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The Graying of Mass Incarceration
Graying Mass The of Incarceration
Prisons, ill-suited for providing health care, are facing an explosion of elderly inmates.
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BY VICTORIA LAW
MARY FISH turned sixty-eight in September. She did not celebrate with her sons or grandchildren. No one sang her happy birthday; nobody baked her a cake. Instead, she spent that day as she has her previous seventeen birthdays—behind bars.
In 2002, Fish received two prison sentences totaling forty-eight years for assault and burglary. After entering prison, she stopped using drugs and alcohol. She’s participated in self-help groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and various prison programs.
At age fifty-three, Fish began working in the prison’s laundry room for $11 a month. For twelve hours a day, she pushed carts crammed with clothes and sheets, loading them in and out of the institutional washing machines and dryers. “I now have two herniated discs in my back,” she tells me in a letter from prison. She also enrolled in college courses, earning two associates degrees, which helped her shave some time off her sentence for good behavior.
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist covering issues of incarceration and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.
Fish, who is serving her sentence at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, says she has eight years of prison left to go. She’s worried about catching COVID-19. Besides her back problems, she has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Still, Fish considers herself lucky compared to other women aging around her. She does not have a terminal illness or a degenerative disease. She does not need a cane, walker, or wheelchair. But she knows her time is running out. “I sure don’t want to die in prison,” Fish wrote me. It’s one of her biggest fears.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that nearly 21 percent of the nation’s prison population, or almost 300,000 people, were fifty or older. Outside prison, fifty is no longer considered elderly. But incarceration, with years of bad food, little opportunity to exercise, and inadequate medical care, accelerates the physiological aging process and often shortens life expectancy.
Between 1995 and 2010, the number of prisoners aged fifty-five or older nearly quadrupled while the
number of all prisoners grew by 42 percent. At this rate, one-third of the prison population will be over age fifty by 2030. This would mean that, in the next ten years alone, 490,000 prisoners will be age fifty or older, not including people in jails. Prisons will face an explosion of geriatric needs—and the skyrocketing costs that come with it.
In 2017, Oklahoma incarcerated 5,214 people over age fifty, a steep increase from eighty-five in 1980. In 2000, California locked up 4,900 people over age fifty-five; by 2010, that number had more than doubled to 13,600.
At the end of 2018, 30,336 California prisoners were over age fifty, about a quarter of the state’s prison population. California spends about $138,000 annually on each incarcerated person over the age of fifty-five. In 2016, 10,140 of New York’s 52,344 prisoners were fifty and older.
A 2013 study found that 69 percent of U.S. prisoners ages sixty-five and over had been sentenced to life in prison. Add in the 44,311 people serving sentences of fifty years or more, or virtual life sentences, and that makes 206,268 people—or one in seven prisoners— who face dying behind bars.
Stephanie Prost, an assistant professor at the University of Louisville who has extensively researched aging in prisons, understands how decades of toughon-crime sentencing has led to prison wings that resemble long-term-care settings.
“Hallways are filled with rollators and oxygen tanks,” she says. “You’ve got nursing assistants who are also incarcerated flipping people so they don’t develop bed sores.”
And the need for these types of units will continue to rise, in some states above the one-in-seven national average. For one study, Prost interviewed 499 people incarcerated in Kentucky. One in four had been sentenced to life without parole or sentences that exceeded a natural life span.
Mary Fish after participating in The Messages Project, which allows incarcerated people to record themselves reading books to their children or, in Fish’s case, grandchildren.
America’s graying prison population is not the result of a crime spree by senior citizens but rather decades of national and state laws requiring decades-long, if not life, sentences with few chances of reprieve, even for those who had completely turned their lives around.
The “lock ’em up and throw away the key” policies of earlier years did not anticipate the challenges of caring for thousands of people who become less agile or able to navigate crowded corridors, lengthy lunch lines, and prison bunk beds—let alone the more serious medical needs that frequently accompany aging. This became even more apparent when COVID-19 hit the United States—with prisons quickly becoming flashpoints for the virus’s spread. (As of November 13, state and federal prisons reported 182,776 confirmed COVID cases and 1,412 deaths.) People in prison are at heightened risk of contracting—and dying from—this raging pandemic. Even before the arrival of COVID-19, medical care in U.S. prisons and jails has been typically inadequate, often bordering on life-threatening. It has led to dozens of lawsuits, both individual and class action. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s prison overcrowding impeded incarcerated people’s right to medical care and thus violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Still, prison health care across the nation remains deficient.
