COVID-19 is rampant in ICE detention facilities. Where’s the vaccine?
Friends,
The inhumane treatment of ICE detainees has grown worse during the pandemic. Here’s an op-ed that I helped to pen in the LA Times today:
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent vaccine rollout have exposed deep issues of equity, access and justice in California. Perhaps no population has been more marginalized in the rollout than those who are held against their will in immigration detention facilities. Nearly a year into the pandemic, there is still no known plan in place and no agency or group clearly responsible for making sure that immigrants in detention in the state will get vaccinated.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains immigrants in six facilities in California. Five of them are owned and operated by private, for-profit corporations where reports of maltreatment have been commonplace, including court-cited “deliberate indifference” toward the spread of the coronavirus. General conditions have been so bad at the sixth detention center, the Yuba County jail, that it has been under a court-ordered consent decree since 1979. Read more…