Nearly 20% of detainees at the ICE Adelanto Remedy Center tested positive for COVID-19 amid a developing coronavirus outbreak at the San Bernardino County Federal Immigration Detention Center.
There were 148 active cases of viruses in detention in mid-Wednesday morning, according to knowledge published on the U. S. Immigration and Customs website.
The Advance Detention Center is experiencing lately the largest active outbreak of the approximately 100 establishments where the federal government has immigrants. The center is already one of the largest detention centers in the country, and officials in the city of Adelanto have recently presented a plan to expand that.
The epidemic has the issue of a months-long legal war over settlement situations amid the pandemic, prompting the wrath of the federal ruling on the pace of the case, which criticized ICE and The GEO Group, the criminal corporation staff who own and operate the facility, for their “inadequate and objectively unreasonable” reaction to the COVID-19 crisis.
ICE reported further main points about the outbreak in a court case Tuesday afternoon. At this stage, 123 detainees had tested positive, according to Gabriel Valdez, ICE’s CHIEF in detention center rate, sixteen of those Americans had been hospitalized. since then. September 14 for problems related to COVID-19; Since then, 11 of them had been removed from the hospital.
He said 759 detainees were awaiting the effects of the “saturation tests” that took place on Monday and Tuesday.
Fifteen houses were quarantined on Tuesday, he said.
In addition, 31 in the facility have recently tested positive for COVID-19, he said. No member was hospitalized, he said.
Among those who tested positive is Luis Miguel García Hernández, 26, from Mexico.
He was transferred to a quarantine bedroom before receiving the effects of his COVID-19 test, he told Desert Sun. First, he was accommodated with two other people who seemed “seriously ill,” he said. For 40 minutes he was on his cell phone with them, but he still feared for his health.
He did the COVID-19 test the next day, he said.
Then he stayed with another guy waiting for his results. He said he had tested positive at one point; said his cellmate had tested negative two days later and had taken him out of the bedroom.
Garcia Hernandez alone on a cell phone on September 28, with a dry cough and sore throat, and eagerly wondered: will inmates continue to transmit the virus to each other?
“I fear for my life,” he says. He added that he and his spouse had a six-month-old daughter in Paso Robles and “are on top of me. “
Since the California pandemic, immigration lawyers, medical experts and detained immigrants have warned that, if introduced, COVID-19 could spread to detention centers like a wildfire.
They argued that Adelanto’s facilities are too full to allow others to practice social estgnation as a preventive measure. They also asked ICE to avoid moving others from state and county prisons to detention centers, warning that correctional facilities are hot spots for the virus. .
In an elegant action filed on behalf of the Adelanto detainees, U. S. District Judge Terry Hatter, Jr. ordered ICE and inmate attorneys to provide a secure capacity for the detention center. The court decided that the facility had reduced its population enough to allow social esttachment at any time and place.
Rebecca Plevin on immigration to The Desert Sun. Contact her at rebecca. plevin@desertsun. com. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaplevin.