Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) airlifted a group of detainees to Virginia on June 2 to facilitate the rapid deployment of Department of Homeland Security tactical teams in protests against racism and brutality. police in Washington DC.
After this transfer, which violated charter flight restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, coronavirus infections were detected among migrants, causing an outbreak at the Farmville detention center, Virgnia, which infected more than 300 prisoners, one of which he died, as reported this Friday by The Washington Post.
ICE assures that it transferred the migrants in its charter planes (informally baptized as
ICE Air
) to avoid the excess of prisoners in facilities in Arizona and Florida and as a precaution against the pandemic.
But sources from the aforementioned newspaper indicate that the main reason was to circumvent the ban on agency employees traveling on those flights if not to transfer prisoners.
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In fact, the trip was made against the criteria of ICE officials in Washington DC, according to the newspaper, and with half-empty facilities in many other parts of the country due to the closure of borders during the pandemic.
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Why then move them to the capital area?
"They needed to justify the movement of special response teams," says a source from the Department of Homeland Security, referring to federal agents who mobilized against the protests in the capital.
Four ICE detainees transferred to Farmville (three of them became ill) have filed a lawsuit, and during a court hearing an attorney for the agency indicated that one of the reasons was that “ICE has an air regulation that dictates that, to move agents, they have to go from one place to another with detainees on the plane ”.
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Despite the fact that ICE insisted that the transfer was made "within the nationwide effort to distribute detainees through the network of centers throughout the country to facilitate social distance and mitigate the spread of COVID-19," the statistics of the agency consulted by the newspaper indicate that there were more empty facilities to which they could have been transferred.
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On June 1, after two nights of massive protests outside the White House, the Department of Homeland Security decided to send rapid response teams from Arizona, Florida and Texas to the capital.
In this operation, agents from ICE, the Border Patrol and other federal agencies were mobilized.
Immigrants transferred to Farmville were quarantined for 14 days, but just after that period the number of infections in that center skyrocketed, to 339 in early July, more than in any other ICE jail up to then.
Last month, the director of the private company that manages the jail assured that local ICE agents opposed the transfer because there was not enough space to maintain an adequate quarantine, according to the newspaper.
