covid-19 — the detention center failed to take basic precautionary measures, refused to test symptomatic detainees, and underreported cases of Covid-19, according to the earlier whistleblower report — and her hysterectomy was delayed. ”I felt like I didn’t have control over my life,” she said. She eventually refused the surgery and was deported.

The medical review of pathology reports conducted by ALLGOOD showed “a pattern of overly aggressive care,” including “inappropriate, unconsented transvaginal procedures,” “exaggerated interpretations of imaging results,” and less invasive methods not being pursued.

Attorney Benjamin Osorio, who represents two of the women tallied in the Senate briefing, said in an interview with The Intercept that one of his clients was told a hysterectomy was the only possible option to remove a possibly cancerous cyst. “There are less invasive, less aggressive treatments, but he took out her whole reproductive system,” Osorio explained “That’s not something you can go back from.”

The Intercept spoke to Yuridia, who was deported three days after undergoing an operation she said she did not comprehend and did not consent to. She was dumped into Mexico not knowing what happened to her, still bleeding, wondering if she still had a uterus, her attorney Kathleen Hoyos told The Intercept. It was a month before Yuridia, who asked to be identified by her first name because of an ongoing immigration case, was able to see a gynecologist in Mexico and learn what had happened to her. (She had been given a shot of a hormonal contraceptive and underwent a dilation and curettage to remove a cyst.) Hoyos said, “All she knew was what happened to her was wrong.”

Deportations Concern Congress

Since the initial whistleblower report was submitted in September, ICE has deported at least five women who were seen by Amin. At least two more women may be deported this week, according to the Senate briefing. “ICE, LaSalle, and DHS are ensuring fewer witnesses are able to participate in the pending federal investigation,” the Senate briefing materials say.

“We need a full accounting of what has been done to the women at Irwin, so we can hold perpetrators of any horrific actions accountable.”

Members of Congress are taking note. “Advocates have shared with my team that many of the women who questioned Dr. Amin’s advice were quickly deported, and that many others at the facility are now fearful of seeking medical care at all,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement to The Intercept. “We need a full accounting of what has been done to the women at Irwin, so we can hold perpetrators of any horrific actions accountable, and give the American people the answers they deserve.”

Last Friday, eight members of Congress, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., sent a letter to United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet outlining concerns about gynecological procedures on women in Irwin. They requested that Bachelet lead an investigation into the procedures conducted on immigrant women.

“These allegations illustrate a clear pattern of alleged human rights violations by DHS,” the letter says. “This pattern of behavior is perpetuated and encouraged by the consistent and unforgivable failure of the United States government and its institutions to take these allegations seriously by investigating them in a transparent, thorough, and impartial manner.”

Last week, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., also sent a letter to ICE, along with Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., demanding that Irwin be shut down.

One detained woman quoted in Monday’s Senate briefing materials also called for Irwin to be shut down, adding, “We could die locked up in here.”

The post Number of Women Alleging Misconduct by ICE Gynecologist Nearly Triples appeared first on The Intercept.

The complaint, filed by the human rights group Project South, quoted a detainee from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Irwin County Detention Center saying that five women who had the procedure between October and December 2019 had told her that they “reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.” Multiple women claimed that they did not have access to proper interpreters and that medical staff often did not speak Spanish.

The accounts in Project South’s complaint — which included that of the whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse at the facility — were consistent with accounts given in separate interviews conducted by The Intercept with three other current detainees at the facility, eight advocates for detainees at the prison, and a former Irwin employee, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals against themselves and their clients.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy — just about everybody,” Wooten, who is being represented as a whistleblower by Project South and the Government Accountability Project, explained in the complaint. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor, and they’ve had hysterectomies, and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going.”

Like many other ICE detention centers, Irwin, which is operated by the private prison firm LaSalle Corrections, has come under fire for medical mistreatment. Wooten’s whistleblower complaint, which The Intercept reported on Monday, focused on precautions at Irwin related to the coronavirus pandemic. The accounts of the high rates of hysterectomies, which were first reported by the legal website Law and Crime, were also included in the Project South complaint to the Office of the Inspector General.

In a statement to The Intercept, ICE said it does not comment on matters presented to the Office of Inspector General. “ICE takes all allegations seriously and defers to the OIG regarding any potential investigation and/or results,” the ICE statement said. “That said, in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.” The agency maintains that the Irwin County Detention Center has been inspected multiple times, with and without warning, and that the facility has been found to be in compliance with Performance-Based National Detention Standards.

In a statement sent to news media and, reportedly, Congress made after publication of this story, an ICE official said, “According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, since 2018, only two individuals at Irwin County Detention Center were referred to certified, credentialed medical professionals at gynecological and obstetrical health care facilities for hysterectomies in compliance with National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) standards. Based on their evaluations, these specialists recommended hysterectomies. These recommendations were reviewed by the facility clinical authority and approved.”

LaSalle Corrections did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation into Wooten’s allegations. Georgia State Rep. Bob Trammell sent a letter on Monday to the Georgia Composite Medical Board and the Georgia Board of Nursing after the complaint was published, requesting that they “immediately suspend the licenses of the providers named in the whistleblower complaint pending a full investigation by your offices.”

Though Wooten, in an interview with The Intercept on Monday, declined to identify the doctor, according to interviews with a detainee, two detainee advocates, and a former Irwin employee, the doctor is Mahendra Amin, an obstetrics and gynecology specialist based in Douglas, Georgia, near Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla. Amin, who has operated through at least one other practice, also has a relationship with Irwin County Hospital, where the immigration detention facility takes some detainees for treatment. The doctor’s identity, which was first reported by Prism, did not appear in the whistleblower’s complaint to the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

When reached by phone for comment, Amin confirmed that he conducted procedures on immigrant women brought from the facility. He said that after he conducts exams, he requires the approval of the detention center before conducting any necessary procedures. Amin said that he has only performed “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years.” When pressed, he did not specify whether those hysterectomies were performed on people detained in Irwin.

Amin said that allegations of performing procedures without patients’ consent were ruining his reputation and affecting his practice. “Everything is wrong, and if you want to talk, talk to the hospital administrator,” Amin said, referring to Irwin County Hospital, and then hung up the phone.

In a statement made to the news media, a lawyer for Amin said the doctor “vigorously” denied the allegations. “Dr. Amin is a highly respected physician who has dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk, underserved population in rural Georgia,” said Scott Grubman, the lawyer. “We look forward to all of the facts coming out and are confident that, once they do, Dr. Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.”

Reached by text message, Irwin County Hospital CEO Paige Wynn said consent was obtained for all surgical procedures. “We do not do any surgeries that do not have prior consent from ICE and the patients,” Wynn said. “We cannot specifically comment on any specific patient matter due to patient privacy obligations.” (Neither Wynn nor Amin responded immediately to a more specific, written requests for comment.)

“All I know is, if you go in for anything, the majority of the time, he’s going to suggest surgery. I don’t know why. I just — I don’t know why. He does a lot of surgeries.”

The former Irwin employee said that Amin is the only OB-GYN serving the detained population in Irwin. “All I know is, if you go in for anything, the majority of the time, he’s going to suggest surgery,” the former Irwin employee said. “I don’t know why. I just — I don’t know why. He does a lot of surgeries.”

Amin was previously taken to court for making false Medicaid claims. In a case filed against him, other doctors, and Irwin County Hospital in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, the government alleged that the hospital was billing Medicaid for obstetric ultrasounds, even if they weren’t necessary. The case was dismissed as part of a settlement, in which the hospital paid more than half a million dollars to the government, but did not admit any liability. The government, as part of the settlement, did not admit that its own claims were unfounded.

Several women detainees whose accounts of medical visits were shared with The Intercept said they had no choice but to go to the doctor, who has become notorious among detainees for “rough treatment” of women during gynecological exams and performing a high number of procedures. The accounts were consistent with the whistleblower complaint.

According to an advocate, one woman who had repeated medical visits requested deportation because she was worried that she would “lose her reproductive system” if her only choices were to see the doctor or remain untreated. The woman was subsequently deported.

The current detainees at Irwin who spoke with The Intercept said they were pressured by the doctor to undergo partial or full hysterectomies. One of the women estimated that as many as 20 others were recommended for an operation, in some cases undergoing surgery on the recommendations. All of the women who spoke to The Intercept said that no interpreter was present, and they were unclear about the necessity or purpose of the proposed treatment.

In an interview with The Intercept on Tuesday, Wooten estimated that more than 20 women had undergone hysterectomies in the last six years. “People ask you why I got a hysterectomy,” Wooten said. “I couldn’t explain it. The only thing I have to say is that I’m sorry.” Wooten described one 23-year-old woman who wasn’t told what the operation entailed until after the procedure. In the Project South complaint to the inspector general, Wooten called the doctor “the uterus collector.” She told the human rights group, “Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out, or he’s taken their tubes out.”

One detainee told The Intercept that “the doctor got mad when I didn’t want to have the surgery” to remove a cyst. “No woman should go through this,” the detainee said, through tears. “There’s something strange going on.” Another woman who The Intercept spoke with said she simply didn’t understand why the doctor was insisting on an operation or even exactly what it would be. She had heard from other women that “he just empties you all out.”

According to one advocate who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to shield a detainee from reprisals, a woman detained in Irwin saw the doctor for spotting, or light vaginal bleeding. The doctor claimed the woman had a cyst — a claim the woman was dubious about — and insisted on a procedure to remove uterine tissue. While performing the procedure, the doctor removed part of the woman’s fallopian tube, claiming that “it was clogged,” according to the advocate. The woman never gave her consent.

“Assuming the allegations are true, I question the decisions DHS and ICDC make regarding the medical care for detained migrants,” said Lorelei Williams, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. She said it appears that officials at the ICE prison “fail to provide basic medical care, necessary lifesaving treatments, and the resources needed to protect detained migrants during the Covid-19 pandemic — why?”

Gregory Dober, an adjunct professor at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and expert in health care ethics and law regarding incarcerated individuals, told The Intercept that “medical law and ethics doesn’t care about the inconvenience by having to perform two procedures.” He added that informed consent is a process, explaining that interpreters should be present. “The process, purpose of the procedure, risks, and benefits and alternative treatments should be discussed and noted,” Dober said.

“The allegations regarding high number of hysterectomies and lack of informed consent requires a full and trauma-informed investigation,” said Amanda Klasing of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, in a statement to The Intercept. “Human Rights Watch research has shown consistent neglect and abuse in the health services provided in immigration detention, including failure to communicate clearly to patients, which makes these allegations particularly disturbing.”

Update: September 18, 2020
This story has been updated to include a statement made to media after publication by a lawyer representing the doctor, as well as a statement from ICE to media made after publication claiming that two detainees at Irwin have were referred for hysterectomies since 2018, both in accordance with medical and institutional standards and policies.

Correction: September 18, 2020
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story said that, along with Irwin County Hospital, Amin and other doctors named as defendants in a court case over allegations of false claims to Medicaid and Medicare made payments to the government as part of a settlement. According to the settlement, as well as a subsequent statement by the hospital to the Associated Press, Irwin County Hospital alone, not the defendant doctors, were responsible for the payment as part of the settlement. The reference to the doctors making the payments has been removed from the story.

The post “He Just Empties You All Out”: Whistleblower Reports High Number of Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Facility appeared first on The Intercept.

The whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, says that Irwin, which is run by the private corporation LaSalle Corrections, has underreported Covid-19 cases, knowingly placed staff and detainees at risk of contracting the virus, neglected medical complaints, and refused to test symptomatic detainees, among other dangerous practices. On September 8, Wooten submitted a letter detailing her complaints to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, with the help of attorneys from the Government Accountability Project. The grim situation inside the facility reflects what she called “a silent pandemic” running rampant behind the prison bars.

“You don’t want to see what you’re seeing,” Wooten told The Intercept. “You’re responsible for the lives of others,” but Irwin management, in her eyes, downplayed the threat of the virus from the start.

When the first suspected case of Covid-19 arrived at Irwin in March, Wooten says, she overheard the warden, David Paulk, tell a member of the nursing staff not to tell anybody that the man recently transferred might have the coronavirus. “He didn’t want there to be mass panic,” she said. (Reached by phone, Paulk said he had no comment.) Another member of the medical staff ordered Wooten to triage the man, even though she didn’t have a mask. She refused. “They’re still not taking this seriously,” Wooten said. “Enough was enough.”

In a series of interviews with The Intercept, Wooten described how she repeatedly complained to staff leadership before she was demoted in early July from working full time to an on-call position, where she was only offered a few hours a month — a move she charges was retaliation for speaking up and demanding stricter medical safety protocols. She has worked at the facility for three years in three separate stints as a licensed practical nurse, and has over 10 years of experience working as a nurse in prisons.

Her own health was imperiled while working at Irwin during the outbreak. She has sickle cell anemia, and although she told her supervisors her doctor had warned her that exposure to the coronavirus could be deadly, management at Irwin neglected to tell her that detainees she had contact with were symptomatic and, in three cases, had tested positive for Covid-19.

Wooten’s account was bolstered by interviews with another current member of Irwin’s medical staff — who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation — and four people currently or recently detained there.

