Brazilians Report Covid-19 ‘Hell’ in US Immigrant Detention Centers

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Tired of working “just to survive” in Brazil, carpenter Paulo Passos, 39, decided to try a better life in the United States last year. He had already lived “in America” between 2004 and 2015 and knew how to get in, despite lacking documents. Along with a friend, he traveled to the Mexican border with Texas and crossed on December 26th.

However, when he reached the other side, he was caught by the border police. He spent six months detained in three immigration holding centers. During this time, the Covid-19 pandemic exploded.

In a short time, the health emergency that Paulo was following on TV materialized in his cell at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico. Of the 32 detainees in that cell in early May, 23 were diagnosed with coronavirus, including himself and another Brazilian.

According to data from ICE (US immigration and customs control department), by October 4th, a total of 152 detainees had been infected there -more than ten percent of the 1,089 that the facility holds.

According to Paulo, preventive care was lacking. With bunk beds attached to the floor, social distancing was impossible. Masks were only distributed days after the first cases.

The first symptomatic contamination in his cell occurred on May 1st, when an immigrant was taken away sick and never returned. After that, an Ecuadorian had 40ºC temperature for three days, while nothing was done, according to the Brazilian.

“We had to rebel and go on hunger strike, pressing for help,” he says. The patient was transferred to the prison clinic, where he spent 17 days. With bronchitis and a history of three pneumonias, Paulo was afraid that his lungs would be affected by Covid-19, but the only symptom he experienced was chest pain.

He was placed in isolation in one of the “punishment rooms”, as the solitary confinement was called. He remained there for 12 days, leaving only for 20 minutes to shower. “All I can say is little to describe what I went through there,” he says. “We didn’t have access to medication, to sunlight. The guards torture us, they treat us like dogs.”

Paulo was deported on a US government charter flight on June 19th, a few days after Brazil became the second deadliest Covid-19 country in the world. The first was the US.

According to ICE data, more than 6,300 arrested immigrants had the disease confirmed – there were 677 active cases on October 4th. Eight died, two of them since September. Currently, there are almost 20,000 detainees under the agency’s custody.

The ICE failed to report how many of those affected are Brazilians.  Folha de S.Paulo learned of at least six cases, and three of them agreed to tell their stories.

The agency said that since the start of the pandemic it has protected both detainees and staff, with suspension of visits, separation during meals and occupation of the centers limited to 70 percent, with a 44 percent reduction in the number of detainees between March and August.

The statement also said the ICE “suffered the impact of the pandemic” like other agencies and that resources for testing were limited, but the number of tests has “increased significantly” since July.

For experts, the numbers released by the agency are underestimated, due to the lack of tests and the failure to count people who become infected in prisons but die after being released. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, which developed an epidemiological model simulating Covid-19’s behavior in these detention centers, in May the number of people infected could be up to 15 times higher than the official figure.

According to the International Rescue Committee, the proportion of positives in the tests conducted by the ICE between February and August was 20 percent, up to three times higher than in the US as a whole. In a Virginia facility, the rate reached 80 percent of inmates tested in July.

Since the start of the pandemic, activists and health experts have been alerting to the high risk of the virus spreading in these prisons and pressuring the US government to improve sanitary conditions and release vulnerable detainees.

As early as March, two doctors from the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Congress warning of an overburdening if nothing was done. Days later, the ICE released the first confirmed case among detainees. On May 6th, it announced the first death: a 57-year-old Salvadoran.

Some cases ended up in court, like that of a center in California that was forced to run weekly tests on prisoners after a judge ruled that there was “deliberate indifference to the risk of an outbreak”.

In May, the state Health Secretary of New Mexico made an appeal to the central government, concerned about the reports she received from the detention center where Paulo was held: lack of disinfection materials, unwashed sheets for a month, and the impossibility of social distancing. She said she tried to offer test kits to the directors, but received no reply – which the ICE denies.

The separation of patients into tiny solitary cells, something that happened to Paulo, was denounced by human rights organizations, for discouraging other detainees from reporting symptoms.

The Freedom for Immigrants group received over a dozen reports from six different states, of infected individuals placed in cells designed to punish violent inmates. Some of them, without a shower or medical attention. One interviewee reported that upon returning from the hospital, still weak and unable to even stand, he was put in a dirty, freezing cell for two weeks.

The transfer of immigrants from one center to another is also criticized by experts, who say that the practice may have contributed to spread the virus in prisons throughout the country. According to the ICE, these trips continued, partly to remove detainees from crowded centers to vacant ones, favoring social distancing.

Evanilson Sousa Gomes, 34, experienced this. Before being deported to Brazil, he was taken in a van with five other immigrants from the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey to the Philadelphia airport. There he took an internal flight with 24 people to Louisiana, from where he boarded to Belo Horizonte. According to him, there was no social distancing at any time during the trip.

