Last week, we won an important victory for transparency in our fight to unseal data that would help us understand how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has handled detainees’ parole requests during the pandemic. 

We’re trying to unseal status reports that summarize parole determinations made by the New Orleans ICE office, which handles requests from asylum seekers detained in Louisiana and four other states. The reports have been filed with the court as part of a Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit, Heredia Mons v. Wolf, that challenges ICE’s practice of detaining asylum seekers who qualify for release on parole while they await a decision on their claims. 

On Sept. 24, government attorneys filed a response to our motion seeking to unseal these reports. They hint that the government wouldn’t contest their release, as long as the personal identifying information of the asylum seekers listed in the records is redacted.

For nearly a year, these records have remained under seal, making it nearly impossible to fully grasp how often ICE is denying parole requests. These decisions are so critical, especially in the middle of a pandemic, when public health experts have warned the government repeatedly that the virus spreads easily in congregate settings such as ICE detention centers. To date, eight detainees have died from COVID-19, and more than 6,000 have tested positive for the virus since March.

But we may face other challenges in fully gaining access to these documents. The government attorneys said they wouldn’t have a problem with releasing future status reports. Going back to redact the previous 11 reports already filed in the case, however, “would be burdensome and of limited benefit to the public.”

We disagree. In our response to the government this week, we pushed back on the idea that releasing the records would be a burden. That argument is “insufficient to thwart the right of access,” our attorney, D. Victoria Baranetsky, wrote.

“The right of access to judicial records is grounded in the importance of judicial transparency and accountability to the public,” she wrote, “not the convenience of the government.”

I touched on the Heredia Mons case in my story about asylum seekers held in a Louisiana ICE detention center in the early days of the pandemic. A decade ago, ICE granted nearly all the parole requests that came before the agency. But under the Trump administration, denials have surged. At the New Orleans ICE office alone, only two out of 130 requests were approved in 2018. The low numbers prompted Southern Poverty Law Center attorneys to sue ICE in May 2019. 

A few months later, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg sided with the Southern Poverty Law Center and ordered ICE to comply with its own parole directive, which states that the agency can grant parole in cases in which the asylum seeker isn’t a flight risk or a danger to the community. Boasberg also ordered ICE to file the monthly reports, beginning in December 2019, that we are now trying to obtain. We also filed a similar motion to unseal status reports in a separate case, Damus v. Wolf, that challenges ICE’s parole denials in seven states. 
 

NEW DETAILS EMERGE FOLLOWING NURSE’S WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT

The New York Times published a story this week that adds a new dimension to the whistleblower complaint about hysterectomies in ICE detention, telling the story of 16 immigrant women’s concerns over their medical care.  

Earlier this month, a nurse alleged that Dr. Mahendra Amin performed questionable hysterectomies on detained immigrant women, often without an interpreter present or a clear explanation about why the procedure was needed, at the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia.

Now The Times has learned more about the surgical procedures Amin performed. Reporters interviewed 16 women and analyzed the medical files of seven of those women. They found that “Dr. Amin consistently overstated the size or risks associated with cysts or masses attached to his patients’ reproductive organs. Small or benign cysts do not typically call for surgical intervention, where large or otherwise troubling ones sometimes do, the experts said.”

From The Times’ story:

Wendy Dowe was startled awake early one morning in January 2019, when guards called her out of her cellblock in the Irwin County immigration detention center in rural Georgia, where she had been held for four months. She would be having surgery that day, they said.

Still groggy, the 48-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, who had been living without legal status in the United States for two decades before she was picked up by immigration authorities, felt a swell of dread come over her. An outside gynecologist who saw patients in immigration custody told her that the menstrual cramping she had was caused by large cysts and masses that needed to be removed, but she was skeptical. The doctor insisted, she said, and as a detainee – brought to the hospital in handcuffs and shackles – she felt pressured to consent.

It was only after she was deported to Jamaica and had her medical files reviewed by several other doctors that she knew she had been right to raise questions. A radiologist’s report, based on images of her internal organs from her time at Irwin, described her uterus as being a healthy size, not swollen with enlarged masses and cysts, as the doctor had written in his notes. The cysts she had were small, and the kind that occur naturally and do not usually require surgical intervention.

“I didn’t have to do any of it,” Ms. Dowe said.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. The death toll within ICE detention is the highest it’s been in 15 years. (CNN)

In the 2020 fiscal year, which ended this week, 21 immigrants died while in ICE custody – the highest death toll since 2005. Eight of the deaths are attributed to COVID-19. Advocates say that a combination of factors, including poor conditions and lack of proper medical care, have contributed to the rise in deaths.   

The kicker: "We're seeing the pandemic is playing a role – but also the conditions of detention, and what it does both to your mental health and the really poor medical care that exists inside," said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. "As we're looking at this death toll going up, what it tells us is ... it's a system that shouldn't exist. People should be with their loved ones, with their families, being able to social distance and quarantine at home going through their immigration proceedings," Shah said. "They shouldn't be locked up."

2. Families separated under Trump immigration policies face more uncertainty as they await the results of the presidential election. (Reuters) 

During the Trump administration, families have been split up by deportations, travel bans or separations under the “zero tolerance” crackdown at the U.S. border. Now these families are clinging on to hope that they might be reunited under a Biden administration. 

The kicker: A Venezuelan father waiting in Mexico to plead his U.S. asylum case who has yet to meet his newborn daughter. An Iraqi refugee stuck in Jordan despite his past helping U.S. soldiers. A mother sent back to Honduras after being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border from her two young children. A Malian package courier deported after three decades in the United States. And an Iranian couple kept apart for years under a U.S. travel ban. They have all experienced first-hand the effects of Republican President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy goal in his nearly four years in office – the overhaul of the U.S. immigration system. A multitude of new bureaucratic hurdles to entering or staying in the United States have upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. 

3. Internal records reveal a pattern of medical neglect on ICE deportation flights. (Capital & Main) 

Immigrants aboard deportation flights have had heart attacks and miscarriages and flown without their medications, according to ICE internal records obtained by the journalism nonprofit Capital & Main. Several ICE staff, the records state, also failed to fly detainees with a sufficient amount of their prescribed medication. “It is on the burden of ICE, if they are going to detain someone, to provide proper care,” said attorney Sawyeh Esmaili. “And time after time, we continue to see the inadequacies and its inability to do so.” 

The kicker: Lapses in care may be responsible for health crises that have occurred during flights. An HIV-positive woman with a high-risk pregnancy miscarried triplets on a 2012 deportation flight to El Salvador, according to a complaint made to a departmental watchdog unit, which blamed the emergency on ICE’s negligence. That same year, another complaint alleged that a Honduran woman who hadn’t been sleeping or eating in ICE custody due to depression and emotional trauma was deported anyway; she died on the flight, the complaint says. On a 2019 deportation flight, a man with a severe heart condition fell ill, according to interviews with his lawyer, who said the agency recklessly sped up his removal and deemed him safe for flight despite his record of medical emergencies while in custody. And another man recovering from knee replacement surgery said he experienced excruciating pain and psychological trauma, but received ineffective treatment, during an attempted deportation in 2019.

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

– Laura C. Morel

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.