The legal advocacy group Project South also submitted a complaint to the OIG on Wooten’s behalf, which also included similar testimony collected from interviews with detainees. Priyanka Bhatt, a staff attorney with the group, told The Intercept, “Ms. Wooten’s whistleblowing disclosures confirm what detained immigrants have been reporting for years — gross disregard for health and safety standards, lack of medical care, and unsanitary living conditions.”

LaSalle — which runs 18 detention centers throughout the South, capable of holding over 13,000 people — isn’t the only for-profit detention company to face scrutiny for dangerous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. But as the virus took hold in the region this summer, a pattern emerged of alleged abuses in LaSalle facilities. In July, medical staff at the LaSalle-owned Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana submitted a letter to Congress detailing troubling allegations, including that LaSalle management withheld personal protective equipment from both staff and detainees, dismissed positive Covid-19 test results, and ignored symptoms. In the same month, medically vulnerable asylum-seekers detained at Richwood told The Intercept they were handcuffed, pepper-sprayed in the face, and thrown into solitary confinement after protesting the dangerous conditions. One of the men was transferred to River Correctional, another LaSalle-run detention center, where he told The Intercept that management there also neglected to take proper medical precautions to stop Covid-19’s spread. Asylum-seekers have described similar abuses at LaSalle-run Winn Correctional Center.

A spokesperson for LaSalle declined to respond to a detailed list of questions, saying only, “LaSalle Corrections is firmly committed to the health and welfare of those in our care. We are deeply committed to delivering high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe and humane environments.” ICE also declined to comment.

In July, LaSalle’s CEO Rodney Cooper submitted a letter to Congress outlining LaSalle’s response to Covid-19, claiming that the company was being “diligent in operating our facilities at the highest level,” and stating that no LaSalle detainees have “succumbed” to Covid-19. In fact, at least two LaSalle guards and one member of medical staff have died of the disease.

People detained at Irwin have been protesting since the first weeks of the pandemic, and have faced punishment from staff. A series of hunger strikes and protests chronicled in the New York Times Magazine in early June brought increased scrutiny to the facility, but according to Wooten, little has changed over the months. The perilous conditions the detainees decried earlier this summer continue, she said.

“I would cry,” Wooten said, reflecting on what she had seen after a shift. She worried about the detainees locked up and unable to protect themselves, but also about contracting the virus herself, imperiling her own health, and bringing it home to her children. “I’ve got a kid with asthma,” she said.

Lack of Testing Leads to Underreporting

According to ICE, 31 people detained at Irwin have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began. But Wooten suspects that there were most likely at least 50 by early July, when she was demoted, based on the number of detainees she personally knew who had tested positive, and what she heard from her colleagues. The other member of the medical staff agreed with her estimation.

Wooten maintains that management at Irwin has been underreporting cases of Covid-19 to ICE, the state of Georgia, as well as to LaSalle headquarters, and not conducting sufficient tests. Even when people had Covid-19 symptoms or had been in contact with people who had tested positive, only those individuals or other people who complained about symptoms were tested. She described one instance in which a person in a crowded dorm tested positive, and only his bunkmate was subsequently also tested. “Everybody in that dorm should have been tested,” Wooten said.

Wooten was warned of “wasting tests” on people she suspected of being infected.

In her complaint to the OIG, Wooten claimed that the director of nurses “routinely rejected” symptomatic detainees’ requests to be tested. Other medical staff were also unsympathetic. “He ain’t got no damn corona, Wooten,” she was once told by a co-worker when she inquired about testing a detainee. Another detainee asking for a test, she said, was told, “Get your ass back in that room.” Wooten was also warned of “wasting tests” on people she suspected of being infected.

“‘Everybody want to be sick with corona, everybody want corona,’” she said other nurses would often say.

According to Wooten, ICE had purchased two testing machines for Irwin, which arrived in June, and which, she claimed, could deliver results in eight minutes. But to her knowledge, no staff had been trained to use them, and the machines were only used twice before being locked away. Instead, medical staff collected swabs from detainee testing and drove them in their personal vehicles to the local hospital to be processed, which was against protocol and inevitably meant delayed results.

“I was told by [management] that they were not going to be used and she was not going to put them out, because she didn’t want us testing each other,” Wooten said. “They were still sending people to the hospital and had these machines in the facility.”

The virus also spread among staff. According to Wooten, more than 15 LaSalle employees she knows personally have been infected with Covid-19; she provided the names of at least 12 staff members, including both correctional staff and health care workers, who tested positive.

The list included Marian Cole, the health services administrator who hired Wooten at Irwin. Cole had told Wooten she was being extra careful to avoid infection, traveling only from the facility to her home. But in May, Cole fell ill and passed away from complications from the virus.

Management at the facility said Cole had contracted the virus at a family event. “I knew better,” Wooten said. “And me, being who I am, said, ‘That’s not true.’ [Cole] told me she didn’t go anywhere but here and home.” (Cole’s daughter, reached for comment, did not want to discuss her mother’s passing.)

Wooten’s account of systematic undercounting of the true spread of the virus accords with what has been reported at other facilities, where ICE has resisted testing because it didn’t have space to quarantine people or ignored glaring symptoms. Detainees at Irwin, echoing those held at other detention centers, also said they were afraid to report their symptoms because they would be locked in solitary confinement, with little medical attention. “It is complete torture, because it’s like a punishment,” one immigrant said, who declined to give their name for fear of reprisals. “I didn’t want to say I had a pain in my throat, or that I had symptoms, because I didn’t want to go back to the punishment cell.”

Dangerous Practices

In March, when fears of coronavirus began spreading rapidly, LaSalle acquired hundreds of N95 masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended for health care workers. Each member of the medical staff at Irwin was given a single mask, though Wooten specified that most N95 masks were reserved for high-ranking staff, even if they had less contact with detainees. No masks, at the time, were given to detainees. Wooten received her N95 mask and wore it consistently while doing her rounds. By May, however, the strap had broken. When she asked for a replacement mask, supervisors refused her request. Worried about protecting herself and the detainees, Wooten purchased a homemade cloth mask. The other member of the medical staff The Intercept spoke with said that management had hundreds of replacement masks they were hoarding in storage.

Detainees, meanwhile, had begun to make their own masks out of whatever materials they had at hand. By late April, LaSalle offered them masks — provided not by the company but donated by a local church group. But one detainee said the masks have not been replaced unless a family member pushes ICE and LaSalle for a new one.

Wooten said that on at least three occasions, management ordered her to interact with patients who had tested positive for Covid-19 without informing her of the diagnosis. “I had been in all of three of their faces,” Wooten said. When Wooten and other members of the staff confronted management about the situation, they were told that revealing detainees’ test results would be a HIPAA violation, an illegal disclosure of confidential personal medical information.

Gregory Dober, an adjunct professor at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and expert in health care ethics and law regarding incarcerated individuals, told The Intercept that alerting staff that a detainee has tested positive for coronavirus “would not be a HIPAA violation.” In fact, Dober said that the failure to inform staff of positive cases could constitute reckless disregard of the health of an inmate, detainee, or staff worker.

“A lot of the nurses were not doing nursing. They were just bodies in the building.”

The other medical worker, who is currently at LaSalle, said that even when they are working with patients in the medical area, not just doing the rounds with the general population, they don’t have enough gowns, face shields, or masks to properly protect themselves. Wooten also said the medical area was dirty: the floor infrequently swept, the exam tables not cleaned after use, and the area cluttered and dusty. “There was often blood on the floor that had not been cleaned up,” Wooten said. Detainees told The Intercept the bathrooms are dirty, and they had to disinfect phones and other materials themselves within their units.

Wooten described negligent or perfunctory care for sick detainees, which had been common before the beginning of the pandemic. She witnessed nurses shred and ignore “sick call” sheets, which detainees use to request nonemergency medical help, some of which included complaints of Covid-19 symptoms (the other member of the medical staff supported this claim, saying that the shredding of sick call sheets was common.)

“Every day she is shredding something and throwing it in her trash can,” Wooten said of another member of the medical staff. “I had one girl who put in about 12 sick calls. She was oozing out the belly button and nobody ever saw it.” In another case, a man with Covid-19 symptoms requested a test. He was isolated in solitary confinement, a swab was taken and sent to the hospital, and more than two weeks later, nobody had called the hospital to check for the test results. When Wooten called, she learned he had tested positive and informed the man herself.

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Wooten was with another member of the nursing staff when she declared, without taking his temperature, that a man who had complained of a headache had a temperature of 97.7 F. She “pulled it out of the air,” Wooten said. “She falsified it. I watched her.” Wooten insisted that they actually take his temperature, and found that it was 101.8. Detainees with fevers were usually just given over-the-counter cold medication, Wooten said.

“A lot of the nurses were not doing nursing,” she said. “They were just bodies in the building.”

In response to the neglect and refusal to test detainees, Wooten described a “system” that detainees had developed, organizing to isolate people suspected to have Covid-19 near the door to the dormitory, both for their protection and to force the medical staff to test them. And yet, she overheard other medical staff tell detainees, “There was no Covid in here.” In one instance, according to Wooten, detainees staged a “mini-riot” to demand a Covid-19 test.

The frequent transfer of detainees between facilities compounded dangers. Wooten explained that while typically people were tested before being moved to Irwin, sometimes the transfer took place before the results of the test were in. Plus, newly arrived detainees were not always isolated from the others in the facility. She was also aware of at least one occasion in which a detainee who had tested positive for Covid-19 was deported to Mexico.

“They keep piling more people in here. They keep bringing more people in here, and in the end, it’s all about the money,” said a detained woman who had to wait over a week for her sick call. Wooten echoed the statement: “They get seen as a dollar sign. Their heads are counted not as humans but as dollars.”

Wooten’s Demotion

The tinder-box scenario finally brought Wooten to a breaking point. After months of observing troubling medical conditions and, at times, going out of her way to care for detainees who had been ignored, Wooten began to raise the alarm with management in the facility.

“When I started talking about the unfairness and injustice,” pressuring staff to conduct more Covid-19 tests, “I was written up,” Wooten said. “It’s dog-eat-dog in there, at the expense of the detainees.”

By mid-June, Wooten had already been tested twice for Covid-19. And each time, due to her prior health concerns, she was instructed by the hospital to wait until her results arrived before returning to work. Medical records reviewed by The Intercept confirm her third Covid-19 test took place on June 21. In a letter to Wooten’s employers, the medical facility where she was tested requested Wooten be excused from work for 10 days, until her results were available and her symptoms — including muscle aches, headaches, and diarrhea — had gone away.

“It’s dog-eat-dog in there, at the expense of the detainees.”

After her first two tests, the doctors’ notes were sufficient to be excused from work. However, according to documents, on June 27 — six days after her third test — management reported her for “no call no show for her regular scheduled workday.” Her supervisors wrote that she was required “to call out each day she is off work.” They also pressured her to return to work, which she did, working two shifts on June 23 and June 25.

But as of June 27, there was no requirement for staff members to call in sick every day while awaiting Covid-19 test results; that policy was not implemented until July 1, according to a memo from facility management viewed by The Intercept. One day after the policy was in place, Wooten was demoted, reducing her from full-time status to “on-call,” and drastically cutting her hours. Wooten, who is Black, also said she suffered racism throughout the experience. White staff members who took time off for testing were given “Covid pay” and were not required to call in every day, she said.

With medical bills, sick family members, children to feed, rent to pay, and car payments to make, the reduction in her work hours was a serious blow. As her own health deteriorated and she suffered from consistent stress, Wooten relied on her eldest son to help pay off the car.

She says her demotion was an indirect threat to other health care staff at the facility who had expressed concerns, though more quietly.

“They’re afraid of being fired,” Wooten said. Irwin had treated her as an example, “I was thrown to the wolves.” But, she added, “I have nothing to lose at this point.”

Correction, Sept. 14, 2020, 10:41 p.m.
This article originally misstated Marian Cole’s title. It was Health Services Administrator, not Director of Nurses. It also misstated Gregory Dober’s affiliation; he is a professor at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, not Lake Erie College. The article has also been corrected to reflect that Wooten is a licensed practical nurse, not a nurse practitioner, and that Cole died in May, not March. 

Update, Sept. 14, 2020, 12:14 a.m.
This article was updated to include the role of the Government Accountability Project and Project South in filing Wooten’s whistleblower complaint.

The post “A Silent Pandemic”: Nurse at ICE Facility Blows the Whistle on Coronavirus Dangers appeared first on The Intercept.

It was possible he had come down with the coronavirus, and if he had, it was all but guaranteed that guards in the ICE detention center, operated by private prison company CoreCivic, would place him in solitary confinement.

After two weeks of submitting requests for medical attention that went ignored, Blanco staged a one-man protest, sitting at a table in his unit and refusing to follow guards’ orders to go back to his cell. He said a guard approached him and told him that he should either return to his cell “or go die with the sick ones in the hole.”

The guard wrote Blanco up for “refusing to obey staff,” according to disciplinary documents provided to The Intercept. Still, his protest was successful: He was taken to Stewart’s clinic and given pills for his stomach pain.

When four guards came to get him from the clinic around 30 minutes later, they told him that he’d be going to solitary confinement — not because he was sick, but as punishment for having protested. Blanco refused. According to the disciplinary records, “force was used to secure the detainee after he charged in an attempt to break away from the emergency response team.” But Blanco’s account paints a more graphic picture.

