Hundreds of inmates and at the San Bernardino County Federal Immigration Detention Center are being screened for COVID-19 amid a highly contagious virus outbreak.
Inmate saturation tests at ICE Adelanto Rehabilitation Center with 2084 beds are expected to be completed on Sunday, according to Gabriel Valdez, deputy director of the US Office of External Control and Immigration and Customs Removal Operations. The GEO Group is one of the largest migrant detention centers in the country.
As of Sunday, 53 out of 394 others had tested positive for COVID-19, 34 had tested negative and 307 were waiting for the results, Valdez said in court documents.
Each kit is sent to an outside lab, he said, and officials get the effects in 3 to 5 days.
“As the effects roll in and the facility learns the full scope of the outbreak, mitigation plans are still being developed and will be changed as the scope and location of the outbreak is defined,” Valdez said.
At least two other people arrested at the facility described the scenario as “uncontrollable”.
“Everyone is testedArray,” He told Desert Sun José Tapete, a Mexican inmate who took the test on Friday.
“I’m afraid of dying here,” said José Ricardo Viveros Rodríguez, 72, who said Saturday that he was on hunger strike to raise public awareness of the threat he faces at the facility. You have diabetes and high blood pressure, which increases your threat of getting seriously ill by the virus.
ICE spokesman Alexx Pons said Monday that there are no inmates on strike at the facility.
Nine of the other 53 people who tested positive have been hospitalized since September 10, Valdez said. Three of them have been discharged and lately are in isolation rooms, he said.
One of the bedrooms, known as West 5, has been changed to “quarantine status,” he said. People in the bedroom will have to stay in their room, which does not house more than two people. They can’t make a stopover in the dining room, so the hotel staff brings them meals. Showers and telephones are allowed in one room at a time.
Tests for all GEO and the contracted medical corps of workers are expected to be completed until Tuesday, Valdez said.
As of Sunday morning, 238 of the approximately 600 members had been reviewed for COVID-19, he said, of which 8 tested positive, he said. These workers have been told to quarantine their homes and will not be allowed to do so. Go back to the facility for at least 14 days, he said. They’ll have to test negative for the virus before they come back.
Officials decided that the outbreak originated in the west bedroom of the fifth D, as the detainees first became inflamed between 5 and 10 September, Valdez said. As a precautionary measure, he said, the approximately one hundred staff members who painted in the West Five Bedroom between August 26 and September 10 will not be allowed to repaint or have contact with inmates or other personnel in contact with inmates until the check is negative for the virus.
Several of those who in the past showed CASES of COVID-19 in Adelanto were among those who tested positive for the virus in local and state prisons.
Heads of state and locals and defense teams had asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to avoid moving others who had been released from prisons and prisons to ICE by the pandemic, but the practice continued at the Adelanto facility for months.
But Adelanto stopped allowing other people to move “who are known lately to be positive for COVID-19” in prisons or prisons since last Thursday, Valdez said.
“We ask that all new entries from other establishments (state or federal prison, county jail, etc. ) have a recent documented COVID-19 negative result to be accepted” at the facility, he said.
ICE will also require others to have tested negative for COVID-19 before releasing or expelling them, unless the law or policy requires the firm to release a user, to prevent the virus from spreading from facilities in communities.
There were 774 other people detained at the Adelanto facility on Sunday, Valdez said. That day, the facility was approximately 37% of its capacity.
Rebecca Plevin on immigration to The Desert Sun rebecca. plevin@desertsun. com. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaplevin.