Inhumane treatment of civil detainees by inhuman vermin masquerading as human beings at the NWDC, but they just get what they "deserve" for being here, right?

 

Buried on page 10 of yesterday’s Seattle Times was a story on a University of Washington Center for Human Rights report on conditions at the Northwest Detention Center, the kind of place where the formerly “liberal” but increasingly right-wing Ninth Circuit Court ignores evidence of inhuman conditions at privately-run immigration detention centers. 

By law private immigration detention centers are only allowed to "hold" immigrants "guilty" of civil offenses, meaning their only “crime” is being in the country; the court's ruling in overturning a California law closing such facilities declared that states have no authority to do so, because-immigration policy is under the purview of the federal government. This seems rather “odd” view, given the Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott or any court in Florida or Texas don’t seem to think that this restriction applies to them.

The UWCHR tells us that

The Northwest Detention Center first opened on Tacoma’s tideflats in 2004, and expanded in 2006 and 2008; today, with a 1575-bed capacity, it is one of the largest immigration detention centers in the nation. The facility is owned and operated by GEO Group under a contract for ICE which guarantees to pay GEO, at minimum, to incarcerate 800 people per night. The NWDC exclusively holds people detained for ICE on suspected civil violations of immigration law.

While the City of Tacoma initially welcomed the facility, and the State of Washington helped procure financing for its construction, escalating hunger strikes, protests, and deaths inside and near the NWDC have led to growing criticism of the facility in recent years.

In its search for documentation of abuses at the Florida-based GEO-operated facility since 2017, the UWCHR notes that there had been stonewalling by the DHS for years in its FOIA requests: “The agency declined to provide the documents by claiming that their release would violate detained people’s privacy, even though we asked that all personally-identifiable information be redacted; in still others, the agency appears to have lost our request, having confirmed its initial receipt but then failing to respond to multiple communications inquiring as to its status."

A lawsuit against the DHS has, however, led to the release of some documents. The report notes that its researchers have been denied access to NWDC, so it is “it is impossible to corroborate individual claims of abuse at NWDC without access to the facility." Nevertheless, "it is imperative to take accounts of abusive conditions seriously, particularly as research has documented troubling conditions in many other facilities used for the civil detention of immigrants by both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the United States.”

At other facilities throughout the country of which access was granted (or forced to be) to federal investigators from the DHS OIG and  obtained for perusal, "Human rights organizations, journalists, and academic researchers" were able to document "grave abuses in private and public facilities alike, including dangerously inadequate medical care;  insufficient nutrition; lack of access to showers, clean clothes, and basic hygiene items including soap or toothbrushes; physical abuse, including sexual abuse, of detained people; and other concerns.” 

And it isn’t just “Mexicans” who have been subjected to inhuman conditions, but Ukrainians who entered the country without “documents” have also reportedly complained about their treatment at the NWDC.

The DHS OIG has issued studies on the “dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention of children” at facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, reporting “inadequate food leading to digestive and other health problems, and insufficient access to clean clothes and showers." Another OIG report after “unannounced visits to public and private facilities in California, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Colorado,” it “documented the overly restrictive use of segregation; inadequate medical care; food safety issues including—in all four facilities inspected—the serving of expired food; and lack of access to clean clothing and adequate hygiene items.”

Republican House committees charge that the Biden administration’s border policy is “criminal,” and it is—just not in the way they want the public to believe. As reported by John Oliver in one of his recent exposés, the Biden administration’s detention and asylum policy continues along Trump lines, and in some cases even worse because of the false “promises” he made to make asylum and family detention policy more “humane,” when in fact the opposite has happened, mainly because Biden caved-in to far-right xenophobia like a political coward.

However, the UWCHR report notes that despite the OIG studies, and that of “overlapping” government and health care facilities watchdog teams, these have not led to any improvement of treatment in the privately-run ICE detention facilities, all of which continue to make excuses for their inadequacies, redefining what qualifies as a "grievance," or blaming the victims when not denying there is a “problem” at all.

The UWCHR reiterates that “ICE only has authority hold people for civil violations of immigration law,” not for actual “crimes.” Many of these people mistakenly believe that they applied for asylum and are awaiting adjudication, and Hispanic asylum seekers typically have to wait much longer than other groups to have their cases even heard regardless if they happen to be from countries on the U.S. hit list, like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua; however, the reality is that like those asylum seekers who were conned on board the DeSantis/Abbott express flights, they are only seen as subjects of abuse. 

Not surprisingly, the UWCHR notes that these facilities violate international human rights law:

Under international human rights law, civil (or administrative) detention should be a measure of last resort; it should never be punitive; and alternatives to detention should be employed whenever possible. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has criticized the United States for its use of mandatory civil detention and lack of alternatives, writing that the mandatory detention of immigrants is a “disproportionate measure in many if not the majority of cases,” and that it threatens due process.

