On this week’s episode, we look at how COVID-19 is affecting immigrants – some stuck in detention facilities, fearing a major outbreak, others working in perilous conditions to feed the country.

An outspoken critic of Cuba’s communist leaders, Pedro Iglesias Tamayo left the country last year to escape government harassment. Now he’s detained at Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, one of the country’s most severe coronavirus hotspots. Each time the facility’s guards clock in for work, he wonders if they are unwittingly bringing coronavirus in with them.

Through video chats, Iglesias told reporter Laura C. Morel that Pine Prairie feels like a disaster waiting to happen: There are no gloves or hand sanitizer for detainees – just one small bar of soap allocated per week. Iglesias says officers haven’t provided any guidance about the virus, and he recently witnessed one of them coughing so severely that he could barely breathe.

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

In the past, many detainees like those at Pine Prairie would have been granted parole. But since President Donald Trump took office, the number of detained immigrants has soared. Previously, border agents frequently allowed asylum seekers to go free while they awaited their appearance in court, a wait that often takes months or years. Trump derided this policy as “catch and release” and sought to end it. 

As a result, the number of immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities has boomed during his tenure, from 37,931 in 2017 to 50,922 in 2019, according to agency statistics. 

Meanwhile, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in these facilities has begun a steady climb.

Also in the episode: Reporter Aura Bogado tells the story of a 16-year-old boy who came to the U.S. from Guatemala. He’s been in the U.S. for a year, moving from shelter to shelter. At the moment, he’s stuck in a shelter in Fairfield, California, despite having a family who is willing to take him in.

Hear the episode.
 

Farmworkers are now deemed essential. But are they protected?

On a recent morning in Salinas, California, in the state’s rural heartland, David Rivera and Alfonso Hernández worked shoulder to shoulder, installing irrigation pipes across freshly plowed fields that stretched to the horizon. Wearing jeans and sweatshirts with their hoods up to block the sun and dust, they prepared the fields for a spring planting of spinach, lettuce and broccoli. 

Nearby, a large billboard featured a man wearing leather gloves and a white cowboy hat, an irrigation pipe hoisted over his shoulder. It read: “Salinas Valley. Feeding Our Nation.”

It was mid-March, the same week that Trump declared a national emergency because of the coronavirus. By then, over 250 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide shelter-in-place order was imminent. Just an hour or so drive north in Silicon Valley, businesses and schools were shuttering, and hundreds of thousands of people began working from home.

But for people such as Hernández and Rivera, working from home was not an option. An estimated 2.5 million farmworkers across the United States are now deemed essential workers – exempt from shelter-in-place restrictions to keep the country’s food supply flowing. California farms are vital to that system, producing a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. 

Yet at a time when social distancing and careful sanitizing are necessary safeguards against exposure to the coronavirus, little has been done to protect farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented and work in remote, rural parts of the country with little access to health and social services.

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