“They grabbed me, they hugged me, and they slammed me to the ground,” Blanco said. His head hit the floor and a guard pressed his foot down onto it. The impact of his head slamming the floor damaged Blanco’s right eye.

More than two months after the incident, Blanco said he still has a blood clot in that eye and his vision is still blurry. Although officials told him that he would see an eye specialist prior to deportation, he never saw the doctor. Blanco was diagnosed with Covid-19 on arrival in El Salvador in late May.

Blanco is one of three medically vulnerable immigrants held at Stewart who say they were subject to excessive force by guards amid the coronavirus pandemic. All three incidents follow a pattern: After detainees demanded medical attention, guards threw them to the floor. Two of the immigrants were using wheelchairs at the time, and guards hurled them out of the chairs nonetheless.

“When immigrants use their voice to advocate for themselves, they’re always met with intimidation and use of force,” said Priyanka Bhatt, a staff attorney with the advocacy organization Project South, which has chronicled years of problems at Stewart.

As The Intercept previously reported, during April, a SWAT-like unit of CoreCivic officers twice pepper-sprayed immigrants and shot pepper-ball ammunition in response to protests for better conditions. ICE has reported 116 cases of Covid-19 among people incarcerated at Stewart, and one Stewart detainee died of the disease in May.

In a statement, CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin said the prison company is “committed to providing high-quality healthcare to all of those entrusted to our care at Stewart Detention Center,” but declined to comment on any specific allegations, citing privacy regulations. “The claim that detainees are forced to wait to receive medical attention is patently false,” Gustin said. An ICE spokesperson said “all persons in ICE custody receive all appropriate medical treatment,” adding, “we generally cannot discuss specific medical treatment of any person in custody absent their consent.”

Miguel, a recently deported Salvadoran immigrant, arrived at Stewart earlier this year from another Georgia detention center already in bad shape. “[PATIENT] NEEDS INCISIONAL VENTRAL HERNIA REPAIR URGENTLY,” reads a November doctor’s assessment, which Miguel shared with The Intercept. “[PATIENT] IS HAVING PAIN …. WILL ATTEMPT AGAIN TO GET APPROVAL FROM ICE.” (Miguel is a pseudonym; he asked to remain anonymous to protect him from harassment in El Salvador.)

After at least two requests, ICE finally approved Miguel for surgery, and he had the operation in March. But shortly afterward, the pain returned; it seemed something had gone wrong during the surgery. Rather than treating Miguel again, ICE decided to deport him.

On April 8, detention staff told Miguel to prepare for his deportation flight. “Three guards came over and brutally tried to force me into a wheelchair,” he told The Intercept. “I kept yelling that I was in pain. I almost fell out of the wheelchair because I couldn’t even sit; I had to lie flat.”

“I kept yelling that I was in pain. I almost fell out of the wheelchair because I couldn’t even sit.”

That’s when Miguel says a guard grabbed him by the collar “practically strangling me,” he recalled, and made him fall on to the ground. “I told them, ‘You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me. You cannot wait? Just deport me another day,’” he said. The guards grabbed his arms and legs and carried him away.

Even before the coronavirus made its way to Georgia, immigrants and advocates criticized conditions in Stewart, one of the largest ICE facilities in the country. Four Stewart detainees died between 2016 and 2019, two by suicide after spending prolonged periods in solitary confinement.

ICE previously said it is looking into recent use-of-force incidents. ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility launched an investigation after the incidents in which correctional staff used pepper spray and pepper-ball ammunition on immigrants.

After both incidents, The Intercept and the advocacy coalition Georgia Detention Watch found social media posts in which members of a special unit of CoreCivic guards — called SORT, for Special Operations Response Team — joked about the use of force. In one post, a SORT officer joked that detainees were so hungry, they were “eating that spray.” As a result of The Intercept’s reporting, four staff members were fired from the facility and four others remain on administrative leave as ICE continues its investigation. While testifying before Congress earlier this month, CoreCivic’s CEO Damon Hininger denied that pepper spray was used at the company’s facilities. He later retracted his statement, claiming that he misunderstood the question, but noted only one instance in New Mexico.

One of the Facebook posts from April described a man in a wheelchair being hit by pepper-ball ammunition. He “felt them mfs,” the officer wrote. “He grabbed his face.”

That detainee was Hugh Tinarwo, a 33-year-old immigrant from Zimbabwe who has been held in Stewart since last October. According to court filings, guards shot him in the back more than 60 times with the pepper-ball ammunition. Other court records say he urinated blood after the incident.

Less than two months later, correctional officers at Stewart threw him to the ground and pinned him after he protested for more medical attention, further injuring his back.

“I constantly fear for my life in here,” Tinarwo told The Intercept from within the detention center.

Tinarwo has a history of medical problems prior to entering Stewart — a previously ruptured spinal disc, paralysis in his legs, hypertension, and an enlarged heart. He lost his ability to walk after a surgery before entering ICE custody and is using a wheelchair. After the pepper spray incident in April, he was newly diagnosed with a herniated disc.

On June 18, due to the pain from the herniated disc, Tinarwo requested medical attention but was denied. Frustrated, he made a cynical comment to staff.

Three guards arrived to take him to suicide watch. At Stewart, that means solitary confinement.

“I was like, ‘Do I have to say that I am going to kill myself to get medical attention around here?’” Tinarwo recalled. Officers rolled him to the medical unit, where a nurse checked his blood pressure, then sent him to the waiting room.

Because of the comment about killing himself, which he said was meant ironically, three guards arrived to take him to suicide watch. At Stewart, that means solitary confinement.

Tinarwo resisted. According to Tinarwo, he held tight to the wheelchair, so one guard tried to flip him off, while another tried to drag him from the waiting room.

“My legs was going one way, my body was going the other way, and I started yelling, ‘My back! My back! My back!” Tinarwo said.

Thrown to the ground, Tinarwo grabbed onto the chair so that the guards could not cuff him. One of the officers pressed his head onto the ground, with another pressing on his neck. They handcuffed Tinarwo, with the cuffs scratching his arm, he said, and took him to solitary confinement for suicide watch for some days.

“[My back is] much worse now,” Tinarwo said. The pain is so bad that he has to ask others to push his wheelchair: “Every time I push myself, I can feel the disc, like it’s ripping.”

Tinarwo is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Asian Americans Advancing Justice demanding the release of medically vulnerable immigrants detained in Stewart.

“It’s a failure of Stewart Detention Center,” said Erin Argueta, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney who represents immigrants detained at Stewart. Argueta said detention center staff don’t take requests for medical care seriously enough: “To respond to that with violence is so sad, and wrong, and scary.”

The post Immigrants at Privately Run ICE Detention Center Were Thrown Out of Wheelchairs When They Asked for Medical Help appeared first on The Intercept.

Other detainees felt ill too. Tension was mounting inside Stewart, one of the largest immigration jails in the country, with a capacity to hold nearly 2,000 male detainees.

Carlos was on his bed, feeling sick, when he turned to look out the window and saw a group of detainees running out a side door leading to a recreation yard. Several correctional officers were giving chase. At first, Carlos thought that there was a fire, but then he saw correctional staff use pepper spray on the detainees.

Daniel, another detainee whose name has also been changed, saw it all happen from another unit across the hall.

“People were asking for medical attention for some of the sick people in there,” Daniel said. “But because they” — the staff — “didn’t pay attention, they began protesting. They started placing sheets on the windows and doors.”

Daniel said the correctional staff began deploying gas, throwing detainees on the floor, and taking them in handcuffs to — he assumed — solitary confinement, or as he called it, “the hole.”

At Stewart, which is operated by the private prison giant CoreCivic, there is a special unit of correctional officers tasked with suppressing detainee disturbances. Akin to a SWAT team, the pepper-spraying unit is known as the Special Operations Response Team, or SORT. The SORT unit, which has not been previously reported on, is trained to use riot shields, helmets, pepper spray, and pepper-ball ammunition.

During a two-week period amid the Covid-19 pandemic, SORT officers at Stewart have used force on immigrant detainees two times, on April 9 and again on April 20.

Following each of the incidents, some members of Stewart’s SORT unit celebrated using force on migrants in their custody in multiple social media posts. The posts, in aggregate, gives a series of snapshots of the SORT team’s actions against the protesting detainees. In one social media post, a SORT officer said he shot all the detainees in sight with pepper-ball projectiles — it was, he said, “call of duty mode,” referring to a violent, first-person video game series about going to war.

Another Facebook poster purporting to be a SORT officer suggested that he shot a protesting detainee who uses a wheelchair with pepper spray, saying the immigrant “felt them mfs” — using an abbreviation for “motherfuckers.” In the same social media post, the SORT officer added, “He grabbed his face.”

The numerous social media posts exemplify the tense and complicated dynamics within the walls of the Stewart Detention Center, a migrant jail that has continually fallen under scrutiny for its alleged mistreatment of immigrants.

The posts from the SORT officers, spanning months and shared with The Intercept and WNYC’s The Takeaway, were flagged by members of Georgia Detention Watch, an activist coalition documenting conditions in ICE detention. The Intercept and The Takeaway independently verified much of the social media activity, identifying 11 CoreCivic SORT officers, along with other correctional staff at the detention facility.

Five accounts claiming to belong to SORT officers identified were responsible for the posts included in this article. In phone interviews, The Intercept and The Takeaway confirmed three of the five officers’ employment with CoreCivic, their membership in the SORT unit, and their postings to social media accounts bearing their names. The two other SORT officers responsible for the social media posts neither confirmed nor denied their employment and social media accounts but posed for pictures on the accounts dressed in SORT unit regalia and, in the case of one officer, with documentation of accolades from CoreCivic for his work.

After reaching out with a detailed description of this reporting, a spokesperson for CoreCivic said: “After you alerted us to the social media posts, eight Stewart Detention Center employees were immediately placed on administrative leave. Since then, four of those employees have been terminated. We are also continuing to cooperate fully with the investigation into this matter being conducted by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).” The spokesperson declined to confirm any disciplinary actions in reference to particular officers’ names.

In a statement, an ICE spokesperson did not comment on the specific allegations but said such matters are referred to ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. “In general, the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General and ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigate all allegations of misconduct,” the spokesperson said. “If any such allegation was to be substantiated appropriate action would be taken.”

Advocates for immigration detainees said the incidents are part of two larger problems occurring simultaneously: the threat of the coronavirus to detainees in cramped quarters and the frequent violence of disciplinary actions in immigration detention facilities like Stewart.

“For months, community members have demanded ICE protect detained immigrants from Covid-19 and release them immediately,” said Adelina Nicholls, executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and member of Georgia Detention Watch. “Instead, detention centers, including for-profit facilities, ramp up their use of violent, paramilitary, SWAT-like teams, such as SORT, to repress immigrants in detention centers that are speaking out about the horrendous conditions and lack of protections during this global pandemic.”

Stewart is located in southwest Georgia, in a rural area with a depressed economy and one of the state’s hot spots for the coronavirus. For some residents of the area, Stewart is a lifeline. Becoming a guard is a steady job in a region where unemployment was high even before the coronavirus crisis, not unlike the migrants on unauthorized stays in the U.S. to get work. The economic pressures — in tandem with notorious immigration enforcement policies and bloated budgets — brought the immigrants and community members into close proximity in one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the U.S., a fertile breeding ground for the virus.

“It’s just a tragedy,” said Sharon Dolovich, professor of law at UCLA who also directs the university’s Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, tracking confirmed cases in jails, prisons, and detention centers. “You have these two groups of people who are just desperate for a better life. And they’re playing the terrible hands they’ve been dealt. And now, this.”

Neither the guards at Stewart nor the detainees were spared from the coronavirus. The first CoreCivic staff member at Stewart tested positive for Covid-19 on March 31; in one month, the number of infected CoreCivic staff rose to 44, according to a recent court filing. ICE says there are 12 current Stewart detainees confirmed to have Covid-19.

A month ago, with cases mounting and around 1,900 people locked up in Stewart, tensions in the facility had begun to escalate, said Pedro Ramirez-Briceño, who was released in early April. (Following a judge’s order for ICE to consider releasing sick detainees, the amount of people incarcerated at Stewart had dropped to around 1,000 in early May, according to a recent court filing.)

After hearing of the coronavirus spreading to other immigration detention facilities, he and other detainees took part in a hunger and labor strike in early March, demanding better conditions and more resources to prevent the spread of the virus. But the strike action fizzled away over time, Ramirez-Briceño said.

There are around nearly 30,000 people currently in ICE custody around the U.S., and since the pandemic began, detainees in other ICE facilities have also reported the use of force in response to coronavirus-related protests. As of May 4, the agency says 606 detainees have confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. Testing in the facilities has been sparse and ICE does not release numbers in real time, so that number could be much higher. On April 20, a federal judge ordered ICE to consider releasing high-risk detainees.

In the month of April, there were five 911 emergency calls from the facility, according to call logs obtained by The Intercept and The Takeaway. Although it is not confirmed whether calls were coronavirus-related, four of those calls were for respiratory problems, a common symptom of Covid-19.