How about this for brain fog hypocrisy:

The United States government has argued that the detention of immigrants does not require adherence to the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause because unlike criminal detention, civil detention is not supposed to be punitive. Yet the notion that the indefinite deprivation of liberty for immigrants is not punitive rests on a legal fiction. The matter was most recently raised before the U.S. Supreme Court in Jennings v. Rodriguez in 2018, although the court did not rule on this specific question, sending it back to lower courts to decide. As the ACLU wrote at the time, “Nowhere else in the U.S. legal system do we let the government take people’s freedom away for months or years without a hearing before a judge who determines whether their incarceration is necessary.”

Further, “Under international human rights standards which are also echoed in U.S. law, all detained people have the right to be detained in conditions that are safe and respectful of their dignity.” However, the report is rather “exhaustive” in its illumination that the opposite is occurring at the NWDC, which you can find here https://jsis.washington.edu but I’ll mention some of the “highlights” here, based on “3240 pages of written grievances filed by people detained at the NWDC,” otherwise known by the sinister-sounding “Northwest ICE Processing Center.” While I didn’t see his name mentioned in the report, the NWDC was open for "business" during the time this Heinrich Himmler-lookalike, Marc J. Moore…

 

…was the acting head of the Seattle ICE deportation office, on his way to Dallas from Miami, where he was deemed a "liability" because of inhuman abuses of asylum seekers, some of whom were shackled up and herded like cattle on board planes out of the country. The person who took over permanently in that position, Nathalie Asher, served for a time as a director of the NWDC, and of course as a woman she is given the "benefit of the doubt" about the abuses that occurred there during her tenure.

I mention this because of the absolute hypocrisy of Moore and this country; on the ICE website, it brags about its “respect for human rights” when Moore (in his post in Miami) oversaw the deportation of a former soldier in the El Salvadoran army, Jose Francisco Grijalva Monroy, who admitted “that as a soldier in the Salvadoran army, he tortured suspected guerrillas by hanging them by their hands from trees and slapping their chests with his bare hands. Monroy also admitted that he tied suspected guerrillas to the back of an army Jeep and dragged them on the road until their skin came off.” 

The problem, of course, was that the Reagan and first Bush administrations were funding and arming right-wing murder regimes in Central America, and knew full well that this kind of thing was going on,  but overlooked these abuses if it was “necessary” to keep the “communists” out. 

Moving on, we learn that there were “complaints about sanitation at the NWDC, principally in the laundry and kitchen facilities. Detained people repeatedly reported that food was either spoiled or uncooked, sometimes infested with worms. They also noted that clothing was washed improperly, leaving them forced to wear clothes that smelled bad or were stained, including underwear.” 

We should note that for GEO this was a "for profit" operation, so we shouldn't be "surprised" by how much they "cut corners." That included "saving" time, water and soap; witnesses noted that clothing was sometimes washed in the same loads with dirty mop heads, and sometimes even without laundry soap.

Such complaints meant nothing: “Despite ample evidence of abuses at the facility, the privately-run NWDC operates with no meaningful oversight from the federal, state, or local governments. Unfortunately, we conclude that there is little reason to believe that is amenable to change.” The report notes that complaints by detainees within the facility were simply tossed from one person to the next like a hot potato before it ended up in the trash:

Furthermore, responses by staff reviewing grievances—a combination of ICE and GEO officers, though on individual grievance forms it is not always clear which institution is issuing the response—show that these concerns are often dismissed by the facility, which either deems them “not a grievance” or suggests the detained person must approach the other institution (ICE or GEO) for resolution. While concerns about being forced to wear another person’s dirty underwear or eat food containing maggots are clear violations of detained peoples’ rights to conditions of confinement that respect their human dignity, they also suggest a systematic disregard for the public health implications of detention.

A Russian detainee complained that “The facility’s laundry does a horrible job and my… clothes come back brown-reddish color and smell[ing] rotten.” Despite the fact it is an “ICE Processing Center” and ICE holds ultimate responsibility for what goes on there, they simply tossed the problem to someone else: “You need to file a grievance with the GEO laundry staff; as I explained before, ICE does not manage the daily operations of the facility, including the laundry room.” 

What was the response from GEO? “I have talked to the laundry officer and they have not mixed or washed mop heads with the clothes.” A Filipino detainee reported that “‘I was given some filthy underwear that I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to keep.’ The response from GEO was ‘Not a grievance.’”

In regard to medical care,

Detained people at NWDC routinely report that when seeking access to medical care, their concerns are ignored, either because GEO guards deny them permission to visit the medical clinic or, more frequently, because in the clinic, the medical staff belittles their concerns. Many people report that those who experience illness and seek treatment at the NWDC clinic are simply told to drink water, or occasionally given over-the-counter pain medications, without any serious analysis of their health needs. This pattern of dismissals of patient concerns is also reflected in investigative reports on conditions in other ICE facilities nationwide.