“Prisons aren’t built to be hospitals,” Prost says. Prisoners, she notes, typically acquire serious and chronic health conditions at a younger age than people who are not incarcerated.
That was what happened to Robert Lind, who entered New York’s prison system at age thirty-eight with no health concerns. He was given a fifty-yearto-life sentence, also known as a virtual life sentence. He remained healthy during his first three decades behind bars.
But when Lind turned seventy, he began having stomach pain, his wife, Michelle, tells me in a phone interview. One night, while the couple was on a “trailer visit”—where family members can spend one or two days together in a trailer on prison grounds— he vomited after dinner. The following morning, he vomited again. This time, the vomiting wouldn’t stop.
Alarmed, Michelle wanted to call for medical help. But this would have ended their visit early and Lind persuaded her to wait. Later, he collapsed and was rushed to a hospital in Albany, where he underwent surgery for H. pylori, a stomach infection that can be caused by contaminated food or water.
While recovering in the Intensive Care Unit, Lind was shackled by his feet to the bed, a precaution that Michelle, who was allowed to visit for a brief half hour, found outrageous. “My husband couldn’t even talk, he had so many tubes down his nose and mouth,” she says.
Two years later, Lind was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He spent a year undergoing radiation treatment five days a week at the hospital. Again he was handcuffed and shackled during the procedure.
When the pandemic hit, Michelle worried about her husband’s safety. The radiation and chemotherapy had weakened his immune system. His age made him vulnerable to the ravaging effects of COVID-19. New York prisons halted all visits, but staff continued to come in and out. Lind called his wife four times a week—Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. Normally reluctant to run up the phone bill, he wanted to reassure her that he was still alive.
One Tuesday in May, Lind didn’t call. At first, Michelle didn’t worry. The prison is in a rural area and it wasn’t unusual for the phones to go out. When her phone remained silent on Thursday, she called the prison and learned that her husband had been hospitalized. She was not told more.
“I was in terror mode,” Michelle says. “I know where he is—but I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.” A full week later, she learned that he had both pneumonia and COVID-19. She called every day but often could not get through. Two weeks later, Lind was returned to the prison. He must serve at least fourteen more years, before he is eligible to be considered for parole.
At that point, Lind, if he’s alive, will be eighty-eight.
The graying of prison populations is happening not just in the United States but around the world.
Across Europe, an average of nearly 12 percent of prisoners are over fifty. In the United Kingdom, the number rose from 7 percent in 2002 to 16 percent in 2018. In Japan, the number of prisoners aged sixty or older soared from 7 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2016.
Michelle and Robert Lind in 2012. He has been incarcerated since 1984.
In Japan, which has the highest elderly population, per capita, in the world, almost one in five women in prison is a senior citizen. There the boom is driven not by decades of draconian sentencing but a rise in petty crimes, typically shoplifting, among elderly women, nearly half of whom live in poverty. Most are serving relatively short sentences—ranging from one to three years—but their chronic poverty drives up the recidivism rate. In response, Japanese prisons have hired specialized workers to help the elderly with bathing and using the toilet during the day; at night, these become the guards’ responsibilities. Legislators are also trying to stop elder crime. In 2016, Japan’s government passed a law designed to reduce recidivism among its senior citizens, adopting a plan to help them find jobs and housing. But recidivism among the elderly remains high. Most prison sentences in Europe are substantially shorter than those in the United States, with fewer people growing old behind bars. In Spain, for instance, less than 2 percent of prison sentences are for more than five years. In France, a 2012 tally found fewer than 500 prisoners (or 0.7 percent) were serving life sentences. And in both countries, people become eligible for parole upon reaching age seventy. Release is not automatic; inmates must successfully argue that they have earned the opportunity to spend their remaining years outside of prison.