The Intercept and The Takeaway spoke to eight people currently detained in Stewart, six family members of those in detention, and two formerly detained people who were released after being involved in protests and a use-of-force incident. Although the current detainees called from various units in the facility, they all paint a similar picture: More and more people are feeling symptoms associated with the virus and desperation is growing, with between 60 and 90 people per unit.

“If they don’t want us in this country, they should at least deport us to our countries, so we’re not getting sick inside this place.”

All the detainees The Intercept and The Takeaway spoke with allege delays in accessing medical attention. A man from El Salvador, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals, was feeling ill and said he was required to fill out a paper request to see a medic. Five days later, when he called The Intercept and The Takeaway, he still had not been seen.

On the day that Daniel, one of the witnesses to the SORT officers’ use of force on April 9, contacted The Intercept and The Takeaway, he said a Guatemalan detainee in his unit had just been taken for more medical attention after fainting for the third time that day. The second time Daniel called, he reported another detainee, who was complaining of symptoms and feeling weak, was removed from his unit.

Alex from Honduras, whose name has been changed for fear of retaliation, said tensions continue to rise in the facility. Oscar Martinez, a Mexican man from another unit, said he was feeling throat pain, feverish, weakness, and chills.

Martinez said, “If they don’t want us in this country, they should at least deport us to our countries, so we’re not getting sick inside this place.”

Three of the detainees interviewed by The Intercept and The Takeaway — Alex, Daniel, and Martinez — all believe that detainees who show severe symptoms end up in the solitary confinement unit, or “the hole.” In a Monday court filing, Stewart Warden Russell Washburn said, “When detainees at SDC appeared symptomatic, they were moved to medical isolation” — though it is unclear if the solitary confinement unit was used for medical isolation.

ICE and CoreCivic declined to provide answers to questions about placing symptomatic detainees in solitary confinement units, but a CoreCivic spokesperson defended the private prison company’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. “Since even before any confirmed cases of COVID-19 in our facilities, we have rigorously followed the guidance of local, state and federal health authorities, as well as our government partners,” the CoreCivic spokesperson said in a statement. “We have responded to this unprecedented situation appropriately, thoroughly and with care for the safety and well-being of those entrusted to us and our communities.”

As The Intercept and The Takeaway have previously reported, Stewart has a troubled track record of solitary confinement practices: Two men with mental illness killed themselves in the timespan of 14 months in 2017 and 2018.

With the pandemic at hand, family members and advocates have had difficulty reaching people in solitary. “We’ve had some trouble being in touch with people, both times that there has been reports of some sort of incident or some sort of use of force against the detained people who were trying to speak out peacefully for their rights,” said Erin Argueta, lead attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative.

On April 7, the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with other organizations, filed a lawsuit seeking the immediate release of people with preexisting health conditions from Stewart.

The facility normally runs on detainee labor, but with units in quarantine, correctional staff were tasked with making meals. According to Argueta, this led to detainees being fed very little food at irregular times, sparking the April 20 protest. Detainees refused to eat the provided food and demanded better provisions. As the protest went on, SORT officers responded with pepper spray and pepper-ball guns.

Later that night, SORT officer Tyriq Key joked on social media that the detainees were so hungry, they were “eating that spray.”

The SORT officers at Stewart are CoreCivic correctional staff, who then change into all-black uniforms with thick protective gear. Their SWAT-like uniforms include pepper spray and pepper-ball guns dangling from their belts. Promotional videos, produced when CoreCivic was still known by its former name, Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, show SORT officers trained in using large shields and batons.

The SORT team is not unique to Stewart.

“CoreCivic operates their immigration detention facilities just like they operate their prisons; there’s really no difference. And many prisons have tactics teams, SWAT-type teams inside their facilities,” said Dolovich, the UCLA law professor. “In every prison, when there’s a perceived emergency that requires rapid intervention, there are a certain set of prison officials trained to participate in these SWAT teams.”

According to a 2008 CCA manual, these types of units were created after the 1971 Attica prison riots, “modeled after police SWAT teams and military commando units, such as the Army Green Beret Special Forces and Navy Seal Teams.”

“SORT teams are specially trained to use ‘mind over matter’ in de-escalating situations, using CCA’s ‘talk down, rather than take down’ philosophy,” the manual adds.

Dolovich said such philosophies often don’t hold sway in the real world. “Force should never be the first resort; it should be a last resort, after you’ve tried all available nonforceful responses,” she said. “But, in fact, that’s not what happens. What happens, often, is that force is used as a first resort.”

Before the pandemic, the SORT unit in Stewart had been activated as recently as 2019. On September 11, 2019, a group of around 60 Cuban asylum-seekers staged a peaceful protest in Stewart’s recreation yard, refusing to enter the facility until they received word from ICE on their requests for parole.

Reinier Rodriguez Bombino took part in the protest. He told The Intercept and The Takeaway that the protesting asylum-seekers used a marker to write their demands on bedsheets, then snuck the sheets out in their clothes to display in the yard. As the next morning rolled around, SORT officers began moving in on the asylum-seekers.

“They were dressed in all black, with vests, knee pads, helmets, with weapons, with everything — like they were prepared for anything,” Rodriguez said, “even though we were always clear — always clear — that everything was peaceful and we were not going to resist.”

The SORT officers began deploying tear gas and fired either rubber bullets or pepper balls at the asylum-seekers. Rodriguez said he was shot by a projectile in the back of his thigh. Days after the protest, he was placed in solitary confinement, then transferred to another facility in Georgia.

What happened to Rodriguez is a pattern, advocates said. “Very quickly and quietly, in a way, most of the people involved in the protest were immediately placed in segregation,” said Argueta, the Southern Poverty Law Center attorney, referring to solitary confinement. “A lot of them were transferred out of Stewart. The facility did its best to silence it.”

On September 12, after the officers used force, Jaraivius Sullivan, a Stewart SORT officer, posted on Facebook: “If u see me cheesing just kno I had a good day at work.” When someone asked what he did, he replied: “had my way.”

In October, Project South, an Atlanta-based social justice group, along with dozens of other advocacy organizations, submitted a complaint regarding the September use-of-force incident to Georgia lawmakers and U.S. senators.

In the aftermath of the crackdowns on the coronavirus-related protests at Stewart, CoreCivic guards again posted messages celebrating the SORT unit.

On April 9, hours after Daniel witnessed officers pepper-spraying detainees, a Facebook account claiming to be from a CoreCivic employee on the SORT team praised other SORT officers on Facebook for their quick action. In the comments, the officer shared a photo of his boots with laughing emojis, saying that he “was ready to stomp and drag today,” referring to a military- and riot-police marching cadence.

“It is abominable for the Stewart guards to use pepper spray and other aggressive means of crushing the protest by detained immigrants who are subjected to imprisonment at this deadly facility in the midst of a pandemic.

After the April 9 incident, another SORT officer, Quantavious Lewis, shared a video of a man purportedly in Mexico being restrained. Another man pulls down the apparent arrestee’s underwear and begins beating his bare behind with a stick. The man shrieks and squirms, while the person behind the camera laughs. Posting a series of laughing emojis, Lewis shared the video on Facebook with his own caption: “Next time they activate Sort.”

Advocates for immigrant rights were taken aback by the social media postings. “It is abominable for the Stewart guards to use pepper spray and other aggressive means of crushing the protest by detained immigrants who are subjected to imprisonment at this deadly facility in the midst of a pandemic,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director of Project South. “All immigrants detained at Stewart should be freed immediately, and ICE and the private prison corporation should be held to account for their abusive conduct.”

After the April 20 use-of-force incident, Sullivan and Lewis, along with fellow SORT officers Tyriq Key and another officer began sharing comments and more jokes. Stitching together their social media posts paints a picture of what took place that night. (Lewis, Sullivan, and Key confirmed their employment and social media accounts to The Intercept and The Takeaway, but declined to comment on the record for this story, and the other officer did not respond for a request for comment. The account of the self-proclaimed SORT officer who praised other SORT officers after the April 9 incident blocked this reporter on Facebook, after The Intercept and The Takeaway asked for a request for comment.)

When the food-related protest escalated, detainees began throwing toilet water and food at the guards, according a social media posting. As the officers attempted to end the protest, Lewis slipped on water and fell, according to his posting. Lewis then said he got up and “went to shooting whatever was n his path” with the pepper-ball gun — then made the “Call of Duty” reference.

Another Facebook account claiming to belong to a SORT officer shared that he “walked in that mf pod letting the OC go,” referring to oleoresin capsicum, the active ingredient in pepper spray and pepper balls. He wrote that he “had a can in each hand.” At the moment of the commotion, according to the Facebook post, was when the detainee in a wheelchair “jumped out the chair into the room.” The Facebook posting recounted that the man in the wheelchair “felt them mfs. He grabbed his face.”

A recent court filing in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s lawsuit says the man continued to urinate blood 10 days after the use-of-force incident.

As Lewis summarized it in another posting: “they learned they lesson fasho.”

The post ICE’s Immigration Detainees Protested Lack of Coronavirus Precautions — and SWAT-like Private-Prison Guards Pepper-Sprayed Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Efraín Romero de la Rosa would pace around his solitary confinement cell. He often paused to glance through the small window that looked out at the rest of the gray immigration jail unit. Standing at 5-foot-5, with a bushy black beard and receding hairline, Romero spent his 21st day in solitary battling the voices in his head.

Romero’s schizophrenic episodes had a particularly dark nature to them, frequently colored by his deep religious beliefs. Every voice that called him the “Antichrist” twisted the dagger of his anguish, and Romero sunk further into a state of depression. Confinement to his 13-by-7-foot concrete cell for 23 hours a day only worsened his condition.

Dressed in his red prison jumpsuit, the 40-year-old would push against the cell door. As he paced back and forth in his cell, he would sometimes weep. He occasionally passed the time by standing on the rim of his cell’s chrome toilet, only to step back down again. Step up, step down. Step up, step down.

Romero was being held at the Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia, one of the largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the country. The facility houses male migrants who are both requesting asylum and who are set to be deported. But ICE does not run the detention center: It is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic.

Romero wanted nothing more than to be deported to Mexico, a move that would mark an end to the excruciating months he had spent in ICE custody. Other men detained at Stewart saw Romero cry inside his cell and heard him yelling for his family. “He said that soon he wanted to see his dad and his mom,” one man detained in the same unit told a state investigator.

Before entering ICE custody, Romero had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. During his time in ICE detention, Romero’s mental health deteriorated; at one point, he told the detention center staff that he would suffer “three terrible deaths.”

Previously, while in ICE custody, Romero had been placed on suicide watch and, separately, assigned to a mental health institution. Officials had noted his fixation on death. And yet CoreCivic’s correctional staff sent Romero to solitary confinement for 30 days.

Nearing the end of his 21st day in solitary, Romero took his own life in the tiny cell.

Documents obtained as part of a joint investigation by WNYC and PRX’s The Takeaway and The Intercept offer a look into Romero’s time in ICE custody, as well as his death. Hundreds of pages of documents collected in an investigation by the state of Georgia, and an internal CoreCivic investigation, along with records shared by Romero’s family attorney, show that CoreCivic staff at the Stewart Detention Center violated their own rules when dealing with the mentally ill detainee. From the intake process to the disciplinary process — and even on the night he killed himself — the CoreCivic staff neglected to properly care for the man in their custody who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Romero’s case stands as a tragic exemplar of an immigration detention system gone off the rails. Solitary confinement is frequently used by corrections staff as a means to punish detainees; a Bangladeshi man told The Intercept in 2018 that guards at the CoreCivic-run Stewart Detention Center — the same facility where Romero was held — sent him to solitary confinement because of a dispute over $8 for prison labor.

The use of solitary confinement in immigration detention is growing and has, in tandem, become a political issue. An investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Intercept, which included testimony from a whistleblower, found that the use of solitary was a go-to practice to discipline detainees and deal with troubled cases, rather than the last resort prescribed by detention standards. After the release of the investigation, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., condemned the use of solitary and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., called for congressional hearings on the practice.

Cases of death in ICE custody are often shrouded in secrecy, with few details released to the public. The documents, photos, video, and audio obtained by The Takeaway and The Intercept offer a rare look at the specifics of an immigration detainee’s demise in custody.

Four Stewart Detention Center detainees have died since spring 2017. Romero is the second man detained at Stewart to die by suicide. There are striking similarities between Romero’s case and that of Jeancarlo Jimenez-Joseph, another ICE detainee at Stewart: Jimenez-Joseph had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia, taking his own life after 19 days in solitary confinement.

Both Romero and Jimenez-Joseph were held in solitary for weeks, a period of time widely agreed to constitute torture. In 2011, the U.N. said detention in solitary for more than 15 days should be prohibited — and that a ban should be placed on using solitary at all for detainees who, like Romero and Jimenez-Joseph, had been diagnosed with mental health conditions. Nonetheless, some 40 percent of ICE detainees held in solitary have diagnoses for mental illness, according to a report from the Project on Government Oversight.

Owing to the spate of migrant deaths in U.S. custody, the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, has faced heightened scrutiny. Nonetheless, the numbers of people held by ICE continues to reach record levels: More than 55,000 migrants are in its custody — an all-time high. Of those, nearly 2,000 have a diagnosed mental illness.