Typically, facility staff refer those who complain that they have been denied care to the clinic’s daily “sick call” at 5:30 am, in most cases not addressing the fact that the grievance itself describes at least one prior visit to the clinic in which the patient was unsatisfied with the care received; simply sending them back for more of the same seems unresponsive to their concerns. Indeed, grievances were almost universally labeled “not a grievance.” Occasionally, facility staff deflect concerns by insisting, on GEO grievances, that the issues should be raised with ICE, and on ICE grievances, that they should be raised with GEO.

Inhuman behavior by medical providers was rampant:

Today at 11 am I went to a medical appointment where I saw Dr. [Name redacted]. He started asking me questions about my medical history. One was if my mother was still alive, and I answered him yes, after I answered him yes he told me that your mom’s biggest mistake was having you as a daughter. Then he asked me if I had children and I answered yes, I have 4, then he told me that was my kids’ biggest mistake having me as a mother. I don’t understand why he told me these things, he really did hurt me, as soon as I got back to my pod I started crying for what he told me, it’s hard enough being here and away from family and then just for a stranger to tell me all these things it’s just not fair.”

And another incident which underlines the kind of people that ICE thinks have the right “attitude” for the job:

I was seen by Nurse [name redacted]. She took me into an interviewing room to ask me questions about my medical. She asked me how I was feeling and I stated to her that I was in pain, my back, joints, and kidney, she asked how do I know that. I told her because I know, that’s why I am here. She stated, “You are here because you are here illegally.” That’s when I told her that I didn’t want to talk or be seen by her.

Human Rights Watch noted that “On the basis of reviews of medical records of a dozen other detained individuals...there is systemic substandard and dangerous medical practices." A whistleblower working for the ICE Health Service Corps (IHSC)  denounced “numerous preventable deaths in ICE custody, including cases where mentally ill patients were administered inappropriate or negligent care that culminated in their suicides; the same memo noted that ICE personnel never reviewed notifications that should have alerted them to a problem.” Another whistleblower accused “ICE employees of simply ignoring quality control mechanisms intended to provide oversight," and the NWDC was a noted perpetrator.

The report noted that there is “unprecedented numbers of detained people dying in ICE custody" and "there is already abundant evidence of systemic problems in ICE’s Health Service Corps. Yet DHS, ICE, and GEO are the only parties able to access the medical records necessary to conduct any deeper analysis—and they are insufficiently committed to transparency to do so in a credible way." 

It also notes that solitary confinement is used more often and for longer periods at the NWDC than at other ICE facilities, not just for those who have mental health issues, but those who “exercise their First Amendment rights” by complaining too much about the conditions at the facility.

The report continues:

UWCHR researchers reviewed ICE’s internal documentation of 70 use of force incidents at the Northwest Detention Center during a period of 7 years, 5 months between 2015 and 2023. Under the PBNDS, facility personnel are required to “prepare detailed documentation of all incidents involving use of force, including chemical agents”; the original report must be submitted prior to the conclusion of the shift during which the use of force took place.

The ICE documents reviewed describe these use of force incidents as ranging in nature from the spontaneous use of physical force to break up fights, to the deployment of chemical agents to obligate detained people to “follow officer orders,” to the force-feeding of a hunger striker. Uses of force are particularly likely to occur during “cell extractions,” or the forced moving of a resistant person from one cell to another; this occurs most frequently in the Restricted Housing Unit. Particularly in the Restricted Housing Unit, there are multiple cases of repeated, escalating uses of force against the same individual, sometimes on the same day; the most extreme of these involve a single man who experienced 13 use of force incidents over a three-month period in 2019.

Now, before you say “well, if these people just did what they were told, this wouldn't happen” let’s remember that the only “crime” these people committed is that in most cases they entered the country seeking asylum, which explains why they are subject to lengthy detentions and not simply immediately deported. 

Hunger strikes are constitutionally-protected free speech, but the ICE only sees these efforts as a way to "embarrass" the agency and possibly even promote public "interest" in what is going on, and support changes in the way these detention centers operate. After all, these people have a right to be angered by the abuses they suffer as human beings at facilities like the NWDC, and the fact their detention and conditions at such facilities violates international human rights laws.

There is a lot more to the UWHRC report, but you get the gist of it; that this report wasn’t anywhere near the front page of the Times suggests to me that the editors don’t believe that readers (and there are not too many of those of print newspapers) are either not too concerned or even interested in what happens to people who “don’t belong here,” even when many of them are not “Mexicans” but Asian, black and even European (one complainer in the report was a UK citizen), although likely most stereotype every Hispanic they see as someone who “doesn’t belong” and is less than human on their “cultural” and social strata terms—so whatever they endure at these detention is no more than what they “deserve.”

Nothing is likely to change at NWDC as long as its activities are insulated from public discourse, which is aided by the toxic atmosphere generated by nativism, paranoia and the search for scapegoats. The prevailing attitude, as expressed by a resident of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, JaeLynn Mackalonis, after the kicking and beating death of Luis Ramirez in 2008 by white high school students: "It wasn't a racial crime. If he wasn't here illegally, I think it wouldn't have happened.”