In New York State, the Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) campaign has urged lawmakers to pass the Elder Parole Act, which would require prisoners fifty-five and older who have served at least fifteen years to get a pardon review.
If the act passes, Lind, who has been imprisoned for thirty-six years, would immediately become eligible for parole. Otherwise, he must wait another fourteen years.
In prison, Lind has earned his associate and bachelor’s degrees. He has helped countless other inmates with their parole applications and other paperwork. “He’s a completely different person” than when he was arrested in 1983, Michelle says.
RAPP director Jose Saldaña got to know Lind during his own thirty-eight-year incarceration. He notes that Lind was among a small group of incarcerated men who developed the prison’s Transitional Service Program, which provides reentry-related services.
“The most effective therapeutic programs,” Saldaña
U.S Prison Population Aged Fifty-Five or Older
2018 2013
131,500 185,110
2010 2005 2003 2000
66,500
58,300
44,200 124,900
1993 26,300 0 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000
SOURCE: BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
says, “were developed by and for incarcerated people. Most have languished in prisons across the state for up to three to four decades, and some even longer. They could safely return to their families and home communities.”
Saldaña, who was released in 2018, has encouraged the Linds to join the fight for elder parole. And that’s what Michelle has been doing. Before the pandemic, she and other RAPP members met with state legislators in Albany to share their stories and advocate for the bill. Now she works from home, participating in virtual press conferences and media interviews.
In Oklahoma, the law now allows people aged sixty and older who have served at least ten years or onethird of their sentence to apply for a parole hearing. But it excludes anyone convicted of violence, including Fish, whose eight-year sentence stems from a fight over a stolen baby monitor.
California law now requires parole hearings for incarcerated persons age fifty and over who have served at least twenty years. Commissioners are supposed to consider the person’s advanced age and diminished physical condition. Prisoners who have been sentenced to death or life without parole are not eligible.
Between 2014 and 2020, only 28 percent of the 4,232 Californians granted elder parole hearings were approved.
Linda Axell, an inmate at the California Institution for Women, had served thirty years in prison by 2018, when she was sixty-four, and had already been denied parole six times. The commissioners noted that she had no prior record and acknowledged that her advanced age made it unlikely that she would commit another crime. But they still denied her release and
pushed her next parole hearing off for another five years.
“I was truly shocked, traumatized,” Axell writes me from prison, noting that she had minimal disciplinary violations and has spent three decades “attending all kinds of self-help, getting vocations, tutoring in education.” Now she holds little hope for her next hearing: “I fear denial again because the Board says I am in denial.”
Another way elderly prisoners can find release is through clemency. This can take two forms: a commutation, which shortens a prison sentence, or a pardon, which overturns a conviction. In many states, including California and New York, a governor can grant clemency to anyone convicted of a state crime. In Oklahoma, the pardon and parole board must first recommend a person for commutation before the application goes to the governor. In every state, clemency is a long shot.
In California, through June, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom had issued forty-one pardons and sixty-five commutations, most during the pandemic.
Even before COVID-19 struck, advocates have been pushing governors to issue clemencies to aging people in prison. But the pandemic—and its rapid spread behind bars—adds urgency to their demands.
In New York, the RAPP campaign has organized rallies, vigils, and phone campaigns demanding that the governor step up his use of clemency. “If the risk is low, let them go” is their rallying cry, reflecting that most people age out of harmful behaviors, including criminal acts.
“For some men and women, who have already languished in prison for decades, a commutation of their sentence [or the passage of the elder parole bill] is the only hope they have of not dying in prison,” Saldaña says.
That is where the Linds have placed their hopes. In 2016, Lind applied for commutation. He received a letter from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office notifying him that he was a candidate for pro-bono legal assistance. That was the last he heard about his application. Cuomo has granted twenty-four commutations during his three terms in office, and just three after the pandemic hit U.S. prisons in March.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over and continues to create a greater sense of urgency,” Saldaña says. “For the most vulnerable, death is still around the corner.”
Michelle Lind lives every day with the fear that her husband will die in prison. “What does he have— five good years left?” she asked. “Let him spend that time with his children and grandchildren. Send him home.” ◆
AHunger for Justice
Immigrant detainees are being punished for refusing to eat.
