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J. Lee woke up in early June in a migrant detention center when one of his mobile friends slipped a hand for his pants.
Lee, 38, had spent the duration of a South Korean tourist visa and now locked on a mobile phone 22 hours a day with two foreigners, one of whom had been convicted of requesting the murder of a circle of 10 relatives in Belize. The third cell phone partner had told Lee that the Belizean boy raped Lee in his sleep.
This time, Lee felt it.
He attempted to report the incident, but 911 is disabled on phones available to inmates at the ICE Advance Resource Center where he was being detained, according to immigration and customs control. Desperate for help, he asked an attorney investigating coronavirus disorders at the facility to report his allegations to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which sent an officer to interview the three inmates.
Later, Lee said, he had panic attacks. He wrote to an ICE agent: “How can I get out of this nightmare?”
Details of the incident are described in a police report. Lee laid out those facts and the main points of the consequences in interviews with The Times, physical fitness records and federal court documents. The Times sometimes doesn’t fully call out victims of sexual abuse, unless when they have. volunteer to be publicly identified.
Lee’s witness was deported on June 22. A week later, the district attorney’s workplace did not process, which raised a lack of evidence.
A Times investigation found that since 2017, at least 265 911 police calls and non-emergency lines have reported violence and abuse at California’s 4 personal federal detention centers overseen through ICE. abuse of detainees. Others had to report assaults, assaults and other threats of violence against inmates and personnel.
In only 3 cases in which detainees reported being victims, records showed that a suspect had been charged, the Times reported, and in two of them, suspects were deported before they could be arrested. a prisoner – it’s edsle.
Prosecutors will most likely pursue cases where those affected worked at the facility. Of 41 appeals alleging attacks on staff members, fees were charged in 12 cases.
Unlike prisons and prisons, others detained through ICE do not serve sentences for crimes: they are detained while immigration judges judge whether they should be deported. Many are asylum seekers and most have no history of criminals. The federal government is guilty of your safety.
For years, lawyers and inmates have complained about uncontrolled violence in these institutions.
The Times reviewed a lot of pages of public documents, added federal investigative reports, 911 calls and court documents, and interviewed federal and local officials as representatives of detention centers and detainees.
What has emerged is an image of a formula in which violence against inmates with impunity can be perpetuated, either through other inmates or institutional staff. Detainees were barred from calling 911, according to ICE, and forced to rely on others to report the allegations on their behalf.
Some personal detention centres negotiated agreements with law enforcement that dictated the crimes to which the police were to be subjected; when police intervened, some were discouraged from investigating, prevented from talking to inmates who had reported abuses, and ordered not to prosecute the instances. considered justified, according to police reports.
ICE rejected an interview request on the Times results, but responded in writing to a few questions.
“ICE is committed to a culture that promotes protection and has 0 tolerance for abuse of any kind,” spokeswoman Paige Hughes said in a statement. “ICE is committed to the transparency, collaboration and resolution of all concerns, court cases and accusations of detainees through ICE.
Representatives of corporations operating ICE services in California said they are still communicating with police to investigate criminal charges and conduct their own administrative investigations.
In Lee’s case, his alleged assailant was transferred to another cell and the stress caused Lee to lose 35 pounds. I could not sleep. He wrote to a psychiatrist, pleading with him, “I don’t need to die here. “
For more than 4 decades, the country has built a network of services to space tens of thousands of people while deciding their immigration instances. The vast majority are owned or controlled by for-profit corporations.
In California, 4 services can accommodate more than 4,000 people: the Otay Mesa Detention Center, through CoreCivic; The Ice Rehabilitation Centers of Adelanto and Mesa Verde, operated through the GEO Group; imperial Regional Detention Center, controlled through Management and Training Corp.
These centers are expected to meet ICE’s safety and care criteria. His daily activities are the duty of companies, whose staff did not take the oath through law enforcement and does not have the authority to conduct investigations of criminals. To deal with immigration issues, they also do not have the authority to corruptly investigate allegations of abuse, firm officials told The Times.
ICE calls for detention centres to notify local authorities of any crimes. The resolution to prosecute violations of state law is “the only duty of the local law enforcement agency,” said ICE spokeswoman Britney Walker.
