Last month, I got a call from Pedro Iglesias Tamayo, a Cuban asylum seeker at an ICE detention center in Louisiana. I had spoken to his mother, who lives in Havana, a few days earlier and she passed along my number to him. I asked Iglesias how he was doing. His response: “We’re nervous. We’re scared.”

Iglesias, 31, told me that he learned about the coronavirus on the TV news. That’s also how he found out that a significant outbreak had erupted in New Orleans, a three-hour drive from the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, where he is being held.

“There’s this global pandemic that’s taking people’s lives,” he told me, “and they have us here trapped like animals.”

For the next few weeks, I spoke to Iglesias and other men at Pine Prairie through a video visitation app called, sardonically, GettingOut. While experts tell us to practice social distancing, it’s an impossible task inside detention. Iglesias, for instance, sleeps in a room lined with bunk beds with 13 other men, where they share two toilets, two sinks and two shower stalls. Some of these rooms – known as pods – at Pine Prairie can hold up to 70 people. The state of Louisiana has banned gatherings larger than 10.

I learned that detainees go without hand sanitizer and gloves. Some have fashioned masks out of socks. All they can do is wash their hands and wait for the agency in charge of their lives – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – to do something. For its part, ICE says it canceled social visits at detention centers and scaled back arrests. The agency also said it released 160 detainees it determined to be “vulnerable” and is separating immigrants at high risk of becoming seriously ill from the general population.

THE CONTEXT

With nearly 36,000 people still in ICE custody, human rights organizations, immigrant rights advocates and a former acting ICE director worry that a massive outbreak in these facilities will further overwhelm an already-strained health care system and put lives at risk. Three weeks ago, ICE reported its first case of COVID-19 among its employees, and a week later its first cases among detainees. Then, last week, it reported its first case of a detainee at Pine Prairie.

Meanwhile, lawyers are pleading for their clients to be paroled, a mechanism through which asylum seekers can be released while they await a decision on their case.

But lawyers told me they’re having little luck with those requests. “The message that we have gotten back is ICE is not budging on this,” said Jessica Shulruff Schneider, detention program director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, based in Miami. 

In Louisiana, many immigrants are in detention because ICE began denying parole requests at a high rate after Trump took office. The Southern Poverty Law Center and ACLU in Louisiana sued the Department of Homeland Security in May after it discovered that the New Orleans ICE office, which handles parole requests for Louisiana and four other states, had granted parole in just two of the 130 requests it received in 2018. The low numbers continued into 2019: In December, the office declined 98% of parole requests. This wasn’t always the case. A decade ago, ICE granted about 90% of requests.

In September, a federal judge ordered ICE to comply with the agency’s own directive, which allows officers to grant parole for asylum seekers who don’t pose a flight risk or have a serious medical condition. And last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed an emergency motion in the case that calls for the immediate release of asylum seekers in ICE custody to reduce the risk of coronavirus exposure. 

In the meantime, Iglesias and other detainees wait and watch the news. I spoke to another asylum seeker, Manuel Rodriguez Ruiz, who told me that he barely sleeps and has stopped buying commissary items, such as instant soups and mayonnaise, because he’s worried the products may have been exposed to COVID-19.

“This isn’t about liberty anymore. This is about our health and our lives,” he said. “If people on the outside are getting sick, can you imagine what it will be like in here?”

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

Among those calling on ICE to release more immigrants is former Acting ICE Director John Sandweg. He said it could be done quickly: Because risk assessments are conducted when immigrants first enter ICE custody, the agency already knows which detainees would pose a low flight risk if released. 

“It makes little to no sense to me,” he told reporters recently, “why the administration does not just take the next step.”

Dr. Ranit Mishori, a senior medical adviser for the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights who has studied migrant health for the past two decades, puts it this way: “Imagine when you don’t have those options to protect yourself, when you live with other people in close proximity, in dorm-like facilities, sharing bathrooms with poor access to soap and hand sanitizer.” 

The only way to avoid a massive outbreak, Mishori said, is to release detainees. 

“Acting now will save lives,” she added. “Acting late will lead to death.”

Read the full story here.

You can hear the voices of these detainees in my story in this week’s Reveal episode.

