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More than half of detainees at a Florida immigration center have tested positive for coronavirus

Those numbers are “likely to be much greater,” experts say.
 
A protester walks away from a gate at the Northwest Detention Center during a mostly car-based protest, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, in Tacoma, Wash. The facility is privately operated on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and organizers said they were showing support for detainees inside who were taking part in a hunger strike to protest conditions they say are inadequate to protect detainees from the spread of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
A protester walks away from a gate at the Northwest Detention Center during a mostly car-based protest, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, in Tacoma, Wash. The facility is privately operated on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and organizers said they were showing support for detainees inside who were taking part in a hunger strike to protest conditions they say are inadequate to protect detainees from the spread of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) [ TED S. WARREN | AP ]
Published April 21, 2020

More than half of the detainees inside an immigration detention center in Miami-Dade County have been exposed to COVID-19, U.S. government officials said in a federal court filing Tuesday.

In a sworn statement filed in Miami federal court, Liana J. Castano, the acting director in charge of the Krome facility, said eight staff members have tested positive for the virus and that 350 detainees, whom the government has identified as being exposed to the illness are being quarantined together, a practice that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls “cohorting.”

Court records show that as of Monday there were 587 detainees at Krome. Castano’s statement is part of an ongoing federal case filed by immigration advocates seeking the release of about 90 percent of detainees at three South Florida detention centers — Krome, the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach and the Glades County detention center in Moore Haven.

Castano’s count of exposed detainees is an increase of 112 in about two weeks. On April 8, she had reported that there were 238 people being cohorted.

But those numbers are “likely to be much greater,” experts say, due to lack of testing and the constant transferring of detainees across Florida and the country.

“If people are coming and going, and leaving and then coming in, then the number of people that have actually been exposed is way more than 350,” Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, told the Miami Herald.

“It’s terrible policy. The idea that you have all these transfers from center to center or to airports, each one of them requires officers and a number of people that you have to interact with,” Jha added. “It’s very risky under the context of coronavirus. So by cohorting people, all you are doing in spreading it among everyone, including people that may not have it. And because we are not testing, there is no way of knowing.”

ICE reports that as of Tuesday, 220 detainees across the country have tested positive for the virus. However, ICE officials told Congress last week that only 400 of their approximate 32,000 detainees have been tested.

As of Tuesday, about 50 Guatemalan nationals at Krome have been transferred to and from the airport and detention centers at least 11 times in the last 7 days. During each transfer, none were given personal protective equipment, they said.

Last week, Guatemalan Health Minister Hugo Monroy said 75 percent of the passengers on a recent deportation flight from the U.S. had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Guatemalan government said deportation flights from the U.S. were suspended until further notice, making it the third coronavirus-caused suspension of deportation flights since March 17, when Guatemala closed its borders.

“But ICE keeps trying to deport us. When we get to the airport, the plane doesn’t take off and we are taken back to the detention center,” one detainee told the Herald.

According to his timeline, the Guatemalan detainees were taken to the Krome detention center in Miami from the Glades detention center in Central Florida on April 13. The next day the group was transported to Miami International Airport, only to find out the flight had been canceled. From the airport they went back to Krome.

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The next day, they went back to the airport and the flight was canceled again. After that they went back to Krome, then to Glades, where they were told to pack up. That’s when they were transferred back to Krome to “wait.”

So, ICE tried again, they said — twice. The agency put them on a bus to MIA on Sunday and Monday. When the flights didn’t take off, they were taken back to Krome.

“They lug us around like pieces of luggage,” the detainee said in Spanish. “We are now in quarantine at Krome because they said we have been exposed to the virus, but they also said they would try to take us back to the airport on Tuesday.”

Another detainee, a cancer survivor, told the Herald “my issue isn’t about being deported. Deport me. Just stop playing with our lives.”

In a court fling Monday, Dexter Lee, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Department of Justice representing ICE in the ongoing lawsuit, told Miami federal Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman that ICE was not willing to halt transfers of detainees during the pandemic. In the filing, Lee did not explain why.

Miami’s Dr. Pedro “Joe” Greer, associate dean of Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, told the Herald Tuesday “that continued and widespread infection will not only just occur in the detention facilities but also in the community.”

Greer, along with other national health scholars, filed sworn statements in federal court earlier this month that said U.S. immigration officials are violating federal guidelines by grouping inmates together by the hundreds if they have COVID-19 symptoms or have been exposed.

“We consider ICE’s estimate of 350 absolutely a conservative number,” Greer said. “ Every time you transfer someone you’re exposing every place they go.”

Under CDC guidelines — which detention centers are required to follow — people exposed to COVID-19 should be put in individual, not group, quarantine: “Facilities should make every possible effort to quarantine close contacts of COVID-19 cases individually.”

Cohort quarantine, the CDC says, “should only be practiced if there are no other available options.” The CDC says “cohorting multiple quarantined close contacts of a COVID-19 case could transmit COVID-19 from those who are infected to those who are uninfected.”

“None of this makes no sense,” Greer added. “The agency is surely is not following the stay-at-home order, safe social-distancing guidelines, and they are not testing people. What they are doing is spreading the virus everywhere.”

So far only two detainees in Florida have tested positive for coronavirus and they are being housed at Krome.

After one of those detainees was granted release, the Miami Herald published a story about how the 27-year-old Mexican national would be stranded with nowhere to go because his family is scared of being infected. The article cited experts who weighed in on whether ICE bears the responsibility of arranging a safe place to self-isolate in post release since he caught the virus in ICE custody.

On Monday, three days after the story ran, ICE told the detainee and his legal team that his release was granted in “error” and rescinded it, federal records show.

Immigration officials are now saying they need proof that he has a place to go before “considering” granting his release again.