U.S. now adding COVID-19 to MS-13 gang members as its principle “export” to Central America

Don Winslow of the Daily Beast reminded us that the MS-13 gang was “Born in the USA”—or more specifically in American prisons as a protection racket against neo-Nazi white supremacist and black prison gangs. Once released into the public, members continued to act like any other American homegrown gang; it is remarkable how such violent street gangs seem to be a part of Anglo-Saxon societies. These gangs did not exist in Central America until the U.S. started “exporting” its own problem there. Central America did have “revolutionary” and anti-government insurgent groups that bankrolled their activities by criminal endeavors, but “street gangs” that preyed on the general population were virtually unknown until the U.S. started deporting deportable gang members to those countries, who of course continued to practice the “trade” they had learned from their white and black American predecessors. 

And now the Trump administration is exporting a new disease to Central American countries—the COVID-19. Countries like Guatemala had few cases of the virus until ICE deportees started arriving on deportation flights. Guatemala’s president and health minister publicly denounced the practice, claiming that at least half of new arrivals were testing positive for the virus. The Boston Globe is now editorializing about the “recklessness” of the Trump administration “exporting” the virus—again sending an American problem to Central America, and again claiming no responsibility for the results. 

Where are these deportees with the COVID-19 coming from? Mainly from among the 32,000 detainees held in ICE prisons, which according to the Miami Herald only 2.2 percent have been tested, despite the fact that at the particularly notorious detention facility in Krome, Florida one Dade County fire/rescue department official admitted anonymously that the virus situation has “been a mess.” Scenes of detainees taken out on stretchers with medical emergencies and even the dying have become more common in the past month, he said. ICE facilities like Krome provide no masks and insufficient hand sanitizers for protection, and are packed far beyond their capacity with a growing number of non-criminal detainees being held on civil immigration violations, and have kept detainees in unsanitary and unsafe close-contact conditions. Of the few detainees that have been tested, two-thirds have tested positive for the virus.

One of those non-criminal detainees was Nelson Valera, who was a former health and safety engineer for General Electric in Venezuela, not some “rapist” or “violent criminal.” He was stuck in a quarantined “pod” after one of the men he was detained with tested positive, but no one was told who that person was to stay away from. He was like many others who could not know if they were infected because they were not tested. But now “I know I have the virus because I got out and got tested, but them? Everyone is sick in there and yet they’ll never know because they don’t have tests.” If the ICE can’t deport them all right away, perhaps there is another way to bring down the undocumented immigrant population? If you listen to people like the thuggish former ICE director Tom Homan, who has written a book defending himself based on far-right anti-immigrant propaganda and deliberately manipulated numbers, they all deserve to “die” anyways. 

Valera noted that more detainees were loaded into quarantined cells after others left to board planes to Guatemala, but they all were forced to return because Guatemala is now refusing to take any more deportees unless they test negative for the virus. The fact is that the ICE has been so lax in attempting to control the spread of the virus that virtually the only people who have been tested in detention are those who show severe enough symptoms to be hospitalized, or those would-be deportees that Guatemala has refused to accept unless the ICE tested them. 

That thug organization, ICE, naturally insists it is “business as usual” for them, and will deport anyone they want, whenever they want. But apparently the Guatemalan government has been insistent that it will not allow aircraft with deportees to land at its airports unless all  the deportees tested negative for the virus. According to the Herald, “as many as 50 Guatemalan detainees have been transferred from Miami International Airport and two Florida detention centers 13 times in the last nine days after their flight kept getting canceled.” This of course is not to say what the ICE has been doing with non-Guatemalan deportees, but as the Globe is pointing out, that the U.S. is deporting anyone who has tested positive because of the breeding-ground conditions of ICE detention centers is beyond unconscionable. 

Meanwhile, the Herald reported that that many non-criminal detainees who the ICE was forced to release by court order have not only tested positive, but have infected their family members.