Every once in a while I wonder if this administration has hit the bottom in its maltreatment of people who are seeking a new life in the United States. Family separation? Can’t go much lower than that, right? A few months later Trump is forcing refugees into camps in Mexico, where they become targets of gangs, to await an opportunity to make asylum requests? This must be it. I mean come on! Then the administration is expelling unaccompanied children and others with no due process of any kind under the guise of a public health response to COVID 19. 90% of these people, the administration proudly claims, are expelled within 2 hours of being encountered. For those not expelled immediately, things aren’t great. As you’ve read, some of the kids are held in hotels, out of the reach of attorneys who might support them. Absolutely horrifying, right? Yeah, but then....
The news this week sinks the administration’s practices to a whole other ring of hell. I hesitate to say it can’t get much worse….
First came the news that the Trump administration transferred people from detention sites with high rates of coronavirus infections to sites in Virginia simply because it wanted to fly federal agents to D.C. to monitor Black Lives Matter protests. Yes, the administration wanted to fly in extra agents, and federal procurement laws do not allow them to use charter planes. So, the work around this policy was to have the agents “accompany” people being transferred between ICE facilities - even if there was no other reason to transfer them.
The result of this experiment in absolute carelessness was a massive outbreak at the ICE detention facility in Farmville, Virginia, where basically everyone at one point was testing positive for coronavirus. From the Washington Post:
The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.
After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency moved the detainees on “ICE Air” charter flights to avoid overcrowding at detention facilities in Arizona and Florida, a precaution they said was taken because of the pandemic.
But a Department of Homeland Security official with direct knowledge of the operation, and a former ICE official who learned about it from other personnel, said the primary reason for the June 2 transfers was to skirt rules that bar ICE employees from traveling on the charter flights unless detainees are also aboard.
This news was followed by a whistleblower’s report about medical neglect at an ICE facility in Irwin, Georgia, operated by LaSalle South Corrections. The failure to take appropriate precautions against coronavirus was bad enough - a problem well documented in many facilities in ICE’s network. However, the real shocker in the report was testimony that a large number of women had received medically unnecessary hysterectomies while in custody. I mean….
From Vice:
The complaint, filed on behalf of several detained immigrants and a nurse named Dawn Wooten, details several accounts of recent “jarring medical neglect” at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, which is run by the private prison company LaSalle South Corrections and houses people incarcerated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In interviews with Project South, a Georgia nonprofit, multiple women said that hysterectomies were stunningly frequent among immigrants detained at the facility.
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” said one woman, who said she’d met five women who’d had hysterectomies after being detained between October and December 2019. The woman said that immigrants at Irwin are often sent to see one particular gynecologist outside of the facility. “It was like they’re experimenting with their bodies.”
In one case, Wooten said, a woman who ended up with a hysterectomy was not properly anesthetized and overhead the doctor say that he’d taken out the wrong ovary. That woman had to go back and get her other ovary removed as well, Wooten said.
The Associated Press did a follow up investigation after these reports surfaced. They were not able to confirm Dawn Wooten's accusations, but did find a pattern of issues concerning lack of consent concerning surgeries and medical procedures performed by Dr. Mahendra Amin:
An Associated Press review of medical records for four women and interviews with lawyers revealed growing allegations that Amin performed surgeries and other procedures on detained immigrants that they never sought or didn’t fully understand. Although some procedures could be justified based on problems documented in the records, the women’s lack of consent or knowledge raises severe legal and ethical issues, lawyers and medical experts said.
Receiving less attention is a lawsuit involving another whistle-blower, Brian Murphy, who detailed a number of incidences of administration officials intentionally lying to Congress. The whistle-blower knows this because he is an intelligence official who briefed Kristin Nielsen and others on the content of their congressional testimony, only to have corrections ignored because they did not fit the narrative. A particularly damning part of the legal brief is Murphy's contention that he was ordered to seek out and fire “deep state” intelligence analysts by Cucinelli, because depictions of conditions in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador were making it too easy for people to get asylum! Yeah. From the brief…
Mr. Murphy made a protected disclosure to Mr. Glawe in December 2019, regarding an attempted abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program by Mr. Cuccinelli. In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.
After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program. Mr. Murphy also informed Mr. Glawe he would not comply with the instruction to fire or reassign the alleged “deep state” officials based on nothing more than perceived political differences, and that Mr. Murphy would report the matter to DHS OIG if 10 improper actions were taken to do so. Mr. Glawe concurred with Mr. Murphy’s assessment and Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were never implemented.
You can read the full brief here.
Of course, if one was going to round out the bad news this week, you’d have to include the 9th Circuit Court’s decision to green light Trump’s efforts to dismantle Temporary Protected Status for people from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti and Sudan. The ruling likely also impacts TPS for Honduras. If there is an upside at all it is that implementation will be pushed back past the election. So, the final determination of TPS’ future will be decided as a result of the presidential election. Should he win, Biden has stated his commitment to reinstate TPS for these countries (no guarantee). Another upside, is that for people from Haiti, this ruling will in essence be set aside pending the outcome of a separate case also before the courts (Saget v Trump), and thus the validity of current TPS holder work permits for people from Haiti will almost certainly be extended to September 2021 - no matter what happens in November of this year.