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A cell in the Otay Mesa, California, detention center in 2006.
As coronavirus continues to spread, a crisis is growing inside ICE immigration detention centres in the US.
Verónica says that for days she has only been fed bread and water because the cooks stopped working due to the coronavirus pandemic. She is a young Salvadoran asylum seeker who has been detained in an immigration centre in the US since October of last year.
At the centre she is held at in Otay Mesa, in San Diego, California, they were not given any face masks or gloves as protection, despite the fact that there were already confirmed positive cases of Covid-19 inside the facility, says the 23-year-old.
“There is no medical assistance here, they don’t take care of us, they tell us to gargle with salt water, that we are fine, that it is just a cold,” she says in a phone call on 21 April.
So Verónica decided with another colleague to put together pieces of T-shirt fabric and, with daily sanitary pads and hair ties, make protective masks. Her description is replicated by more immigrants who spoke to the BBC not only in Otay Mesa but other centres, and by organisations that provide legal advice and that are constantly communicating with detainees.
As of Thursday, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) confirmed 490 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in an estimated population of 31,000 detainees. Only 1,030 detainees have been tested up until the same date.
There have been no deaths as a result of Covid-19, according to information that ICE sent to the BBC.
Despite the fact that ICE assures on its website that the health, safety and well-being of detainees are “among the highest priorities”, in recent weeks groups of immigrants have started hunger strikes in protest and several courts have ordered the release of detainees.
What is happening?
Verónica says that she sleeps in a cell “with eight beds, one on top of the other at a distance of about a metre” and that she lives with four other women. “We use the same bathroom… we are not in an environment where you can have social distancing” she says.
The detention centres are managed by private companies and have different sizes and layouts, but the detainees and organizations BBC spoke to agree that there are often spaces where hundreds of people live together and that cells are shared.
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The Otay Mesa Detention Center in California has the highest number of infections among detainees and ICE workers
In addition, detainees are in charge of cleaning the areas they use, including collective toilets, and do so without protection such as gloves or face masks.
“(Detainees) only have access to one bar of soap for the entire week,” says Veronica Salama, an immigration attorney at the US human rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Ms Salama warns that her clients “had no idea of the severity of this disease” at first and that “officials did not inform them of anything or gave them any handouts with instructions for hand washing”.
“There are officials who enter the units where the detainees are to deliver food without gloves or masks,” she says.
The situation has led to “people organising themselves in 30 facilities to demand changes and in 13 of them there has been retaliation”, says Cynthia Galaz, from the organisation Freedom For Immigrants, which has a direct telephone line to connect with detention centres.
Ms Galaz has gathered testimonies from people who say they have received threats that they would be sprayed with pepper spray or transferred to a solitary confinement area, informally called “el hoyo”