The corporations have been prosecuted multiple times on allegations of violence and are the subject of federal reports of inmate protection violations.
Altered by situations in personal prisons and state detention centers, California officials banned new contracts after January 1 of this year and ordered the closure of existing services until 2028. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3228, which requires imprisonment, corporations to adhere to ICE’s detention criteria and allows others to sue companies for violations.
However, some agreements between for-profit establishments and local governments have prevented the investigation of allegations of abuse of detainees, law enforcement said.
At the end of 2018, Abel López Serrano stopped at the Adelanto facility when a deportation officer told him to return to El Salvador and threatened him with “fArray. .
The officer took Lopez to a room away from the cameras, to an 83-page investigative report through the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security. Lopez, 43, said the officer then hit him against a concrete wall.
The next day, Lopez’s fiancée visited her and saw her right eye swollen and gagged, she said in an interview.
An aide to the San Bernardino County sheriff responded, but a facility staff member prevented him from entering, saying the incident is being investigated at the federal level, according to a report of the incident from police and federal records.
The sheriff’s branch told The Times that the existing practice is that the Department of Homeland Security investigates federal workers accused of irregularities.
ICE, however, told the Times that law enforcement “has jurisdiction and can open an investigation for criminals. “
The sheriff’s branch also told The Times that it had followed an agreement between the city of Adelanto and GEO Group that points to the types of calls that sheriff’s officers “should” answer, adding “violent crimes, such as homicides or attacks on staff” and sexual. Any crime listed, the sheriff’s section told The Times, would be investigated through the FBI or ICE.
According to the Advance agreement, GEO Group paid the city $174,866 according to the year for a sheriff’s deputy to answer calls from the facility.
First, sheriff’s officers cited the agreement as reasons why they did not investigate a 2017 indictment that detention personnel assaulted a detainee and a 2018 case in which an inmate organization assaulted another inmate.
Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Cindy Bachman later said the deal was being used as a “guide. “He said he didn’t know it had expired in 2016.
MPs “are investigating the case very well,” Bachman said.
The Mesa Verde facility, also managed by GEO Group, reached an agreement in which police limited their role in investigating “significant acts of crime,” such as homicides and sexual assaults.
Grace Meng, a lawyer who is investigating the detention of Human Rights Watch, said she discovered that the agreements were troubling.
“It seems that ICE, criminal officers and local law enforcement are all looking to pass the ball, and those suffering from the crime are in the middle,” he said.
GEO Group spokesman Pablo Paez issued an answer to more than a dozen Times questions: “We assume our duty to ensure the suitability and protection of all those who entrust us and our workers with the utmost seriousness, and we are committed to all relevant law enforcement agencies. Fix them if there are. He declined to comment on Lopez’s case.
ICE spokesman Hughes said the agreements “are concluded to obstruct or prohibit thorough investigations through officials. “
The investigation into Lopez’s case was left to the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security and, while in class, Lopez was deported. Investigators decided there had been a confrontation between Lopez and the officer, but said they did not discover “conclusive evidence” for the assault charge. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office said it would not continue with the case and allowed investigators to question the officer. while preventing his answers from being used against him in criminal prosecution.
According to the report, when federal investigators asked the officer if he had caused Lopez’s black eye, the officer said, “I put it on the wall, that’s all I did. “Investigators asked if this action had caused the black eye.
The officer’s answer: “Everything is possible. “
In Tay Mesa, an agreement lays down regulations on how allegations of sexual abuse are investigated.
While federal law requires the facility to report these cases to law enforcement authorities, a 2014 agreement between CoreCivic and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department designates the principal, who is not a sworn police officer, as the user who “He will find out if it is evidence of the prosecution. “
CoreCivic says that each and every complaint is reported and, according to spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist, the agreement is “irrelevant” because a 2003 federal law, the Prison Violation Elimination Act, would “cancel” any local agreement. She said CoreCivic would touch the sheriff’s branch. to remove the language.
Sheriff’s Department spokesman Lieutenant Ricardo Lopez told The Times that before this year, some lawmakers had not responded to calls alleging crimes to Otay Mesa, but were waiting for the facility to complete an internal investigation, which he shared with detectives. had replaced it after the Times began asking questions about the story.
