AMID CORONAVIRUS, TRUMP MOVED TO EXPEL IMMIGRANTS — BUT BORDER PATROL DIDN’T TEST ANY OF THEM
(Sept. 3, 2020) U.S. BORDER PATROL appeared to get the coronavirus pandemic under control early: As of May, the agency had only reported a single confirmed case of Covid-19 among those in its custody.
There’s a simple reason, however, that the agency’s numbers were so low: Between March and early May, as the pandemic began to rage, the Border Patrol did not test any of its detainees for the coronavirus.
Documents disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, on Monday show that, between March 7 and May 8, as the pandemic became a nationwide public health emergency, Border Patrol had administered coronavirus tests to a total of zero of the people it apprehended. “USBP has NOT RECEIVED any COVID-19 Tests from any source. USBP DOES NOT conduct COVID-19 Testing of any kind in its temporary holding / processing facilities to date,” the agency wrote in the documents, which came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
In the documents, Border Patrol reported that, though it was not conducting any testing, the agency was “aware of 16 detainees in temporary custody being tested for COVID-19 by local medical/health system” between March and May. Of those, one test had come back positive.
DHS did not respond to questions from The Intercept, including whether Border Patrol began testing after May 8. The agency does not publish detainee Covid-19 numbers for any time frame.
According to its website, 1,973 federal employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency within DHS, had tested positive for coronavirus as of September 1, even without a comprehensive testing plan. Eleven of the agency’s employees have died of causes related to the virus.
In March, the Trump administration granted federal immigration agents sweeping powers to rapidly expel anyone at the border, including unaccompanied children, citing the threat of the coronavirus. Of the 378,065 people apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol and DHS’s Office of Field Operation between March and July, 110,107 were returned under this emergency public health measure.
Immigrant advocates have criticized the policy as a risk to public health. Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, said the universal failure to test people that Border Patrol holds in congregate facilities, transfers around the country, and expels across the globe could contribute to the international spread of Covid-19.
“When they say that they’re doing it under the guise of public health,” Shebaya said, “that’s actually belied by the fact that they’re not testing anyone or putting in place any measures that one ordinarily would, if one were actually concerned about public health.”
OPACITY AROUND THE prevalence of the coronavirus among detainees exists across federal immigration enforcement operations.
Through a review of internal emails between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and officials at a private prison company that houses immigration detainees, court documents, and conversations with lawyers and people detained by federal immigration authorities, The Intercept found that Border Patrol and ICE have obscured the true scope of Covid-19’s spread within immigration detention — often by design.
Resistance to testing staff and detained people, sudden releases of ill detainees, and a shadow set of private contractors whose employee health statistics don’t appear among ICE’s aggregate Covid-19 numbers help ICE and Border Patrol officials report to the outside world that they have the virus contained, that immigration enforcement can operate reasonably during a pandemic.
Other than pointing The Intercept to its general information page on the coronavirus, ICE declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Border Patrol and GEO Group, the private prison company, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lisa Knox, a managing attorney with legal services organization Centro Legal de la Raza, told The Intercept that ICE and its private prison contractors “are deliberately trying to obscure the true scale of what’s happening in detention.”
“ICE and these private detention operators know that there really is no safe way to detain people during a pandemic. Obscuring the numbers kind of helps them obscure that fact,” Knox said. “The way to reduce Covid infections is to not detain as many people, or to not detain people, period.”
For instance, between April 23 and July 15, as 305 people detained in California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center filed written complaints of fever, coughing, chills, and other coronavirus symptoms, ICE tested only one of them for Covid-19, according to information disclosed as part of a court case.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/coronavirus-testing-immigrant-detainees-border-patrol/