As the Trump administration ramps up immigration detention, Romero’s story shines a light at an opaque immigration detention system, pulling back the curtain to reveal what happens behind the walls of one of the country’s largest immigration jails.

Inside Romero's solitary cell. Photos: GBI

The night of Efraín Romero de la Rosa’s death, the Stewart County Sheriff’s Department called on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, a statewide law enforcement agency known by the initials GBI, to investigate. That night, GBI investigators descended on Stewart, interviewing medical staff, correctional staff, first responders, and other men held in the same solitary confinement cell block. The GBI’s conclusion was that Romero had, indeed, taken his own life. The records collected by GBI investigators would eventually reveal some of what Romero’s time in detention looked like.

At first, the GBI refused to release the case file and records from the investigation, citing a federal regulation granting the federal government control over information on immigration detainees. Emails obtained as part of an eventually successful public records request revealed that, in response to Romero’s death, a CoreCivic attorney pressured the GBI into barring the public release of the investigation records. But several news organizations and attorneys demanded the GBI turn over the records. New York Public Radio’s legal counsel crafted a pages-long appeal to the GBI, and in response, the state agency changed course and began releasing records, including the investigation summaries, photos, and 18 hours of security camera footage.

Photos taken by the GBI show the solitary cell Romero was held in. The underside of the cell’s top bunk bed was covered in pencil scribbles. Romero randomly wrote Mexican states, names, and random phrases. He etched the phrase “La Santa Muerte Lo La Cuida” on the wall; in English, the phrase means, “The Saint of Death protects him/her.” Below, in much darker letters, as if he traced over the words, Romero wrote: “CADA DIA ES MAS IMPORTANTE” — or, “EACH DAY IS MORE IMPORTANT.”

The cell bears a drab color scheme. The walls are off-white, and a white sheet is draped over a bed; its cream bunked frame has sporadic patches of blueish-gray paint. A seat and table protruding from the wall are beige. Even the pencil etchings evoke a grayscale palette. The bright orange socks stand out. Several of these socks are tied to one another and finally, with crude overhand knots, to the railing of the top bunk. The socks are what Romero used to hang himself while in the solitary cell.

Romero and his family are from the state of Puebla in central Mexico. “He was a very calm young man. He was a good person,” his brother Isaí Romero said, following Efraín’s death. Romero spent his days meticulously poring over the Bible. Isaí said, “He knew the Bible very well, and he wanted to go to Mexico — to be there with family and share with people what he knew about the word of God.”

The journey home was spurred — and eventually halted by a run-in with U.S. immigration authorities. Romero’s path to Stewart Detention Center came in fits and starts, amid run-ins with the U.S. justice system and, eventually, ICE.

Romero crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the year 2000 through Arizona, when he was in his early 20s, according to a typo-laden ICE report on Romero’s case released by the agency in late 2018. Court records show he was charged with various crimes, including carjacking, possessing burglary tools, and driving under the influence. According to the ICE report, which is limited in scope, Romero was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2004 for charges related to carjacking and possession of burglary tools. None of the available records from Romero’s stints in the criminal or immigration detention systems indicate when or if he was ever freed from prison.

In April 2017, however, he arrived at the Marion Correctional Treatment Center, a mental health institution run by the state of Virginia. The following September, a medical discharge sheet indicates he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The staff at Marion prescribed five medications as a treatment. After his release from Marion, Romero went to North Carolina to live with his brother.

“I would see him shake sometimes,” Isaí Romero said. But the medications seemed to have an effect. “With time, that sort of went away. He was calmer. Sometimes these types of illnesses can make you scared.” Over time, Romero was integrated into his brother’s family. “While he was here — wow. My kids were so happy with him. We had birthday celebrations — just so happy,” Isaí said. “He would say, ‘I have that illness. But don’t worry, God has cured me.’”

The time at his brother’s was brief. In February 2018, Romero was charged with larceny and taken to the Wake County Detention Center, a jail in Raleigh, North Carolina. That’s when ICE showed up — ensnaring Romero in the byzantine web of immigration detention. The goal was simple — the government wanted Romero deported — but the path there would take him to ICE’s privately run Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

An ICE official who interviewed Romero at the jail noted that he refused to answer any questions about his health. But after reviewing Romero’s file, the official made a note of the schizophrenia diagnosis and added that a nurse told the agency Romero “gets a shot because of the shaking in prison.”

A little over a month later, Romero was taken to Stewart. During his intake screening, a registered nurse said Romero reported a history of schizophrenia, smoking cigarettes, using alcohol and drugs, and taking medication for his schizophrenia, according to ICE’s report. Romero also said he had auditory hallucinations.

Three days later during a mental health evaluation, according to the ICE report, Romero said, “God is talking to him and telling him what will happen in the future.” A psychologist, however, found Romero to be psychiatrically stable and released him to general population at Stewart.

ICE says that, as of March 2019, the agency is holding some 1,996 detainees with mental illnesses — nearly 4 percent of the estimated 55,000 people in ICE detention throughout the U.S.

Many people in ICE custody are waiting for their day in court: a chance to request asylum and, thereby, begin a legal fight to stay in the country. Others are simply waiting to be deported. Stewart holds both those seeking asylum as well as people waiting out deportation. The detention center has the capacity to hold nearly 2,000 detainees, according to the facility’s housing plans, more than any other immigration jail.

Over a nearly two-year period — from July 2017 to March 2019 — there were over 300 medical emergency calls from Stewart to the southern Georgia dispatch, according to 911 call records. The descriptions of the calls are succinct and do not offer much detail, but they include reports of many seizures, abdominal and chest pain, a report of an improperly inserted catheter, and even a detainee who was “Maced and now in distress.”

Among the 911 records, there are four clear instances of mental health emergencies in the calls. In one instance, clearly marked as a mental health emergency, a person in custody “ran into a wall and hit his head.” A call from January 2019 is recorded as an attempted suicide; a person in detention cut himself and was “bleeding badly.”

Alarms have long been sounded over conditions at Stewart, particularly for health-related care. In May 2017, the Atlanta-based social justice group Project South released a report highlighting the conditions, detailing “serious concerns” with the facility’s housing, medical care, food, hygiene, and mental health care.

It’s not only advocacy groups, however, that have raised concerns. A December 2017 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General documented multiple violations of national detention standards, including the misuse of “segregation,” or solitary confinement. The Inspector General’s report notes detainees were placed in solitary “for violations of minor rules” — without the required written notification for the reasons behind lockdown. As The Intercept previously reported, detainees at Stewart have been punished with solitary confinement for merely refusing to perform so-called voluntary labor.

ICE has established guidelines for detention at the federal level. Known as the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, it includes standards on detainee classification, transportation, and how to work with mentally ill detainees — as well as the use of solitary confinement.In Romero’s case, staffers at Stewart failed to follow ICE’s detention standards. They failed to properly classify him both on his reentry to the jail and on disciplinary forms as having been diagnosed with mental illness. Then guards did not check in on him at the prescribed intervals once he was placed in a solitary cell.

On April 3, 2018, Romero would begin his first stint in solitary confinement while in Stewart. He had been in the detention center less than a month. Why, exactly, the CoreCivic staff placed Romero in isolation is unknown; ICE had marked the detainee’s disciplinary record as being “confidential,” said the GBI, which then declined to release the documents. (ICE denied FOIA requests from The Takeaway and The Intercept for records related to Romero’s time in custody, citing a pending investigation by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility.)

A nurse cleared Romero for placement in solitary confinement. Because the records are incomplete, however, it is unknown why the nurse cleared Romero despite his recorded diagnosis.

Romero was in solitary until April 18, which meant 15 days in a tiny cell. He was evaluated daily by staff at Stewart and given weekly mental health evaluations. A social worker noted Romero had been refusing to take medication.

Andrew Free, a Tennessee-based immigration attorney representing Romero’s family, along with other families of migrants who have died in government custody, said the stay in solitary marked a turning point: “You look at this 15-day stint for Efraín, and you see the beginning of a deterioration.”

Using solitary confinement can lead to prolonged effects and can often exacerbate already existing mental health conditions, according to mental health and criminal justice experts.

“The symptoms include massive anxiety, which may take the form of panic attacks; disordered thinking which may take the form of paranoia. They may become increasingly angry,” said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. “Despair is very prominent — people become very depressed, and that often leads to suicide. So it’s just a very miserable situation.”

In 2011, Juan E. Méndez, then the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, said solitary confinement for more than 15 days could be considered torture. ICE itself warned in a 2013 policy document that placing someone in solitary confinement could cause the “deterioration of the detainee’s medical or mental health.”

“The use of segregated housing radically increases the risk of suicide.”

“The use of segregated housing radically increases the risk of suicide,” said Ranjana Natarajan, director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. “People with very serious mental illnesses often do not need to be in ICE detention, especially because they’re going to end up in segregated housing for low-level disciplinary violations and then the risk of self-harm and suicide increases once they get into segregated housing.”

Six days after his release from solitary, on April 24, Romero was placed on one-on-one suicide watch in the Medical Housing Unit, the hospital ward of the detention center. What prompted Stewart staff to place him on suicide watch is not clear, because the GBI refused to release records from that day. (Citing its pending investigation, ICE denied a FOIA request.)

The ICE report, however, gives an indication of what may have occurred. Romero told a mental health practitioner that he was the “Antichrist” and that he would be “dead in three days,” according to the ICE report on his detention. The practitioner noted he did not have suicidal or homicidal ideations, but Romero himself said “there was a potential danger to himself or others in the dorm.”

The following day, Romero reported to a mental health physician that “God was trying to kill him,” according to the ICE report, and that he was experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations. The following week, social workers observed a clear deterioration in his condition. At one point, Romero told a social worker he was feeling “hopeless and helpless” and that he would “die three terrible deaths soon.” He would laugh at inappropriate times during evaluations and was obsessed with the concept of death. All the while, he continued to decline treatment and medication. A social worker decided Romero should be sent to a facility with a higher level of care in order to treat his mental health.

On May 4, Romero was taken to the Columbia Regional Care Center in South Carolina, a hospital specializing in mental health treatments that houses inmates and detainees from all over the rural south. Romero spent more than a month there.

In recent years, a spate of migrant deaths in government custody have made headlines. Stewart was among the detention centers where one such death occurred — and the similarities to Romero’s case are striking.

Jeancarlo Jimenez-Joseph was a 27 year old when he died in Stewart. He had been a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, an Obama-era program, since rolled back by the Trump administration, that allowed people brought to the U.S. as children to remain in the country. After suffering a traumatic brain injury that appeared to trigger psychological distress, Jimenez-Joseph was charged with stealing a car and subsequently stripped of his DACA status. Eventually, he came to be detained at Stewart. In the spring of 2017, a little over a year before Romero’s death, Jimenez-Joseph took his own life after spending 19 days in solitary confinement.

The GBI conducted an investigation into Jimenez-Joseph’s death, as did CoreCivic itself. Evidence unearthed by the probes, as well as news reports, catapulted the suicide into the limelight; Jimenez-Joseph’s suicide became one of the highest-profile examples of death in ICE custody. The GBI and CoreCivic probes concluded that his pleas for attention to his mental health went unheeded and, as in Romero’s case, prison staff violated guidelines for checking in on detainees in solitary.

The staff at Stewart were well-aware of Jimenez-Joseph’s schizophrenia diagnosis, according to reports. He had alerted officials that he was having suicidal thoughts, requested more medication, and even called the ICE national help line. And yet Jimenez-Joseph was placed in solitary twice; on the second occasion, he took his own life. That night, a detention officer neglected to check his cell during the 30-minute intervals required by ICE standards. And the correctional officer falsified his logs, lying about looking in Jimenez-Joseph’s cell. He was fired from the facility.

The deaths — not all related to mental health issues — continued coming at Stewart. In January 2018, Yulio Castro-Garrido, a 33-year-old father, died after being held in the facility. He had no health problems when he first entered Stewart but succumbed to pneumonia, a lung infection, and viral influenza. Castro-Garrido was working at the facility’s kitchen while waiting to be deported to Cuba.

“I believe the conditions inside have to be so bad that a flu can turn into pneumonia very quickly,” Frank Alain Suarez, Castro-Garrido’s brother, told The Intercept last year. “And I guess the medical care is so horrible, no one could catch it in time.”

In June, attorneys with Project South provided The Takeaway with a copy of ICE’s Detainee Death Review for Castro-Garrido’s case. According to the record, even after reporting his illness to staff, Castro-Garrido worked food service duties under CoreCivic supervision, potentially transmitting his illness to others. He even worked in the kitchen on the day he was taken from the facility in an ambulance. Eventually, Castro-Garrido had to be carried out by his roommate, another detained migrant, because he could barely walk.

This August, Pedro Arriago-Santoya died in ICE custody, after being taken to a hospital from Stewart. Little is known about the 44-year-old migrant’s death, other than that he died of a cardiopulmonary arrest.

At least 25 migrants have died in ICE detention during the past two years. Last summer, a report by Human Rights Watch documented systemic problems in the medical care provided at ICE detention facilities. In 14 of 15 detainee deaths analyzed for the report, Human Rights Watch’s experts found evidence of “subpar and dangerous practices” by medical staff. (The report mentions two deaths at Stewart, but they were not included in the analysis because little public information was available about those deaths at the time the report was being complied.)