“I think when we take a look at some of those things, and some of the things you’ve put forward, I think we’d better stop by and compare it on our own and get some of the things we want to investigate from them. Lopez said.
The Times also discovered cases in which police were discouraged through the detention center to prosecute criminals.
In April 2017, a Mesa Verde inmate in a bathroom when another inmate grabbed his buttocks and tried to “penetrate him with his penis,” according to a police report, the victim ran to his bed and remained there until the morning Bakersfield was called up to the police.
A police officer interviewed the victim and the suspect, but the center’s security leader told him that “no additional police action is necessary,” according to the report. The case is closed.
Similarly, in December 2016, an inmate told staff that he had been groned through another inmate. According to a police report, two officials interviewed the victim and suspect and watched a surveillance video showing the inmate’s seized genitalia while talking on the phone. .
One worker told police that “no additional enforcement action is required,” according to the report, which also says GEO workers had sanctioned the guy who reported the assault.
Bakersfield police sergeant Nathan McCauley said: “Third-party statements related to documentation or follow-up are not take into account when assigning detectives or at the end of the case. “
A month after the 2016 incident, Bakersfield police detective Jeffrey Paglia reviewed the case and noted in the police report that officials had been incorrectly informed through the GEO worker “that this matter required documentation and would be the subject of an internal investigation. “
Paglia re-evaluated the evidence, adding statements from the inmate who denounced the assault: “I [he] is just and unfairly disciplined,” he wrote.
In response to questions about the incidents, Páez, a spokesman for the GEO group, said the facilities are trained to report allegations of sexual assault to law enforcement. “GEO takes appropriate action if a member does not comply with these mandatory regulations and procedures. “He said.
Paglia did not respond to maintenance requests. According to the police report, he concluded that sexual violence fees were justified and referred the case to the prosecution. Three months later, according to the report, she said the victim had been deported.
The case has been closed.
A fraction of the police calls reviewed through the Times allegedly attacked facility personnel, however, constitute almost all instances prosecuted.
From the 265 appeals from January 1, 2017 to June 6, 2020, analyzed through the Times, 63 instances were filed with prosecutors and 14 accepted. In 12 of them, the victims were ICE staff or agents, adding the pending case involving a staff member and an inmate.
“At least I’d let those sick people spend the day in court,” Imperial Dist County deputy said. Atty, Kevin Cayton, who paid the fees on the pending case. Detainees, he said, “are not detained because they are necessarily criminals: they are detained for immigration reasons and deserve not to be subjected to violence while in detention. “
Michael Bires, spokesman for the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office, said prosecutors do not grant “preferential remedy to those who are legally in the United States over those who are not. “
“Just because someone calls the police doesn’t mean a crime has been committed,” he added.
Prosecutors say that, in some cases, deportation has made it difficult to collect sufficient evidence to prosecute a case.
Beyond that, “sometimes detainees are reluctant to cooperate with an investigation or prosecution,” said Steve Walker, spokesman for the San Diego County District Attorney. “In addition, some suspected affected may have a history of criminals and their credibility with a jury is something that will also need to be taken into account. “
The Times discovered two cases in which suspects were deported before they could be attacked for assaulting other detainees.
One such instance involved Geovany Murillo, now 27, who was arrested at the Adelanto facility in 2017 after fleeing gang violence in Honduras. Murillo asked to be known through his intermission and his intermediary.
He claimed that he constantly harassed his 53-year-old cellmate, who saw him shower, masturbated in front of him and patted him on the buttocks, and also grabbed the genitals of a third cellmate, according to a police report.
In February 2018, prosecutors brought two charges of sexual assault against the man, Rodolfo Audelo, but before the case was tried, Audelo and the two victims were deported.
ICE declined to comment on urgent cases. But generally speaking, Britney Walker, the agency’s spokeswoman, said officials “have significant discretion” in deciding whether to prosecute a suspect.
Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a UC Davis professor and expert on criminals and immigration laws, said the local government can simply legally arrest suspects and prevent the deportation of witnesses into federal custody.
“Functionally, the formula says,” That’s our problem, “he said.
Murillo, now in Honduras, learned this year of Audelo’s deportation through a journalist.
He wondered aloud, “How come there’s no punishment for other people like that?”
This story was reported with the help of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Data Scholarship.
This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.