BY RENÉE FELTZ
In March, a man detained at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center in Washington State began showing COVID-19-like symptoms. He was vomiting as guards removed him, and others in his unit took notice. One called the local grassroots immigrant rights group, La Resistencia, and said simply: “We don’t want to die.”
Washington State was, at that time, an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. After some discussion, about eighty detainees launched a short hunger strike to protest their lack of protection, including guards who neglected to wear masks. Joining with activists on the outside, they successfully called attention to the unsafe practices of GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the 1,575-bed facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But, despite their efforts, little changed. In early June, La Resistencia shared a video on social media of a maskless guard walking behind a detained man around the same time that two more people tested positive and an entire unit was put under quarantine. A woman in a different unit was asked if “the guards wear masks and gloves,” and responded: “The majority, no.”
Staff at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center so rarely masked-up that in October, when one guard decided to cover his face, detainees in his unit became suspicious. When they asked why, they learned he had tested positive for COVID-19.
“When we got the call about the guard being positive, people said they might want to do another hunger strike,” La Resistencia’s founder, Maru Mora-Villalpando, tells The Progressive. But fear of retaliation changed their minds.
“They know they could be sent to the hole,” says Mora-Villalpando, using a slang term for what ICE
Manuel Abrego stands in front of GEO Group’s Tacoma ICE Processing Center, where he says guards put him in “segregation” for participating in a hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions.
Renée Feltz is an award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! News Co-Director. This work is supported by a grant from the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.
Immigrants in ICE jails nationwide say they are punished with solitary confinement when they refuse to eat food that is rotten or still-frozen and sometimes has screws in it.
LA RESISTENCIA
euphemistically calls the administrative, punitive, or even medical “segregation” areas of its Special Management Units. Many detainees “are afraid they’re not going to be able to handle” further isolation after COVID-19 restrictions limited their recreation time, she notes. “My understanding is the entire detention center has become a hole to them.”
As cases of COVID-19 have festered throughout ICE’s sprawling network of 200-plus jails and detention centers, with sometimes deadly results, detainees have turned to hunger strikes to protest conditions that violate the agency’s own guidelines. The abuse of solitary confinement in response has prompted legal action from the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Participation in a hunger strike is a protected form of expression,” says Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project. “It is vitally important to support the First Amendment rights of everyone, including immigrants in detention.”
Manuel Abrego tries to be as reassuring as possible. “When I get a call from somebody in segregation, I always tell them they are not alone,” says Abrego, who leads La Resistencia’s phone support system for people detained by ICE.
Abrego was fifteen years old in 1999 when his family fled violence in El Salvador and were granted Temporary Protected Status in the United States. After struggling to adjust, he eventually got married and had two daughters before a dispute with an acquaintance led to a conviction for assault. At the end of his prison sentence, Abrego was transferred to the Tacoma ICE Processing Center (then called the Northwest Detention Center). He was shocked at the miserable conditions, which he felt were meant to encourage people to give up on their cases.
“They want to push to get you deported, and that’s it,” Abrego says in an interview at his family’s home in Seattle. Guards soon labeled him a troublemaker for being involved in hunger strikes over food quality.
“The reason it started was we weren’t getting fed right,” Abrego tells The Progressive. “Sometimes, in the morning for breakfast, your food comes frozen.
There is no way to eat it. Dinner comes the same way.” Other times, he says, detainees found worms in their “mystery meat.”
After he helped organize a hunger strike at the detention center in 2017, Abrego was put in administrative segregation, where he was kept in his cell for twenty-three hours a day. “A room in segregation is six-by-ten feet, with a bed and a toilet and sink, a blanket, and one set of clothes,” he recalls, adding that the rooms are bound by a solid door with only a small window and a slot to push a meal tray through.
“When you are in there, it is like being dead because you are not in contact with people on the outside,” Abrego says. He describes his time in solitary as “psychological torture,” and remembers how guards would often taunt detainees with threats of deportation to “try to make you snap.”
