Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) already has a history of refusing to release severely ill immigrants, including children, until they are dying. When 2-year-old Mariee got sick while detained with her mom, Yasmin Juárez, at a migrant family jail in Texas back in 2018, officials released them only after the child had become limp, the mother said. The child would die within weeks at a hospital.

ICE has continued this despicable practice through the novel coronavirus pandemic, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has found. Martin Vargas Arellano, a 55-year-old, already had numerous health conditions when he contracted the virus while detained at the notorious, privately operated Adelanto Detention Center in California. Like in Mariee’s case, officials released him only when it was too late for him.

The report, available to read in full here, said that officials had refused to release Vargas Arellano, who had schizophrenia, diabetes, and hepatitis, even after he had been hospitalized numerous times after contracting the virus in December 2020 while detained at the GEO Group operated facility. “As his condition grew worse, ICE officials decided to release him three days before his death at a California hospital. As a result, ICE avoided mandatory reporting requirements for in-custody deaths.” 

But not only did ICE officials get around reporting Vargas Arellano’s death, they didn’t even bother informing his advocates that they’d released him. His attorney assumed he’d perhaps been released to the street and, fearing his for his well-being, filed a missing persons report. It was only then that they found out he was dead. Furthermore, Vargas Arellano had been among the detainees who advocates sought to free through a class action lawsuit. But ICE also failed to inform the court of his death.

“Upon learning about ICE’s failure to inform the court about Martin, the court noted that ‘it appears that the Government actively concealed the seriousness of Mr. Arellano’s condition, and his subsequent death, from his counsel and the Court by reporting that Mr. Arellano was released from detention on March 5, 2021,’” the report said. “The Court has significant concerns regarding the Government’s actions and lack of candor based on the disturbing facts reported in the Notice of Death.”

ICE’s secrecy has extended to workers within immigration detention facilities. As previously noted, ICE hasn’t reported when contracted workers have become sick, which has deceptively made cases among employees look lower than they really are. ICE also hasn’t reported when a number of these workers have died, the ACLU’s report said. “[A]ccording to media reports, at least five employees of private prisons holding ICE detainees have died of COVID-19. ICE, however, has failed to publicly account for these deaths.

“ICE’s lack of transparency and candor, particularly during a public health crisis, should raise deep concern,” the ACLU’s report continued. “The importance of accurate data and public reporting is critical not only to keeping the agency accountable, but to protecting the lives of people in its custody. Unfortunately, ICE’s actions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have failed us all.”

Another facility named in the ACLU’s report, CoreCivic’s La Palma Correctional Center (LPCC) in Arizona, was also recently named in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General report finding that guards at the facility violently attacked detainees who had been peacefully protesting the lack of personal protective equipment, spraying them with pepper spray, pepper balls, and chemical agents. 

In surveillance photos, a dozen officers in riot gear can be seen surrounding a group of men crouching for cover on the floor. ”A letter signed by 182 LPCC detainees indicates the facility used pepper spray, pepper balls, and chemical agents, and punished protesting detainees with lengthy stays in segregation. We confirmed LPCC used chemical agents to end the protests,” the inspector’s report said. 

Both LPCC and Adelanto are named in an April letter from the ACLU calling on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to shut down dozens of ICE sites, citing a number of factors including patterns of abusive conditions and the agency’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. “Our analysis compared estimated infection rates in ICE detention centers with infection rates in prisons and in the general population,” an analysis from The New York Times last month said. “As Covid-19 cases rose last June, ICE detention facilities had an average infection rate five times that of prisons and 20 times that of the general population.”

“Fiscal Year 2020 was the deadliest year in ICE detention in 15 years,” the ACLU said in its letter to Mayorkas. “Last year alone, we saw reports of increased use of force, solitary confinement, patterns of sexual abuse, forced sterilization, and an utter failure to protect people from COVID-19. ICE’s extreme recklessness in handling the COVID-19 virus showed the blatant disregard it had for the health and well-being of detained people, as well as the extent to which it was willing to lie or obfuscate to avoid accountability.”