The episode also features a story about how the federal government is handling detained migrant children. My colleague Aura Bogado speaks with a teenage boy who’s desperate to get out of detention from a shelter run by BCFS Health and Human Services in Fairfield, California.

The 16-year-old has a family in Minnesota that’s eager to sponsor him, but the government won’t consider the application. Now, he’s suing to compel the government to acknowledge that application for release.

It’s part of a larger battle that’s playing out over what to do with migrant children in shelters during the pandemic. Two weeks ago, Aura reported that children in custody in New York were no longer being reunited with their families as planned. She heard about a 17-year-old who, as a result, would lose his freedom because he’d turn 18 in custody and be transferred to ICE detention. After she began asking questions about the child’s case, the government changed course. He was finally reunited with his cousin the day before he became an adult. 

Listen to the full episode here.

DEVELOPMENTS WE’RE WATCHING

More COVID-19 effects on migrant children. Seven staff members at a shelter for migrant children tested positive for the virus, according to Houston Public Media. The employees work at a shelter run by BCFS Health and Human Services and are now under quarantine. The shelter houses children ages 5 to 17 who arrived at the U.S. border alone. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is rapidly deporting newly arrived migrant children “under new rules billed as seeking to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States,” Reuters reports. Between March 27 and April 2, about 120 children were sent back to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

How the virus is affecting Department of Homeland Security employees. According to an internal report obtained by the Los Angeles Times, nearly 300 workers have tested positive for COVID-19 and 8,500 others were under “self-quarantine and self-monitoring.” Several former and current immigration officials are speaking out against the federal agency, saying it isn’t doing enough to protect employees. Brandon Judd, president of a union of Border Patrol employees, said the administration is “exposing them to dangers that are unnecessary.”

Undocumented farmworkers are considered “essential.” More than 1 million farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. In recent weeks, they’ve received letters advising them that their work is considered essential during the COVID-19 shutdown, reports The New York Times. But immigrant advocates worry that it’s sending mixed signals to workers who may believe the letters could protect them from immigration enforcement. “Some people are really confused by the message. The government is telling them it needs them to go to work, but it hasn’t halted deportations,” one agricultural workers union representative told The Times.

In last week’s Reveal episode, “Essential workers,” Monica Campbell of our partner The World spoke to farmworkers in California about another issue they’re facing: working in the fields with little protection from COVID-19. One worker told her that the only guidance he received from his supervisor was to wash his hands. Many workers, she learned, also aren’t eligible for paid sick time. Listen to the show here and read the digital version here.

NEWS BREAK: FROM THE ARCHIVES

Here’s a story that always makes me smile. 

It’s a profile, and the subject isn’t human, but rather the oldest living hippopotamus in the Americas. Lucifer, known as Lu by staff at the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park in Florida, had just turned 59. (He’s 60 now!)

From the 2019 Tampa Bay Times story:

He commands the limelight. He adapted to it as a child actor and roadside attraction star. He clung to it when the state took over the park and resolved to get rid of all nonnative animals, and he snatched it back in a matter of months when the park tried to discontinue the daily educational program he featured in.

They call him "Lu" these days. Some felt his full name was too connoted with the devil. No one can say why he was named Lucifer in the first place.

Today there are cameras, which Lu mugs for. He huffs steam from his nostrils. He cranks his jaw open, and the inside of his mouth looks like the bottom of a river. He "laughs," a sound that in the wild signals aggression but in Lu signals goodwill.

He rests his head – the size of a mini-fridge – on the rock wall around his enclosure. Later, he will gingerly edge back into the water, like an aging wrestler lowering himself into an ice bath.

Lu turned 59 in January, and he has started feeling his age. He sometimes takes palmfuls of ibuprofen for his arthritis. When his skin dried out, park rangers devised a lotion made of aloe and honey and a method for applying it to an animal too dangerous to touch: a long-handled paint roller. He's approaching rarefied hippo air: of Donna, who lived to 61 before her 2012 death in Indiana; of Bertha, who reportedly touched 65 before dying at the Manila Zoo in 2017.

Read the profile here.
 

Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected]. 

– Laura C. Morel

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.