Abrego’s ordeal was echoed in a report released this September by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, which followed a year-long review of conditions at eight ICE detention centers. Investigators interviewed migrants and staff, several of whom recounted how segregation was “used as a tool” to punish people on hunger strikes.
A man detained at the River Correctional Center, run by LaSalle Corrections in Ferriday, Louisiana, said guards put him in isolation soon after he went on a hunger strike, because they perceived him as the leader of the protest.
At the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico, the report noted that migrants “indicated that they had been placed in segregation as punishment for engaging in a hunger strike.” Officials with Management & Training Corporation, which operates the facility, “acknowledged that such individuals had been held in segregation for up to twenty-eight days, but they claimed that the discipline was for other reasons.”
ICE guidelines require an initial finding by a disciplinary review panel before someone is put in segregation, but this step is often skipped. For example, in 2018, the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog agency found that guards put detainees in disciplinary segregation prior to such review at the massive Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California.
Once in segregation, the process of getting out can drag on indefinitely. Abrego’s requests for release were reviewed and denied every thirty days. Sometimes, he was told, “you’re an instigator.” Other times, he says, “ICE would say, ‘GEO says you cannot go out.’ Then GEO would say, ‘ICE says you cannot go out.’ ”
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said solitary confinement should be banned except for “very exceptional circumstances,” calling isolation longer than fifteen days “inhuman or degrading treatment.” Abrego says ICE held him in isolation for a devastating eight months. He was released in 2018 with help from the ACLU. But he still feels the effects.
“I have been out for two years and I still cannot get situated,” Abrego laments.
Abrego now checks in regularly with the ICE office in Seattle as his case proceeds. He supports his family by working as a maintenance man, and spends much of his free time volunteering with La Resistencia.
“I’m doing better than most people because I have a lot of support, but it’s hard,” Abrego says. “I don’t wish it on anybody.”
In 2014, 1,200 people detained at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center stayed in bed through breakfast and refused lunch and dinner. Their list of demands included better food, an end to abusive treatment by guards, and a higher quality of medical care.
“We opted not to eat so that our silence would be heard,” explained a participant named Cipriano, in a video released by La Resistencia. “With our silence, they began to hear us.”
Meals got better for a while, but many of those who refused them until the end of the fifty-six-day protest were put in disciplinary segregation. When spoiled and uncooked food was served again, Mora-Villalpando said, detainees tried to raise their concerns through ICE’s grievance process, only to be ignored.
In a July 2015 grievance form obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, a center detainee said he was served meat “already in a state of decomposition.” A food service manager dismissed the complaint as “Unfounded.”
A year later, another person held at the same facility declared, “I am officially refusing to eat until your kitchen staff start treating me as a human being and not some kind of caged animal deservant of partially cooked and uncooked meals.” This was officially determined to be “Not a grievance.”
On April 10, 2017, GEO reported to ICE that approximately 490 detainees in seven housing units refused their lunch, launching a hunger strike in protest of their treatment at the detention center. The “Event Status” was marked “Routine.”
The ACLU National Prison Project obtained this report through a Freedom of Information Act request that also yielded a batch of emails from officials discussing how to downplay the hunger strikes. As it often does, ICE acknowledged some detainees were refusing meals, but emphasized they could still purchase food from the commissary.
By April 13, ICE’s enforcement and removal field officer wrote that the number of participants had
SAIYARE REFAEI
fallen to twelve. The next day, an ICE spokesperson replied, “OK . . . but the wolves are at the door. Maybe I can come up with something fuzzy . . . using a round number.”
Advocates have tried to stop ICE from retaliating against hunger strikers with solitary confinement by documenting the abuse of the agency’s own standards. But oversight of violations is notoriously lax.
Almost all inspections of ICE detention centers and jails are preannounced and scheduled weeks in advance. When a U.S. Senate committee toured California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center, they noticed one of the housing units smelled of fresh paint, and CoreCivic officials “instituted a major clean up” at another facility in Louisiana. People held in solitary cells at New Mexico’s Otero County Processing Center “were returned to the general population just prior to the Committee’s arrival.”
