As part of a campaign to demand the urgent release of everyone detained at Immigration Centers of America (ICA)-Farmville, our Immigrant Justice team has worked for months with a coalition of community organizations and the family members of people inside of the facility demand Virginia elected officials take actions to get people released.

The ICA-Farmville Detention Center is a privately run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country. Advancement Project National Office is working with our partners, La ColectiVA, Sanctuary DMV, Detention Watch Network (DWN), and the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) to free all people in ICA-Farmville, and to shut it down for good. This week, we released a new white paper and graphics highlighting the deplorable conditions and dark pattern of abuse in ICA-Farmville that has gone on for far too long, dating back to 2015. 

There are currently 259 active cases of COVID-19 confirmed in isolation or under monitoring at the facility (with 339 total cases reported over time), and at least six people inside have been hospitalized with severe symptoms. View an excerpt from our pending litigation here. The case is Advancement Project v. Department of Homeland Security, et al.

While the fight against abuses in the immigration context continues, our Justice Project team continues to fight for the release of community members in jail in East Baton Rouge. Carceral bureaucrats like the sheriff and warden in East Baton Rouge say the jail conditions are fine and there are no COVID-19 cases or concerns.  Our clients and community partners tell us something very different so we filed litigation arguing that the number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 throughout the parish have tripled and that a second wave of Covid-19 is rushing through the jail right now. Jail officials refuse to test everyone so there is no way to know.

We filed the lawsuit, Belton v. Gautreaux, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, The Fair Fight Initiative, Hogan Lovells LLP, and local civil rights attorneys in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, arguing that East Baton Rouge Parish officials are violating the constitutional rights of people in the jail by exposing them to risk of infection, illness and death during the coronavirus pandemic.

Read more about the case here.

Our Justice Project Senior Staff Attorney Miriam R. Nemeth at Advancement Project National Office stated: "The Sheriff would have people believe that everything is just fine inside the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are hearing from our community members in the jail are horrifying, gruesome, and abusive accounts of how people are being treated. This has been the case for months during the coronavirus pandemic and even prior to that. We—along with our partners at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition and VOTE—continue to demand the release of as many people as possible to save the lives of both those in jails and those in the surrounding. In fact, it's time to close this jail once and for all and move to an entirely new public safety model."

Social distancing—the only effective remedial measure against transmission—is impossible in the jail, which is otherwise decrepit, unhygienic, and unsafe. 

It is past time to #FreeThemAll. Join the movement to reimagine safety.

Advancement Project
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