SAN DIEGO – Gregory Arnold joined the principal on April 1 when the new coronavirus destroyed one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the United States. While waiting with about 40 guards to begin his turn, he heard a captain say the masks were forbidden.
Disbelief, he and a guard who recently gave birth sought to hear it from the chief. Arnold told director Christopher LaRose that he is 60 years old and lives with an asthmatic son.
“Well, you can’t wear the mask because we don’t need to scare the workers and we don’t need to scare the inmates and prisoners,” Arnold recalls, the manager says.
“With all due respect, sir, this is ridiculous.” Arnold retorted.
He said he later looked for masks and gloves, and that “everyone does the same thing.” But the manager remained impassive. And in the weeks that followed, the Otay Mesa detention center experienced the first primary outbreak at U.S. 221 detention centers. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service.
The origins of the epidemic are uncertain, but stories and inmates reveal gaps in the way the personal corporation that manages the disease has controlled the disease: there has been an early absence of facial coverings and a lack of cleaning products. Symptomatic inmates were combined with others.
Other centers would continue with their own epidemics, and an internal surveillance survey by the Department of Homeland Security of 188 detention centers conducted in mid-April echoed something the Associated Press discovered in Otay Mesa: 19% of school principals said there were not enough standards of surgical masks, 32% said there was not enough N95 breathing mask and 37% felt that there was not enough disinfectant for the hands of the inmates.
As in prisons, life situations are narrow, so other detainees in migrant detention centres are not charged with any crime. They are waiting to appear before an immigration issues a lawsuit to argue that they deserve to be allowed to remain in the country.
Otay Mesa is located on the hidden outskirts of San Diego amid car parks, a gas force plant, a state prison, a county prison and a juvenile detention camp. Last year, ICE’s average population of 956 inmates made it the agency’s eleventh busiest detention center.
The two-story squatter facility, controlled under contract through CoreCivic Inc. and shared with U.S. Marshals Service inmates, is surrounded by two layers of cord topped with thorns. Rooms from two to 4 bunk beds open to non-unusual spaces with TVs, sofas and board games.
Margarita Smith, a guard named Otay Mesa’s Employee of the Year at CoreCivic in 2019, said managers discourage staff from wearing masks. The topic was discussed at the March briefings.
“They didn’t need anyone dressed in masks,” said Smith, who asked through CoreCivic to lead a workers’ morale committee in January. “They said it would scare the prisoners and make them think we’re in bad health or something.”
In one court case, LaRose, the director, said mask policies had evolved with the recommendation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Staff were to take them to quarantined inmates and it was optional for other workers starting in the third week of March, he said, a dispute between Arnold and Smith.
Arnold said he dressed in a mask after learning of the first case at the detention center on March 31, when a worker distributed appliances to guards starting his shift. Without realizing the prohibition on covering his face, the inmates thanked him.
“I’m disgusted, ” said Arnold. “Clearly this thing is accelerating. I knew it was going to happen. I can just say it.
The contractor handed over a mask to the inmates on April 10, but on the condition that they indicate the fulfillment of duty in English, according to several inmates. He temporarily subsidized after a tension with the prisoners.
“Everyone was screaming,” said Issis Zavala of Honduras, who refused to make the signal and was released with a wristband on her ankle because a TB attack in 2007 made her vulnerable. “They said, “You just have to point it out. Okay, if you don’t need to signal, we just go. “”
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On March 17, the day San Diego limited public meetings to 50 other people and closed the restaurants, colleagues came together to interrogate the manager. Smith remembers wondering why so many other people, partly lieutenants, were allowed to meet so strongly in a room.
When a worker asked for blank rags, the manager replied twice that it was not mandatory because the chemicals used for cutting were very powerful. Others asked when they would get more wipes and gels.
The gloves were hard to find, Smith said. Arnold said the ones he saw were too small for his hands. Hand sanitizer dispensers were empty.
Feeling that the manager did not take the virus seriously, Smith felt he had no choice. The 48-year-old man missed a week of painting in early March due to pneumonia, asthma and had been doing so intermittently since November.
She quit. “I told myself I wasn’t going to be in poor health anymore,” she says. “I felt things weren’t going to be right.”