Romero died just 20 days after the Human Rights Watch report was released.

Romero had been returned to Stewart after a month at the Columbia Regional Care Center. Thoughts of death still loomed over his psyche; he kept talking about dying three deaths. During his intake screening at Stewart, Romero told a nurse and social worker he was taking medication but that he would still “suffer three terrible deaths in the future but would never kill himself.”

According to an intake nurse interviewed by the GBI, Romero reported to her that God could control his mind and that — since childhood — they “always had conversations.”

But according to Romero’s ICE Custody Classification Worksheet, used to classify detainees into the proper housing units, Stewart correctional staff did not recognize his mental illness, despite having returned from a mental health hospital they had sent him to.

On the worksheet, CoreCivic correctional staff neglected to make note of the schizophrenia diagnosis. One question on the form read, “Does a Special Vulnerability Exist?” Correctional staff marked “No.” Yet schizophrenia, according to ICE’s detention standards, qualifies as a “special vulnerability.” The detention standards require staff to reference all documents available to them during the classification process, including medical information, to properly house detainees. The standards also encourage officers to “inquire about and remain alert to signs of any special vulnerability or management concern that may affect the custody determination.”

“He was literally coming back from a specialized psychiatric facility. And the form they signed — two different CoreCivic employees signed — said, ‘He’s fine, don’t worry about it.’”

Despite having been previously placed on suicide watch in the facility and returning from a mental health institution, a CoreCivic officer neglected to recognize Romero’s mental illness and placed him in a “high custody” housing assignment. According to ICE standards, “high custody” detainees are those with a history of violent charges, institutional misconduct, or those with gang affiliation. A supervisor — also a CoreCivic employee — approved the worksheet and signed off on the classification two days later.

“Two people — not just a one-off, but two people, the person who screened him first and the supervisor who reviewed it, both working for CoreCivic — looked at Efraín’s record, looked at the things we have in front of us, and said, ‘Nope, no mental health issues here,’” said Andrew Free, the attorney. “He was literally coming back from a specialized psychiatric facility, after being transferred out of Stewart because of his mental health issues. And the form they signed — two different CoreCivic employees signed — said, ‘He’s fine, don’t worry about it.’”

A CoreCivic spokesperson would not answer specific questions of Romero’s time at Stewart, citing the pending investigation. “What we can tell you is the safety and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority, and we take seriously our obligation to adhere to federal Performance Based National Detention Standards in our ICE-contracted facilities,” said the spokesperson.

At the time, the facility’s warden overseeing Stewart was Charlie Peterson, a longtime CoreCivic employee. According to the CoreCivic spokesperson, Peterson’s departure was unrelated to Romero’s death. When reached by phone, Peterson refused to answer any questions, saying he was not allowed to speak with the media.

On June 13, a day after his return to Stewart, an Advanced Practice Practitioner at the facility medically cleared Romero for deportation. In the days that followed, Romero refused his medication.

Six days later, on June 19, a social worker evaluated Romero for his medication refusals and noted his diagnosis “met the criteria for a serious mental illness,” according to the ICE report on his detention.

Later that day, Romero was placed in solitary confinement for the second — and final — time. At around 4:44 p.m., Romero approached a 20-year-old correctional officer in a hallway leading to Unit 5B, one of the “Medium-High/High” general population units. According to the disciplinary report, provided by Free, Romero spoke to the detention officer and rubbed his foot on hers. The detention officer later told the GBI, “He kept saying he liked me, I was beautiful and had a big butt, and tried to touch me.” She called two correctional officers, and they took Romero to an office.

Romero remained calm during the investigation of the incident, documents report. An officer referred disciplinary action to the Institution Disciplinary Panel, a body overseeing punishment for detainees who break rules, and a registered nurse cleared Romero for solitary confinement. He was moved to Unit 7B and locked away in a solitary cell.

A day later, a social worker evaluated Romero and documented a “limitation in mental functioning, his refusal of medication administration, and the potential of his behavior worsening.”

Two days after being placed in solitary, on June 21, Romero had his hearing before the disciplinary panel. He was the only witness called and admitted to doing what the correctional officer had accused him of.

The supervisor writing up the disciplinary panel report charged Romero with Violation 207: “Making Sexual Proposals.” His punishment: 30 days in solitary confinement — twice what the U.N. special rapporteur on torture says should be considered “torture.”

ICE standards require staff at detention facilities to consult with medical staff during the disciplinary process. They are required to evaluate a detainee’s mental and physical health during the disciplinary process. Yet none of the disciplinary records released by CoreCivic in response to courtroom discovery demands and provided by Free make mention of Romero’s worsening mental illness. (The Takeaway and The Intercept reached out to the shift supervisor, Latoya Gainer, who sent Romero to 30 days in solitary confinement. She never responded, but the current warden of the facility, Michael Donahue, sent a text message requesting that The Takeaway and The Intercept stop attempting to contact Gainer.)

“The use of that kind of discipline without regard to the person’s individual status and individual history is deeply problematic,” Natarajan, of the Civil Rights Clinic, said. Natarajan said the use of solitary in this context was particularly troubling: “When you place someone who has mental health needs, who perhaps hasn’t been taking their medication, has auditory hallucinations, has a history of self-harm, what you’re doing is radically increasing the risk of suicide — especially if you put them in a jail cell that also has protrusions that they can use to readily hang themselves.”

The tiny solitary confinement cell — number 105 in Unit 7B — is where 40-year-old Romero spent his last days. The cell was sparsely accommodated; only a handful of items were present. Looking in from the door, a chrome toilet and sink sit to the left. On the right, a seat and a table protruding from the wall. And along the back of the cell, a bunk bed.

The bottom bed had a white sheet draped over it. The top bunk was without linens. That’s where Romero’s bent Spanish edition of the Bible sat next to some disciplinary records and court documents.

Despite being held in the beige-colored cell for 23 hours a day, Romero would smile and wave, Stewart staff told the GBI. They said he was quiet and reserved. The officer who eventually found Romero hanging, Jamorris McCoy, told the GBI the detainee had always been a nice person to detention staff and other detainees. According to McCoy, Romero would frequently jump around his cell, smile, and give a thumbs-up sign.

Romero continued to communicate with staff and other detainees through the typical means used by those in solitary: by yelling through the walls of the solitary unit or chatting during their one daily hour of recreation.

Despite his friendly disposition with staff and other detainees, Romero had dark moments in solitary. A detainee named Pedro Mejia-Soto told the GBI that Romero wanted to see his parents — something he said on the day he died.

Another detainee, Jorge Caballero-Ramos, told the GBI, “We saw him sad all the time, we saw him just walking around every night. He don’t talk with nobody, pushing the door sometimes. He always crying.” Caballero-Ramos went on, “He say, ‘Take me out, I don’t want to be here! My family!’ That’s all he talk, he just say that — loud.”

Jonathan Calix-Cruz, a detainee held in Cell 117, told the GBI that Romero was his friend and reported that the schizophrenic detainee also expressed troubling thoughts. Romero told Calix-Cruz that God forgave everybody — except for Romero.

Isaac Kargbo, who was held in the cell next to Romero’s, told the CoreCivic investigator during the company’s internal investigation that he was like Romero’s best friend. Romero would tell Kargbo he missed his family and hated being locked up.

“He really acted — he acted like he wasn’t normal,” Jose Ponce-Martinez, another detainee, said. “He would say things — like, that he was a prophet.”

Another detainee, Luis Alvarez-Pineda, told the CoreCivic investigator that Romero would sometimes talk about suicide, but that “no one took him seriously as he always said crazy things and never spoke coherently.” Alvarez-Pineda himself expressed regret in an interview with a CoreCivic investigator for failing to take Romero seriously. On the day Romero died, he reportedly told Alvarez-Pineda during their recreation hour that God had “told him to leave” — and that he was going to “leave the officers with a surprise.”

On June 27, after eight days in solitary, a Stewart Detention Center committee reviewed his case and recommended he remain in solitary confinement until July 18 — through the end of the imposed 30 days. It is not known whether a medical staff member was on the review committee, since those records were withheld from the release by the GBI.

Days later, on July 3, an immigration judge ordered Romero removed from the country.

Seven days after his deportation order came through, on July 10, 2018, Romero began his 21st day in solitary confinement.

At 8 a.m., correctional staff took detainees out of their cells for recreation time in the designated area; calling it a “yard” would be too generous. In Stewart, detained migrants in solitary exercise in one of a row of small, conjoined cages built of tall chain-link fences. Metal basketball hoops hang from the back wall of each enclosure, and a ball is provided.

Each detainee gets an hour of recreation. During his hour, Romero took his shirt off and began throwing the ball at the basket. From time to time, he paused and spoke to CoreCivic correctional officer Patrick Blue, who was keeping an eye on the recreation area. One of the pauses lasted for a while, with Romero leaning against the chain-link fencing, engaged in conversation.

Nothing seems out of the ordinary in the surveillance video footage of Romero; his body language is casual. There’s no audio, but Blue, in an interview with the CoreCivic investigator, said Romero “spoke about the Bible and that the Holy Spirit entered him through a woman.”

Later, according to the ICE report, a nurse evaluated Romero during rounds of the solitary units. According to the ICE report, he presented no distress during the check-in and denied any suicidal ideations. Romero “answered questions appropriately.”

The surveillance footage obtained through a public records request, however, raises questions about the evaluation. The 18 hours of video shows only one on-camera interaction with a nurse, taking place during the recreation hour. The nurse approaches Romero, placing a form through the slot in the fence and pointing at the paper for him to write on. She then stands back and watches. When he is finished, the nurse takes the paper, turns around, and walks away. Although there is no audio in the footage, the interaction between Romero and the nurse is very brief. It is unclear whether Romero expressed any mental health concerns. In response to a public records request, authorities declined to release the form passed between Romero and the nurse.

After his hour of recreation time, Romero was handcuffed and taken back to solitary confinement Cell 105. At around 11:30 a.m., Romero was handcuffed again, escorted out of the cell, scanned with a handheld metal detector, and placed in a wheelchair. A correctional officer wheeled him out of view of the camera.

According to the ICE report, Romero met with a social worker for a mental health evaluation. The social worker documented Romero saying “he was going to die” and, once again, that he did not need medication. At the end of the evaluation, the social worker said Romero “would benefit from a referral to a higher level of care mental health facility.” As Capital and Main reported, Romero did not receive the additional mental health care he needed.

For the rest of the day, Romero paced around his cell. He stood on top of the toilet or by the door, staring out at the unit. He sometimes pushed on the door or moved back toward the bunk bed — disappearing from view on the security footage. He seemed to be struggling to pass the time, to whittle away the long, arduous hours in solitary confinement.

Every 30 minutes, correctional officers are required to look in each individual cell to check on detainees’ well-being, according to ICE’s policy. The detention facility staff need to observe individuals for a long enough time to make sure there are no problems or emergency health situations. After watching each detainee, the staff are required to sign the log sheet on a clipboard by each cell door.

That was the job of Rodney Dent, a CoreCivic correctional officer: to do rounds of the solitary cells, including Romero’s, and sign the logs.

On Romero’s 21st day in his small cell, Dent was responsible for rounds on the lower tier of Unit 7B, covering 17 detainees housed in cells 101 through 120. In the afternoon, Dent moved through the solitary unit, peeking in cells and signing the logs on the clipboards. At times, he sat at the desk in the center of the unit, looking through paperwork.

Inside Cell 105, the slow hours drudged on. Romero continued to pace back and forth, battling the voices in his head. At 8:04 p.m., he turned the lights off in the cell, something that struck another detainee as odd. “He turn the lights early,” Caballero-Ramos told the GBI. “And that’s not — that’s not normal.”

On one of his rounds, Dent can be seen in the surveillance footage passing by Caballero-Ramos’s cell. He stopped, and the pair chatted. There is no sound in the footage, so it is unknown what they discussed. But, according to Caballero-Ramos’s interview with the GBI, he tried to warn a corrections officer that something was off with Romero — and Dent was the only officer who stopped at his cell.

“We told him, ‘Can you check him?’ And they didn’t even care. You can see, they didn’t even care.”

“We told them, ‘Something is happening.’ We told him, he can tell you,” Caballero-Ramos told the GBI. “We told him, ‘Can you check him?’ And they didn’t even care. You can see, they didn’t even care.”

Dent walked by Romero’s cell, briefly peeked inside, and signed the clipboard. Then 30 minutes later, at 8:40 p.m., he did the same thing: walked up to the door, took a quick look inside the dark cell, and signed the clipboard. That 8:40 p.m. round was the last time Dent looked into Romero’s cell.

At 9:13 p.m., Dent spoke with the detainee in Cell 104. Then he stepped up to the clipboard outside Cell 105, with Romero inside, and signed it without peeking into the cell. At 9:39 p.m., Dent did the same thing: signed the clipboard and kept walking without looking in. And at 10:04 p.m. — Dent’s last round-count for that day’s shift — he approached Cell 104, spoke with the detainee, signed the clipboard on Romero’s cell, and walked away without looking inside. Dent’s falsification of the log was first reported by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, based on the internal CoreCivic report.

