Natalia Peña (center left) rallies outside the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement offices in San Francisco on Aug. 28, 2024, in support of labor and hunger strikers inside two detention centers in Kern County. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Advocates are escalating their condemnation of federal immigration authorities and a private prison company that operates ICE detention facilities in California, where dozens of detained men have waged months-long protests over what they say are sub-standard and abusive conditions.
At a protest in San Francisco Wednesday outside the office of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, several dozen activists called on the agency’s field director to meet with detainees who are waging hunger and labor strikes inside two Kern County facilities: Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center and Golden State Annex.
After ICE ended free phone calls earlier this month, dozens of people resumed a hunger and labor strike they have waged intermittently for more than two years. The detainees began by protesting $1/day pay for cleaning dormitories and bathrooms and then used the strikes to call attention to what they say are sexually abusive pat-downs, retaliatory use of solitary confinement and substandard care and conditions. Advocates say eight people are still refusing food.
Eunice Hernandez Chenier, an organizer with Pangea Legal Services, said waging a hunger strike shows how serious the concerns are for people living inside the two privately operated immigration jails.
“It is obviously a very big sacrifice and a decision that one does not take lightly,” said Hernandez Chenier. “So you can imagine how terrible conditions and treatment are in the facilities in order for someone to make such a decision.”
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Hernandez Chenier added that two hunger strikers were transferred to a different ICE facility in Tacoma, WA, last week, a move she called retaliation.
“Retaliatory transfers are common when folks are striking or when folks are just asserting their rights,” she said.
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Protesters called on ICE to end their contracts with GEO Group for both Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex this December, when the contracts are up for a 5-year review and renewal. The publicly traded, multinational corrections corporation holds contracts to operate four out of six ICE detention centers in California.
In response to the protesters, an ICE spokeswoman referred KQED to a statement issued last year that reads in part: “ICE fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference. ICE does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers.”
The spokeswoman, Alethea Smock, also pointed to the agency’s recent statement that it had ended a pandemic-era free phone call program as a result of budget constraints. ICE “would gladly reinstate the 520 minutes calling program with adequate appropriated funds” from Congress, the statement said.
And she referenced ICE’s detention standards regarding solitary confinement, which governs the use of cells for “disciplinary segregation” or “administrative segregation.” The standards say segregation must be reviewed every 30 days if it stretches longer than that. It also states that “every effort” shall be made to place detainees with “serious mental illness” in an alternate setting where they can receive care.
Grievances Reveal Abuse and Neglect, Advocates Say
The protest in San Francisco occurred on the same day that the ACLU of Northern California released a report documenting what it called a pattern of hazardous, inhumane conditions, medical neglect and retaliation across all six ICE facilities in California, which have a combined capacity to hold nearly 7,200 people.
The report is based on a database of 485 grievance claims filed over the past two years by immigrants held at all six ICE facilities in California. The claim records were obtained through a federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit or directly from the people who filed them. According to the ACLU’s report, ICE determined that only 8% of the grievances were well-founded.
Jesse Lucas rallies outside the U.S. Customs and Immigraiton Enforcement offices in San Francisco on Aug. 28, 2024, in support of labor and hunger strikers inside two detention centers in Kern County. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Last year, ICE officials said in a statement that it is “committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement.” They added that “the agency takes allegations of misconduct very seriously – personnel are held to the highest standards of professional and ethical behavior, and when a complaint is received, it is investigated thoroughly to determine veracity and ensure comprehensive standards are strictly maintained and enforced.”
An unannounced federal inspection at Golden State Annex in April found the facility “generally complied” with health care and other standards but failed to allow recreation for people in solitary confinement and did not meet requirements for responding to grievances. An inspection last November at the Mesa Verde facility found staff did not accurately report a use of force incident.
Complaint Charges Sexual Abuse
On Tuesday, the day before the protest, half a dozen detained immigrants at Golden State Annex filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination, based on their sexual orientation, gender expression or as retaliation for speaking out over poor conditions. The complaint charges that guards repeatedly made sexually suggestive and threatening comments to a gay couple who had fled violence in Colombia, subjected a transgender woman to sexually intrusive pat-down searches and waged a campaign of sexually degrading comments against a man after he protested medical neglect and mistreatment.
The detainees filing the complaint are asking the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate and ensure that staff members charged with abuse are barred from working with detained individuals, according to attorney Lee Ann Felder-Heim with the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco.
She said the six people involved only filed the complaint after waiting months for a response to earlier reports of the abusive behavior.
“We’re aware of reports of sexual abuse and harassment in many facilities across the country,” Felder-Heim said. “So this is definitely not an isolated incident.”
In an emailed statement, GEO Group spokesman Christopher Ferreira said the company takes all allegations of sexual abuse and harassment “with the utmost seriousness.”
“We have a zero-tolerance policy as it relates to such matters and take steps to ensure a thorough investigation of all related complaints,” he said, adding that GEO is committed to providing services to the Department of Homeland Security “in accordance with all established federal standards.”
Immigration detention is not a punishment for a crime but a form of civil detention to ensure individuals appear for court proceedings and to protect the public from those who could be considered a safety risk. Immigration law requires mandatory detention for certain immigrants who are in deportation proceedings because of their criminal record, and in some cases for those seeking asylum.
Civil liberties advocates argue that it’s not necessary to detain people who are fighting deportation, as there are fairer and much less expensive alternatives to detention. They say immigration detention is harmful and inhumane. And they point to evidence that the vast majority of non-detained people show up for their immigration court appearances.
But many conservatives – and some moderates – insist that immigration detention is a necessary part of strengthening border enforcement and removing more of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the country.
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged “the largest deportation effort in the history of our country,” if elected in November. To carry that out would likely require a massive expansion of detention capacity if authorities plan to jail people while they await hearings in the backlogged immigration courts.
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