He had been in the USA for eight months, with his wife and two children. He was detained in February and had Covid-19 in April, in prison. He reports that he was only isolated from the 34 other people in his cell two days after he began to have symptoms and that they only received masks after pressure from attorneys.

In his sector, immigrants from Africa and Guatemala fell ill first. Another Brazilian who shared a cell with Evanilson became infected that same week. A warder died after being infected, according to him. “They did not take the proper care. We only did not die because we are in good health, thank God”.

Whoever became worse was released, he says. “They didn’t take them to the hospital, they just let them go on the street.”

Evanilson only told his wife about his illness after he left. “What worried me the most was my family. I was inside and there was nothing I could do.”

With vomiting, high fever and convulsions, Brazilian Laércio also suffered from the lack of care before and after catching Covid-19, his wife says. “He had to wear a wet shirt to fight the fever,” says Marcia, who agreed to give an interview, as long as her and her husband’s names were changed. “He only got a mask after fighting hard, and until then he wore a sock on his nose to protect himself.”

According to her account, in the middle of a seizure, Laércio blacked out and had a torso injury that hasn’t improved yet. He had been living in the US for over 15 years and was detained in February after a traffic violation. At least two other Brazilians became infected in the same detention facility.

According to Márcia, after the illness, Laércio had to be hospitalized several times with vomiting, fainting spells and shortness of breath. In one of these episodes, after days with no news, she managed to locate him in a hospital, but was not allowed to see him. He was deported the following day. He faced 26 hours of travel, handcuffed and vomiting during the flights.

“He had a very bad time,” says his wife. “He was a healthy man before he entered that hell. He came out sick, traumatized. He almost died in there.”

Deportee flights said to have “exported” Covid-19 to Latin American countries

Since October last year, 20 deportation charter flights have landed in Brazil. Fifteen of them occurred after March – while experts and governments, including the US and Brazil, recommended avoiding non-essential travel during this period, the ICE flights continued.

The failure of the US to interrupt deportations has sparked internal and external criticism. In Guatemala, the high rate of Covid-19 among immigrants who arrived on these planes caused the government to stop accepting flights for a while. In Colombia, new arrivals undergo mandatory quarantine at a military base, and tests have detected the disease in part of them.

In Brazil, it is difficult to know if there have been cases because the control of international passengers after landing is poor: travelers do not undergo mandatory quarantine or Covid-19 tests. Instead, travelers who voluntarily report a symptom are referred to the airport medical center.

On deportees’ flights, no one reported suspicion of the disease, according to ANVISA (National Health Regulatory Agency). The agency does not check passengers’ temperatures, stating that the effectiveness of this measure is uncertain, according to scientific literature. Its recommendations for airports and airlines include reinforcing cleaning and advising the wearing of masks to travelers and staff.

There is no passenger monitoring for the first 14 days after landing, as recommended by the World Health Organization. The report interviewed deportees who came on flights on March 6th, May 15th, June 19th and July 17th and all said they had not been provided such information. The majority also failed to comply with voluntary quarantine at home.

According to the statements, preventive care on the first flights was minimal and improved over time. However, some failures were repeated in all of them: the lack of distancing among passengers, for instance, even when there was plenty of room. One of the interviewees said that there was no water in the aircraft’s toilet.

On July 1st, US Ambassador Michael Kozak gave a statement to a US Congressional Committee including Brazil among the countries with immigrants who had Covid-19 after landing ICE flights.

According to him, of the over 37,000 deportees to Latin America between March and June, 220 were diagnosed with the disease – more than 190 of them in Guatemala and the remainder in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti and Brazil.

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which has been tracking “Covid-19 exports” by the ICE to other countries, the US initially only checked the temperature of deportees before traveling. After a few months, they began testing Covid-19 in some of them, but the ICE itself recognized that it is only able to test a sample of deportees.

Jake Johnston, a CEPR researcher, told Folha that coronavirus cases have been confirmed in deportees from at least nine destinations – Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, El Salvador, Guatemala, India and Romania. “Given this scenario, it is clear that it is likely that deportees with Covid-19 have entered other countries as well. But these countries were more successful in keeping it a secret,” he said.

The destination of the deportee flights in Brazil has been the Confins airport in Belo Horizonte. Between late March and early August, international flights were suspended there, and the ICE flights were the only ones to land.

Upon arrival, although exhausted after hours in handcuffs and frustrated for not being able to live the “American dream,” many celebrated having left behind them the ordeals they experienced in immigrant detention centers.

“Not even if I tell you, will you be able to picture what we go through in there,” says Camila de Oliveira, 20, who was arrested with her mother and aunt trying to enter the US and landed in Brazil on a deportee flight in March. “It’s the worst thing. They torture you psychologically.”

Marcia, Laércio’s wife, says her husband is “lost” from having to leave the US after more than a decade. “But I’m calmer because I thank God he got out of that suffering,” she says. “It was very humiliating, exhausting, inhuman. They abuse immigrants.”

Source: Folhapress