Dent told a GBI investigator that he looked into the cell on each round. “He was by the side, looked at him in the corner with my peripheral vision. Just smiled and waving a bit,” Dent told the state-level investigator, when asked about the 10:04 p.m. round. “I just saw his silhouetted face and his gold tooth in his mouth when he smiled. And he was waving.”

Yet the surveillance footage contradicts this statement. From 9:13 p.m. to 10:04 p.m., over the course of three rounds of the unit, Dent hadn’t peered into Romero’s cell, despite what was recorded in his logs.

“If the guard or the officer never even looked into the cell to see what he was doing and if he was breathing, he wasn’t doing his rounds, that’s not doing an observation at all,” said Natarajan. “That’s a critical failure.”

CoreCivic’s internal investigation into Romero’s death found that the check-in logs had been falsified. According to a CoreCivic spokesperson, “Mr. Dent’s employment at Stewart Detention Center has been terminated.” When reached by phone, Dent said that what happened on that July night was an awful experience he was attempting to leave in the past. He hung up the phone, refusing to answer any questions.

As Dent’s shift ended a little after 10 p.m., another correctional officer, Jamorris McCoy, relieved Dent. As McCoy’s shift began, he checked in on the cells in solitary unit 7B. At around 10:30 p.m., nearly two hours since anyone had checked on Romero, McCoy began his first round of checks, looking into each cell.

Security footage shows McCoy beginning to look into the cells at 10:34 p.m. He makes his way around the unit, looking into the cells through the small windows in the doors. He looked into Cell 101, Cell 102, Cell 103, and Cell 104. But when McCoy reached Cell 105, he paused.

“I looked, I wrote the time, but I looked. I hit the window, though I noticed he didn’t respond,” McCoy said. “I hit the window two times, but he didn’t respond so I called a medical emergency.”

In the two hours since someone had checked on him, Romero had fashioned his orange socks into a noose, attached them to the bunk bed’s railing, and hanged himself.

Correctional officer Patrick Blue, who was overseeing Unit 7A, was first to the scene after McCoy called him over. After reaching for his radio and calling for a medical emergency, McCoy rushed over to grab the “J-knife” — sometimes referred to as the “suicide knife” — used to cut down nooses. A supervisor, Lieutenant Jamal Williams, arrived and gave the two officers permission to enter the cell. The door swung open, and the three officers rushed to cut Romero down. Footage shows them struggling to place his body on the floor.

Detainees in the other solitary cells watched in horror. They began banging on the cell doors, yelling at correctional staff. Detainees described the scene unfolding before them, how correctional staff began giving CPR as nurses were called. Many thought he was already dead by the time staff found him.

The senior detention officer that night was assigned to the medical unit but did not hear the medical emergency call because her radio was dead. The correctional staff on the scene seemed unprepared for the medical emergency.

The CoreCivic report notes that the first oxygen tank medical staff brought to the scene was empty. The automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, was also nowhere to be found. Natarajan said, “It’s a critical failure if lifesaving devices like the AED and the oxygen tank are not available.”

CoreCivic staff began recording the events with a handheld camera for liability purposes; the resulting footage is difficult to watch. McCoy gives CPR to Romero as he lays on the floor of his cell, dressed in his red prison garb. Though the handheld recording has audio, the sound of detainees yelling drowns out much of what correctional staff are saying.

“Sons of bitches!” Some detainees can be heard yelling, amid the thunderous banging of the cell doors. “Murderers!”

The nurse who first arrived on scene seemed distressed in the video footage, frantically searching for the defibrillator and instructing the onlooking correctional staff to call an ambulance. “Call EMS now! Get the AED! AED!” the nurse yells. “No, where the hell’s my AED? I need it stat! Stat — I need the AED.”

As more Stewart staff gathered to watch, the nurse begins pleading to Romero. “Hey buddy, can you wake up for me? Hey! Hey! C’mon, buddy. C’mon. Hey! Hey! Wake up for me, c’mon please,” the nurse yells. She mumbles to herself, “I need an oxygen — dammit, there was nothing on my cart.”

Eleven minutes after Romero was found, Stewart County EMS arrived. Two minutes later, they entered the solitary unit and dragged Romero out of the cell. After continuing CPR and other procedures for 10 more minutes, they placed him on a stretcher and brought him outside of the unit and toward the ambulance.

“He’s clinically dead right now. He’s clinically dead,” one of the EMS first responders said. “We’re doing everything we can to reverse that.”

They loaded Romero into the ambulance and rushed him to a nearby hospital. A doctor pronounced him dead at 11:29 p.m.

The Takeaway and The Intercept sent a long list of detailed questions to ICE, highlighting findings of this investigation. An ICE spokesperson referred some of those questions to CoreCivic, saying the agency was unable to speak to the actions of CoreCivic employees.

“ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and undertakes a comprehensive agency-wide review of every fatality that occurs in ICE custody,” the agency spokesperson said. “While any death in ICE custody is unfortunate, fatalities in ICE custody, statistically, are exceedingly rare. That reality, and the contextual data to follow, is in no way intended to diminish the significance of Mr. de la Rosa’s death; it is provided simply to illustrate just how exceptionally rare fatalities are in ICE custody and to explain the policies and procedures in place regarding ICE detention as a whole.”

According to the ICE spokesperson, fatalities in ICE custody occur at a rate approximately 100 times lower than other federal and state detained populations. The agency spokesperson said that ICE spends more than $250 million annually on comprehensive medical treatment for people in custody.

CoreCivic was not the only private company profiting off immigration detention during Romero’s time in ICE custody.

In the hundreds of pages of documents reviewed for this story, The Takeaway and The Intercept identified three companies contracted by ICE Health Service Corps to assist in providing health care-related services at Stewart, during the time that Castro-Garrido and Romero were detained: Maxim Healthcare, InGenesis, and STG International Incorporated.

Staff members for InGenesis and STG responded to the medical emergency call when Romero was found.

“InGenesis employed only a portion of the healthcare workers there, did not manage or maintain its medical records, and did not manage and direct its healthcare services program,” InGenesis’s chief strategy officer and general counsel Justin Harris said, in response to a request for comment. “InGenesis is committed to staffing trained and qualified personnel to support its clients’ healthcare practices.”

InGenesis nurses, however, were involved with Romero’s suicide watch and medication distribution, according to government records on his care. InGenesis did not respond to repeated inquiries on the company’s work at Stewart, how many InGenesis staff members were employed at the facility, or if the company trained staff on mental health and solitary confinement.

A spokesperson for Maxim said the company was not the primary health care staffing provider at Stewart. “According to our records, we placed a total of six health provider contractors over the 20-month time period in question,” a spokesperson said. “We are not presently aware that any of the staff members we placed had involvement in the cases you referenced.”

The nurse who first responded to the medical emergency call and made note that the emergency cart was bereft of supplies, was employed by STG, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Last November, ICE ended the contracts with the three companies providing health care at Stewart, and ICE Health Service Corps is no longer in charge of care at the facility. According to an agency spokesperson, ICE headquarters contracted all medical and health care work to CoreCivic, which now controls the entire facility.

The 2017 death of Jimenez-Joseph brought waves of media attention to Stewart Detention Center. The similarities between his death and Romero’s, however, have led some critics to question whether any serious changes have been made.

“The fact that you see a suicide like Mr. de la Rosa’s about 14 months after another suicide, shows that perhaps there was not a thorough audit or review of the procedures used at Stewart,” Natarajan said. “I think it’s really important that ICE audit the particular suicides, but also audit to see what are the systemic failures at the facility that are causing suicides to happen over and over again. Because we shouldn’t be experiencing these kind of fatalities in immigration detention — period.”

Not only did Romero fall victim to an immigration enforcement system detaining people at unprecedented levels, but he was locked away in one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country. His mental illness only exacerbated his already precarious position. He had already served his time in jail for the laws he previously broke.

“ICE and CoreCivic failed Efraín de la Rosa at every step.”

ICE custody was not supposed to be a death sentence for crossing the border. On paper, it was a civil case, with deportation serving as punishment. But his time at Stewart was filled with anguish. Romero’s mental illness and his conditions swirled into a storm amid which he took his own life. Despite what an immigration judge had decided, Romero’s life came to a permanent end in what was supposed to be temporary detention.

“ICE and CoreCivic failed Efraín de la Rosa at every step,” Azadeh Shahshahani, a human rights attorney with Project South said, after being briefed on Romero’s case. “This horrific facility needs to be immediately shut down.”

There are impossible questions to answer about Romero’s case, questions about whether he would be alive if ICE, CoreCivic, and their staff at Stewart had followed their own procedures, had noted their own acceptance of a diagnosis, or had prepared to have the proper medical equipment to hand.

For attorney Andrew Free, the main question Romero’s death raises is one about how the U.S. organizes its immigration system. “It’s detention itself,” Free said. “When you have this bias towards putting people in cages, in order to get them through a civil immigration detention hearing without fighting, without having counsel, without having access to a lawyer or community advocate who can help with their case — because you want to up deportation numbers, because you want to racially profile and ethnically cleanse the United States of people you find undesirable — and you have this profit motive that fuels that. It is a system that sets people up to die.”

Romero’s brother Isaí, however, isn’t looking to place blame.

“I want there to be more noise, more anger,” Isaí Romero said. “So that this death won’t be in vain. If we can — with my brother’s death — I want other Hispanics to open their eyes, for there to be more unity among us, so we don’t fall and become accustomed to injustice. Because sometimes, if we are quiet, that’s why they do to us what they do. So that’s what I hope for — for there to be justice.”

The post How Solitary Confinement Kills: Torture and Stunning Neglect End in Suicide at Privately Run ICE Prison appeared first on The Intercept.

Documents reviewed by The Intercept show that Jimenez-Joseph repeatedly brought his suicidal thoughts to the attention of officials at the rural Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center run by CoreCivic.

Just six weeks after his call to ICE’s help line, Jimenez-Joseph killed himself in a tiny solitary confinement cell where he had been held for 19 days.

A description of Jimenez-Joseph’s complaint to the ICE hotline, which has not been previously reported on, was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request. The record appeared in a brief accounting of important moments in the timeline leading up to Jimenez-Joseph’s suicide compiled by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which looks into complaints regarding ICE’s activities. The record of Jimenez-Joseph’s call adds yet another key point in the grim chronology of his last months alive.

For critics of ICE’s treatment of detainees, Jimenez-Joseph’s path to suicide in a tiny isolation cell has become one of the highest profile examples of the negligence and cruelty they say pervades the agency’s heavily privatized detention network. They allege that CoreCivic subjects detainees at its Georgia facility to an array of indignities, including forced work, a violent atmosphere, and highly restricted access to lawyers. Advocates say Jimenez-Joseph’s case also highlights the facility’s excessive use of solitary confinement, widely known to be a form of torture.

In 2013, ICE adopted a policy that put new restrictions on placing detainees with a history of mental illness in solitary confinement. The policy requires that such detainees be removed from isolation if their mental state appears to be deteriorating.

Critics say that CoreCivic’s Stewart facility has flouted ICE’s own internal standards. And, earlier this year, another detainee killed himself at the Stewart Detention Center, under conditions that parallel Jimenez-Joseph’s death. Efraín Romero de la Rosa, a Mexican national, was set to be deported. He had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to health documents seen by The Intercept, and killed himself after spending 21 days in solitary confinement.

“As we have documented over the years, Stewart has used solitary in an abusive and retributive manner and as a first resort in response to individuals in a fragile mental health state,” Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director at Project South, told The Intercept in April. “It is time for a congressional investigation of solitary at Stewart, in addition to the deplorable conditions at the facility as a whole.”

A Cry for Help

Shortly before his 11th birthday, Jimenez-Joseph’s mother brought him from Panama to the United States, and the family settled for a time in Kansas. After receiving legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, Jimenez-Joseph studied architecture at a community college with ambitions to one day manage his own business.

In October 2016, Jimenez-Joseph suffered a traumatic head injury while skateboarding, which appeared to trigger months of psychological distress, according to ICE heath records. Shortly after the accident, authorities in Wake County, North Carolina, sought to involuntarily commit Jimenez-Joseph for schizophrenia and severe anxiety.

A few months later, Jimenez-Joseph was stripped of his DACA status after being charged with stealing a car in Charlotte, North Carolina. Prior to that, Jimenez-Joseph had been convicted of several misdemeanors. Local authorities subsequently transferred Jimenez-Joseph into the custody of ICE, which sent him to its privately operated Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. Upon his arrival, Jimenez-Joseph told a nurse that he had attempted suicide in the past and continued to think about harming himself. When the nurse asked by what method he would do this, Jimenez-Joseph provided a one-word answer: hanging.

It is unclear exactly what he conveyed in his complaint to the help line a few weeks later, on April 4. But the existence of the call shows that ICE officials far beyond Stewart Detention Center, or even the agency’s broader region, had also been warned of Jimenez-Joseph’s deteriorating psychological condition. Additionally, the log suggests that Jimenez-Joseph felt his situation had become serious enough to elevate his concerns above management at the CoreCivic-run facility.

“This was a cry for help,” said Andrew Free, a Nashville-based immigration attorney who represents Jimenez-Joseph’s family.

