A federal judge in Florida ordered ICE to find more soap for detainees at three holding facilities and to give each of them masks, replaced once a week, to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Judge Marcia G. Cooke, in an order late Thursday, also told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to retrain staffers about the risks of COVID-19, and figure out ways to cut the populations in each of the facilities down to 75% of capacity to enhance social distancing.
And she gave ICE a list of 34 specific detainees to strongly consider for release.
“The court recognizes that complying with this order poses several procedural and logistical hurdles for ICE, however, at the time of this writing there are at least 30,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 1,000 related deaths in Florida alone,” wrote the judge, a George W. Bush appointee. “Time is of the essence. Accordingly, the court fully expects ICE to work with a sense of urgency to meet the deadlines set forth and refrain from requests for extensions of time absent extenuating circumstances.”
But she declined a mass release, saying her role as a judge in this case is to stop dangerous conditions, not to automatically free those who complain about them.
The Southern Poverty Law Center said the judge’s decision was a move in the right direction.
“The cruel irony is ICE never had reason to detain those under its custody in the first place. There is no justification to force immigrants to navigate their civil immigration matters from behind bars,” said Paul R. Chavez, senior supervising attorney with the SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project.
Federal courts across the country are grappling with similar decisions, as health experts say prisons, jails and detention centers, with their close quarters, are prime grounds for the spread of the virus.
Indeed, maps showing unusual hotspots of coronavirus cases in rural areas often point to a prison or jail where dozens of cases have spread.
When it comes to ICE facilities, judges have split in their decisions.
In Massachusetts, a federal judge is working through the entire list of detainees at two facilities, deciding whom to free.
In Seattle, a federal judge rejected a similar broad request for releases.
But in cases across the country, individual migrants are suing and winning release orders.
ICE argues it’s following the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as best as possible. It’s also making some releases on its own.
Judge Cooke said the agency hasn’t met the CDC’s standards.
“ICE has failed to provide detainees in some detention centers with masks, soap and other cleaning supplies, and failed to ensure that all detainees housed at the three detention centers can practice social distancing,” she wrote.
She said because ICE has made releases from some centers — including one where it released all detainees 60 years of age or older — it has shown it’s aware of the dangers. So to the extent it hasn’t made similar moves elsewhere, it proves “deliberate indifference.”
“These failures have placed petitioners at a heightened risk of not only contracting COVID-19, but also succumbing to the fatal effects of the virus as some of the petitioners have serious underlying medical illness,” the judge wrote. “Such failures amount to cruel and unusual punishment because they are exemplary of deliberate indifference.”