The inmates, of course, still didn’t have the pick to stay. Carlos González Gutiérrez, Consul General of Mexico in San Diego, wrote to ICE on April 16 about “widespread fear” among inmates, raising considerations about the combination of inmates in poor health and asymptomatic and non-easy exemptions from liability for masks. A consulate hotline won more than a hundred calls.
Common complaints included a lack of non-public hygiene products, social estrangement and masks, Gutierrez said. They complained that they had been asked to drink salt water to cope with the pain and that workers were dressed in non-public protective equipment.
CoreCivic spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist said the contractor had strictly followed the recommendation of fitness officers and ICE. She said the CDC had completely followed the mask until the first week of April and claimed that workers and inmates covered their faces without having to point out a resignation.
“We have responded to this unprecedented scenario in an appropriate, thorough and careful manner for the protection and well-being of those entrusted to us and our communities,” he said.
Zelaya, 35, said the commandos had just cleaned the surfaces every hour on March 30, but the rags were dirty. She used the same towel to clean toilets, door handles, telephone receivers and her hands.
“I put the houses blank,” Zelaya recalls, telling the guards. “You can’t use the same towel.”
“Oh, we have a chemical. It kills the bacteria,” Zelaya said.
Victor Rodriguez, 44, one of 35 detainees who started a five-day hunger strike on April 4. The Guatemalan disappointed through an inmate who worked in the dining room handling food and gave the impression of having a fever, so he gained ibuprofen. Array (CoreCivic stated that it prohibits inmates with symptoms from running in the kitchen and follows CDC rules on cleaning and disinfectants).
Authorities insist that the detainees had a lot of loose soap (23,300 bars between March 24 and April 23), but Rodriguez said the bar earned enough daily to wash his hands or shower. Hand sanitizer requests were rejected because the government feared they would be used to prepare homemade alcohol.
Elizabeth Cruz, 22, said an inmate who coughed heavily on her mobile phone in the first week of April was deported for about a week, sent back and evacuated before giving positive. Cruz said he had reported chest pain and shortness of breath for two weeks, but that he may only receive allergy medications.
“I know my body and I’m fine,” he recalls telling a nurse, who told him there was nothing he could do.
Cruz, from El Salvador, finally tested positive and was put in isolation along with 8 other inflamed inmates.
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The virus has brought new features to ICE. The firm hosted an all-time record of more than 56,000 people last year, with more than 500,000 reserves over a 12-month period, but policies to seriously restrict asylum and recent launches to combat the virus have reduced the population to 22340.
Overall, ICE had 3596 inmates who tested positive, 27% of those who were evaluated. Of these, 967 have been detained lately; the rest has been released, deported or recovered. At ICE, forty-five detention center workers tested positive, as well as an undisclosed number of contractors.
Chad Wolf, acting secretary of Homeland Security, told reporters in May in San Diego that ICE had stopped receiving detainees from Otay Mesa and “one or two more” and would continue with the elderly and medically fragile. ICE has reduced the population of Otay Mesa by more than one part in 3 months to 376 since 761 on April 1.
For weeks, Otay Mesa had the dubious difference of maximum instances in the ICE system, but the spread really stopped; 168 inmates tested positive since the outbreak began, as were 11 ICE workers and more than 30 CoreCivic workers. ICE said in a statement that increased testing and isolation of positive inmates contributed to improved conditions.
Cases are spreading at the Farmville, Virginia facility, with 315 positive inmates, Anson, Texas, with 290, Eloy, Arizona, with 250 and Houston with 206, In Eloy, 128 of the approximately 315 workers tested positive this month, according to CoreCivic, who manages the facility.
Arnold resigned after his April 1 with the director, when the virus shattered Otay Mesa. Smith took a two-week leave before resigning, shattered by her loyalty to paintings and what she sees as CoreCivic’s tendency to “take shortcuts.” Both sued the company in federal court.
CoreCivic will examine the guards’ accounts in court, Gilchrist said, but “we can generally say that we defiance of his misleading and sensational allegations seeking favorable final results in court.” Daniel Struck, the director’s lawyer, responded to a request for comment.
Smith and Arnold believe the spread started with someone from abroad, maybe a guard or a lawyer. Smith called the prisoners “easy ducks.”
“After they gave it to the first officer, it was like a chimney,” Smith said. “He just left after that.”
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