ICE’s central office took at least some note of the call: It prompted ICE authorities to contact the ICE regional headquarters in Atlanta to check on how Jimenez-Joseph was being treated, according to the call log. Within 24 hours, ICE’s central office received a response from Atlanta: The privately run facility said it knew of Jimenez-Joseph’s condition, and officials insisted that he was “being treated with medication and therapy.”

Apparently satisfied with this answer, the ICE office left no record of any additional follow-up on the complaint. But the situation of Jimenez-Joseph’s mental health was not under control.

By the time of his call, Jimenez-Joseph had gained a new nickname at the detention facility: Julius Caesar. He was not only called this name by fellow inmates, but also by the facility’s guards. During an interview with state investigators later that year, one guard said he primarily knew Jimenez-Joseph by the Roman emperor’s name.

The DHS document obtained by The Intercept also refers to an encounter Jimenez-Joseph had with another detainee that led to his first placement in solitary confinement. After Jimenez-Joseph’s death, ICE publicly described this altercation as a “fight,” giving the impression that Jimenez-Joseph had a history of violence against other detainees at the facility. Jimenez-Joseph was placed in solitary confinement for seven days for the incident.

Security video obtained by The Intercept demonstrates what happened during the so-called fight. The video shows Jimenez-Joseph standing next to his drawings, which were sprawled out on a table, and engaged in what appears to be a heated discussion with another detainee. The video, which has no audio, shows the other detainee delivering a single blow to Jimenez-Joseph’s face, knocking his glasses to the ground. Jimenez-Joseph does not retreat but does not fight back. Rather, he jumps and moves around the area, dodging additional blows and looking at the other detainee. At that point, an officer enters the room, and both Jimenez-Joseph and the other inmate stand still and listen to the officer.

According to the DHS document, this assault led to a cut on Jimenez-Joseph’s nose but “no outside medical attention was needed,” so he was cleared for solitary confinement. Seven days later, he returned to general population, with persistent hallucinations.

Photos of the CoreCivic solitary confinement cell where Jeancarlo Alfonso Jimenez-Joseph killed himself in May 2017. Photos: Georgia Bureau of Investigation

The Highest Standards

If his altered perceptions didn’t raise serious red flags, Jimenez-Joseph’s more direct attestations of interest in suicide should have. Three weeks after his call to ICE’s help line, he again told an ICE health services official of suicidal thoughts. He said that voices in his head were telling him to kill himself even though he didn’t want to, according to the nurse’s notes from the conversation.

Just two days after that, on April 27, Jimenez-Joseph jumped off a second-floor platform at the detention center. He survived unscathed but told officials that it was an attempt to hurt himself, insisting again that he was a Roman emperor. That day, despite being repeatedly warned of his suicidal tendencies, ICE signed off on placing Jimenez-Joseph in solitary confinement as punishment for the jump, according to internal documents.

ICE placed Jimenez-Joseph in a tiny isolation cell for the second time, with a bed spanning between two of the bare concrete walls, two shelves, a toilet, and a mirror. “Whatever they call it, this cell can only be used for solitary confinement,” said Juan Méndez, a professor of human rights law in residence at American University, who previously served as the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. “It is clearly unsuitable for more than a few hours,” Méndez said of the cell. “Even for a single day, it is banned when applied to inmates with psycho-social disabilities,” he said, referring to international law.

Meanwhile, Jimenez-Joseph had discussed his suicidal thoughts during phone calls with family members, who were becoming increasingly alarmed about his mental state. Believing that he needed someone to talk to, Jimenez-Joseph’s mother asked an immigrant advocate living in Georgia named Marilyn McGinnis to visit Jimenez-Joseph in solitary confinement.

In an interview with The Intercept, McGinnis said she arrived at Stewart to see Jimenez-Joseph early on the morning of May 14, 2017, but due to Jimenez-Joseph being in isolation, her visit did not go as planned. McGinnis recalled ICE telling her, “‘No, he was in disciplinary segregation so he could only have a visit once a month,’” and Jimenez-Joseph already had a visitor that month. McGinnis left the facility without meeting the distressed detainee.

That night, shortly after midnight, Jimenez-Joseph was found in his solitary confinement cell hanging from a bedsheet fashioned into noose. Paramedics attempted to revive him in the small cell and then sped him to the nearest hospital, some 30 miles away. By sunrise, he was declared dead.

In addition to sparking outcry from immigration advocates, Jimenez-Joseph’s death has triggered a federal investigation headed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, ICE said in response to a request for comment from The Intercept. An ICE spokesperson indicated that the federal investigation was ongoing, noting that at “whatever point the investigative findings from DHS OIG are publicly available, we’ll address those findings at that time.”

CoreCivic declined to respond to a list of questions from The Intercept regarding Jimenez-Joseph’s call to the ICE help line, and cited “deference to our government partner” in referring all questions to ICE.

“ICE holds its personnel, including contractors, to the highest standards of professional and ethical behavior, and the agency takes all allegations of misconduct seriously,” an ICE spokesperson said in response to questions about Jimenez-Joseph’s call to the ICE help line. “ICE will continue to monitor the situation and respond appropriately based on the outcome of investigative findings.”

Top photo: An employee waits at the front gate of the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., on April 13, 2009.

The post Immigrant Detainee Called ICE Help Line Before Killing Himself in Isolation Cell appeared first on The Intercept.

“His big hope was that — going to Mexico,” Isaí Romero, who lives in North Carolina, told The Intercept by phone. The deportation would be a relief compared to the limbo of immigration detention, where Efraín had landed after being placed in immigration removal proceedings by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But Efraín never made it out of the ICE facility.

“I spent the entire day crying. I didn’t know how to tell my parents what had happened.”

“When they gave me the news, all of a sudden, the entire world collapsed,” Isaí Romero said. “I spent the entire day crying. I didn’t know how to tell my parents what had happened. I waited for my mom to eat — to be calm, you know?”

Efraín Romero’s suicide came at the end of 21 days in solitary confinement, according to investigators.

Romero had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to documents from the Virginia Department of Corrections. His death parallels a case from May 2017, when 27-year-old Jean Jimenez-Joseph, another Stewart detainee with a mental health diagnosis, killed himself at the facility after 19 days in solitary confinement. The United Nations has previously said that such confinements could constitute torture and ICE itself has issued strict directives about isolating detainees, including specifically on segregating people with mental health conditions for extended periods.

For lawyers, advocates, and the families of the dead, the suicides at Stewart represent a pattern of mistreatment at the hands of ICE, leading to widespread concerns about the safety of immigrant detainees, especially at privately run facilities like Stewart. Romero is the third death at the facility since May 2017 — a troubling indication of an overwhelmed mass immigration detention system that is ill-equipped to deal with delicate cases involving medical and mental health issues.

“We very much have a pattern here,” Azadeh Shahshahani, an attorney with Atlanta-based social justice group Project South, said. “I’m not sure what else it would take for the government to shut this place down. How can they defend what is happening at this facility?”

“He went to other [detention facilities] and he didn’t even scratch himself,” Isaí Romero said. “But he goes to this facility and he takes his own life. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what happened there.”

The Stewart Detention Facility is managed by the private detention corporation CoreCivic under a contract from ICE. The facility is located on the remote outskirts of Lumpkin, Georgia, making visits from family, advocates, and lawyers a challenge. It has fallen under continued scrutiny for its internal operations, by both advocacy organizations and the U.S. government itself.

“The conditions at Stewart are atrocious.”

“The conditions at Stewart are atrocious,” Shahshahani said. In May 2017, Project South released a report highlighting conditions at Stewart and detailing “serious concerns” with the facility’s housing, medical care, food, hygiene, and mental health care.

At the federal level, ICE sets Performance-Based National Detention Standards for all its facilities, regardless of whether they are run by a private corporation or the government. The purpose of the standards is to maintain a “safe and secure detention environment for staff and detainees.”

According to a December 2017 report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, Stewart violated some of the standards, including when it came to the use of “segregation” — also known as solitary confinement. According to the report, staff did not always tell detainees why they were being placed in solitary confinement. Sometimes, the report notes, detainees were placed in solitary “for violations of minor rules” without required written notification for reasons of lockdown. As The Intercept previously reported, detainees at Stewart have been punished with solitary confinement for refusing to perform voluntary labor.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of Inspector General said it estimates the work to address its report’s recommendations will be “complete by the end of 2018.”

That will be little consolation to Efraín Romero’s family.

Prior to Romero’s stay in North Carolina — where Romero was arrested and turned over to ICE — he had been living in Virginia. It was there that he received his mental health diagnosis. He was taken to a treatment center run by the Virginia Department of Corrections. According to his medical discharge summary, which was seen by The Intercept, in June 2017, the Department of Corrections diagnosed him with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, prescribing five different medications and Vitamin D as treatment.

Immigration attorney Andrew Free, who is representing Romero’s parents and the family of Jimenez-Joseph, the detainee who killed himself at Stewart in May 2017, said that ICE should be aware of detainees’ medical conditions.

“Just because you’re locked up doesn’t mean you should get substandard medical care.”

“Just because you’re locked up doesn’t mean you should get substandard medical care,” Free told The Intercept. “And the standard of care is to understand what treatment has been provided in the past and what treatment is necessary — and that requires getting the records.”

ICE did not answer questions regarding Romero’s mental health, including whether the agency received his mental health diagnosis from the Virginia Department of Corrections. The Virginia Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, ICE said that all detainees receive a comprehensive physical exam within 14 days of arrival at a facility to identify medical, mental health, and even dental conditions that require treatment. “ICE is firmly committed to the health and safety of all individuals in custody including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care,” the statement said. “All ICE detainees, regardless of location, can expect timely and appropriate responses to emergent medical requests, and timely medical care appropriate to the anticipated length of detention.”

CoreCivic, the private prison company contracted by ICE to run the facility, referred questions regarding medical and mental health services to ICE, since it is the agency responsible for medical and mental health care.

“CoreCivic strives to house detainees in the least restrictive environment necessary to maintain the safety and security of the institution,” CoreCivic said in a statement. “Regarding Mr. De La Rosa, CoreCivic is cooperating fully with officials investigating his death.” (Both ICE and CoreCivic declined to comment further because of the ongoing investigation.)

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also launched a probe into Romero’s death. Officials with the agency confirmed to The Intercept that Romero was found in a solitary cell amid a suicide attempt. (He died shortly thereafter in a nearby hospital, according to an ICE release.) The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said he had been placed in two separate isolation cells, beginning his 21 days in solitary confinement on June 19.

In 2011, Juan E. Méndez, then the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said solitary confinement for more than 15 days could be considered torture. ICE itself warned in a 2013 policy document that placing someone in solitary confinement could cause the “deterioration of the detainee’s medical or mental health,” laying out regulations for such cases that mandate reporting extended detentions, evaluating detainees, and allowing for alternatives when “available.”

Efraín Romero was the eighth detainee to die in ICE custody this year. Another death at Stewart this year also raised questions about poor medical care in the facility. In January, 33-year-old Yulio Castro-Garrido was detained in Stewart when he became ill with pneumonia. A judge had previously signed his deportation order to send him back to Cuba.

“We heard from another inmate he was being hospitalized, he had been sick for a while, had been complaining,” Frank Alain Suarez, Castro-Garrido’s brother, told The Intercept. “The person that called us, the inmate, told us he couldn’t even breathe.”

Castro-Garrido was taken to two different hospitals in Georgia and later, the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. On January 22, Castro slipped into a coma. He died eight days later.

According to Suarez, the inmate that told him of his brother’s hospitalization asked Suarez not to tell staff at Stewart, for fear of getting in trouble.

“I don’t know what they do to them, but they’re really scared of saying anything to the phone,” said Suarez, who is receiving legal support from Project South. “I believe the conditions inside have to be so bad that a flu can turn into pneumonia very quickly, and I guess the medical care is so horrible, no one could catch it in time.” Suarez added, “He was 100 percent healthy and fine. And after he got into ICE care, he got extremely sick — so sick he died.”

The conditions at the facility have led advocates, like Project South’s Shahshahani, to call for the facility to be shut down. Earlier this year, Project South, in collaboration with the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and more than 70 other organizations, sent a letter to the U.N. to call for an investigation into the facility, where they claim human rights violations are being committed. Project South also sent another letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, highlighting the alleged human rights abuses.

“The national conversation is about abolishing ICE. I am very much for that,” Shahshahani said “Obviously this agency is a failure, as we’re seeing here with the way these facilities are being operated. It is beyond repair, and it should have been shut down a long time ago.”

Instead of being closed down, private detention facilities remain a boon to ICE contractors’ bottom lines. Last year, CoreCivic reported $1.7 billion in total revenue.

Isaí Romero, meanwhile, has started a GoFundMe campaign, aiming to raise $10,000 to cover the cost of sending Efraín Romero de la Rosa’s body back to Puebla, so that his family may have a chance to say goodbye.

Spencer Woodman contributed reporting to this story.

Top photo: The entrance to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, on Feb. 21, 2018.

The post ICE Detainee Diagnosed With Schizophrenia Spent 21 Days in Solitary Confinement, Then Took His Own Life appeared first on The Intercept.