LOUISIANA (US), March 11 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Honduran Christian Mejia thought he had a shot at getting out of immigration detention in rural Louisiana after he’d found a lawyer to help him seek asylum.
Then he was quarantined.
In early January, a mumps outbreak at the privately-run Pine Prairie US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Centre put Mejia and hundreds of other detainees on lockdown.
“When there is just one person who is sick, everybody pays,” Mejia, 19, said in a phone interview from the Pine Prairie centre describing weeks without visits and access to the library and dining hall.
His attorney wasn’t allowed in, but his immigration court case continued anyway – over a video conference line. On Feb 12, the judge ordered Mejia deported back to Honduras.
The number of people amassed in immigration detention under the Trump administration has reached record highs, raising concerns among migrant advocates about disease outbreaks and resulting quarantines that limit access to legal services.
As of March 6, more than 50,000 migrants were in detention, according to ICE data.
ICE health officials have been notified of 236 confirmed or probable cases of mumps among detainees in 51 facilities in the past 12 months, compared to no cases detected between January 2016 and February 2018. Last year, 423 detainees were determined to have influenza and 461 to have chicken pox. All three diseases are largely preventable by vaccine.
As of March 7, a total of 2,287 detainees were quarantined around the country, an ICE official said.
The first cases at Pine Prairie were detected in January in four migrants who had been recently transferred from the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, according to internal emails.
Tallahatchie, run by private detention company CoreCivic, has had five confirmed cases of mumps and 18 cases of chicken pox since January, according to company spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist. She said no one who was diagnosed was transferred out of the facility while the disease was active.
Tallahatchie houses hundreds of migrants recently apprehended along the U.S.- Mexico border, ICE officials said.
Since January, the 1,094-bed Pine Prairie facility has had 18 detainees with confirmed or probable cases of mumps compared to no cases in 2018, according to ICE. As of mid-February, 288 people were under quarantine at Pine Prairie. Mejia said his quarantine ended on Feb 25.
There have been 186 mumps cases in immigration detention facilities in Texas since October, the largest outbreak in centers there in recent years, said Lara Anton, the press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
In Colorado, at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility near Denver, run by The GEO Group, 357 people have been quarantined following eight confirmed and five suspected cases of mumps detected since February, as well as six cases of chicken pox diagnosed since the beginning of January, said Dr. Bernadette Albanese from the Tri County Health Department in Colorado. — NNN-AGENCIES
