![]() Before the outbreak last week, detainees alternated top and bottom bunk sleeping assignments, with one person per bed.ĭetainees in dorm B demanded to be tested for days before facility staff supplied tests late last month, advocates and detainees said. The facility has three disciplinary segregation rooms, two medical segregation rooms and three intake rooms, which don’t have beds. Mesa Verde has four dorms, each outfitted with enough bunk beds for 100 people. ![]() ![]() “The documentary evidence shows that the defendants have avoided widespread testing of staff and detainees at the facility, not for lack of tests, but for fear that positive test results would require them to implement safety measures that they apparently felt were not worth the trouble,” Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in granting the temporary restraining order.Ĭhhabria ordered officials to administer weekly rapid COVID-19 tests to all detainees at the facility and not take in new detainees.Įmails and other documents obtained by the lawyers, who sued the federal government in April over conditions at the facility amid the pandemic, provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at conditions in the facility and ICE’s response to the novel coronavirus. On Thursday, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a searing ruling, saying that ICE has “responded to the health crisis in such a cavalier fashion” that it has “lost the right to be trusted.” Spokespeople for ICE and GEO declined to comment because of pending litigation. As test results trickled in, the staff ran out of quarantine spaces, at one point reportedly placing two men in a bathroom for hours. Detainees and immigrant rights advocates described a chaotic situation there, with two men hospitalized since Saturday and several more displaying symptoms of the virus while being held in large dormitories with others who feared becoming infected.
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