Shackled, abused and humiliated: Report paints grim picture of life in ICE detention

CBC

4 days ago

Starving men with their hands tied behind their backs, forced to eat out of Styrofoam containers "like dogs." Women incarcerated alongside men and denied access to showers or medical care. Dozens of people shackled and left on buses for days on end.
These are just a few of the stories documented in a new report on the conditions at three migrant detention centres in Florida amid U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.
"I would say the key phrase that would come to mind is, you know, fundamentally abusive," Belkis Wille of Humans Rights Watch (HRW) told As It Happens guest host Megan Williams.
The report by HRW, Americans for Immigrant Justice and Sanctuary of the South paints a gruesome picture of abuse, overcrowding and denial of medical care at the Krome North Service Processing Center, Broward Transitional Center and Federal Detention Center.
The U.S. government vehemently denies the allegations, and says it is, in fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers who are being victimized.
In an emailed statement, Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary, accused the report's authors of contributing to a political environment that's creating uptick in assaults against the "men and women of ICE who put their lives on the line every day to arrest violent criminal illegal aliens to protect and defend the lives of American citizens."
Massive surge in detentions
Since being elected to his second term in the White House, Trump has enacted a program of mass deportations from the U.S.
Acting on a presidential executive order, ICE agents, often masked, have been conducting raids all over the U.S. and clashing with protesters in the process.
As of April, 45 out of 181 authorized detention facilities across the country have exceeded their contractual capacity, the HRW report says.
The detained include dozens of Canadians.
The Trump administration has characterised ICE detainees as violent criminals. But ICE's own data shows that of the nearly 58,000 people in detention nationwide, 71.7 per cent have no criminal convictions and 47 per cent have no pending criminal charges.
Some of the detainees interviewed in the report, Wille says, came to the U.S. legally under recently cancelled Temporary Protected Status programs and were arrested while attending their annual immigration appointments.
Detainees describe being shackled on buses
Wille's interviews with detainees at Krome took place in a small visitation room that she described as clean and organized. But each detainee she spoke to told her that, just a few weeks prior, that room was being used as a holding cell.
"This was a tiny room with just a desk and two or three chairs," she said. "People were held there for a week or more because the processing cells were so full."
Overcrowding, the report notes, is a major problem at all three facilities.
Cells designed for 66 people, she said, are instead crammed with as many as 140. People are being kept for weeks in processing cells that are only meant to hold them for a couple of hours. Those waiting there, she says, are forced to sleep on concrete floors with "frigid air blasting."
That's if they're lucky enough to get a cell at all.
"Many of them were arriving at a time when Krome was so overcapacity that they were actually kept shackled in buses for, you know, in some cases, days," she said. "No access to a shower, barely any access to the bathroom, very limited access to food and water."
Because of overcrowding, the report says women are being held at Krome, a men's facility, in rooms with exposed toilets visible to men in the adjacent cells.
"When they asked to get access to medical care, to their much-needed drugs, they were told by the staff at the facility, 'We can't give you any medical support because this is a male-only facility. And we can't give you access to the showers or to outdoor spaces for recreation time because this a male-only facility,'" Wille said.
DHS told CBC women at Krome are kept separate from male inmates and provided with medical care "like all detainees."
Diabetes, HIV medications allegedly withheld
Denial of medical care, the report found, is not limited to women.
"I spoke to one man who needs four insulin shots a day because of his diabetes," Wille said. "He was given less and less access to his insulin and finally was stripped of all access to this insulin for a period of five days, and then he collapsed and ended up in the hospital."
The report's authors also spoke to HIV-positive men who say they were denied their medications until the virus, long kept under wraps, became detectable again.
This can't be blamed on a lack of resources, Wille said, noting that ICE just saw a major funding boost. Nor, she says, is it a matter of detainees falling through the cracks.
"These are prisons that do have medical staff there. They have individuals who have diagnosed conditions, where they have all of this on record," she said. "Denying them their access to medical care, that is a choice."
Forced to eat with their hands tied
The same is true, she says, of the abuse detainees say they're subject to.
Two of the detainees interviewed described being moved, along with other men, from one facility to another, and kept for hours in a transfer cell with no food, their hands tied behind their backs.
When their lunch arrived in Styrofoam containers, the men begged the guards to let them eat.
"But the guards refused to unshackle them," Wille said. "So the men had to, with their mouths, basically lean over and eat from these boxes on chairs with their hands tied behind their backs."
In the report, both men described the incident as dehumanizing.
"We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs," Harpinder Chauhan, a migrant from Britain, said in the report.
The report says the abuses documented at the facilities are violations of international conventions as well as ICE's own policies. It called on the Trump administration to dramatically reduce the number of people in custody.
But McLaughlin at DHS called the report's claims "lies" and said all detainees are provided with meals and medical treatment.