ICE pays a private auditor called the Nakamoto Group to conduct annual inspections, which are considered “useless” and “very, very, very difficult to fail,” according to ICE officers interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog agency in 2018. Another investigation led by the office
La Resistencia wants ICE to release immigrants from detention where COVID-19 spreads easily, and those who demand safer conditions face what they call “the hole.”
of Senator Elizabeth Warren complained that neither the private prison companies like GEO Group nor Nakamoto have taken “responsibility for the numerous failures identified” with compliance with ICE’s safety and quality standards..
GEO Group responded to Warren by citing its score of 99.6 percent from the American Correctional Association accreditation as proof of its compliance with ICE standards. But critics note the ACA has also accredited a detention center in El Paso where detained people were reportedly forced to drink water from toilets, and the Essex County jail in New Jersey, where health inspectors found spoiled meat and moldy bread in the kitchen, “which has led to potentially contaminated food being served to detainees.”
In December 2019, ICE weakened its detention standards, making it easier for companies like GEO Group to pass inspections and maintain their lucrative contracts, for instance, by removing requirements that new detention centers have an outdoor recreation area.
Meanwhile, ICE halted annual inspections from April through August, citing, “CDC guidance and restrictions” related to the pandemic.
Despite the dangers posed by COVID-19, ICE has ignored calls from its own medical experts and a former acting director to exercise its authority to release immigrants and asylum seekers from civil detention. Instead, advocates like the group Freedom for Immigrants have received reports from people in ICE detention centers in California, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, and Arizona who were placed in solitary confinement after being suspected of having the coronavirus.
Oscar Perez Aguirre, a fifty-seven-year-old immigrant with hypertension, told the Southern Poverty Law Center he contracted COVID-19 in an ICE processing center in Colorado, run by GEO Group, and was sent to the hospital when he started vomiting. Upon returning to detention, he said he “was moved to the pod that is known . . . as the Hole, where people go for disciplinary reasons. . . . My cell was filthy and freezing and I had nothing to clean with.”
In July, after a nurse tested positive for COVID-19 at GEO Group’s Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in California, detainees organized hunger and labor strikes to demand cleaner conditions, healthier food, and a halt to transfers. A seventy-four-year-old man named Choung Woong Ahn joined in the hunger strikes and sought release due to his lung disease and diabetes. Instead, he was placed in medical isolation, where he took his own life two days later. “Our brother did not deserve to die, and he did not need to be locked up,” his family wrote in an editorial published by The Sacramento Bee.
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the ACLU sued in March to win the release of medically vulnerable detainees at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. But ICE refused because no one there had yet tested positive.
“Public health officials are in agreement—it is not a matter of if there is a COVID-19 outbreak in immigrant detention centers, but when,” responded the ACLU’s Eunice Cho. “ICE should heed their warning.”
Within a week, ICE reported the first infection in detention.
In August, the city council of Tacoma, Washington, passed a resolution calling on ICE to “address health and racial equity issues impacting individuals” at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. Among the city’s recommendations was that the facility’s operations be suspended “for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
But ICE and GEO say the population of the center is now low enough that people detained there can keep six feet apart. In legal filings, they describe how immigrants who have been transferred from other detention centers are now held in separate units for fourteen days to see if they develop symptoms. An ICE spokesperson said those who test positive “receive appropriate medical care to manage the disease.”
Tacoma has also committed to “continue to explore the city’s authority at the local level for regulatory oversight of the private detention center.” Colorado lawmakers approved similar legislation in July that states public and private facilities that house or detain “noncitizens for purposes of civil immigration proceedings” qualify as “penal institutions” subject to unannounced inspections.
Civil rights advocates like the ACLU’s Cho remain concerned that ICE regards detention centers as “Constitution-free zones.” Despite this, Cho vows to continue to defend the right of detainees “to participate in these hunger strikes without fear of retribution.”
At the end of October, the third employee in less than a month tested positive for COVID-19 at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. Several pods were placed in quarantine and some people were removed for medical monitoring, including one who was in contact with detainees who work in the kitchen. A man in the unit told La Resistencia he asked about a test and a guard responded: “No, you don’t need to get tested unless you are showing symptoms.” People at the facility have debated their next move.
“You can go on a hunger strike,” Abrego noted. “But when you do it, they may punish you.” ◆
