Coronavirus Is Shutting Everything Down, Except for ICE Arrests
ICE detainment facilities could quickly become a hub for Covid-19
A Mexican immigrant at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in New Jersey tested positive for the coronavirus this week — a tragedy advocates warned would happen if ICE continued to arrest and detain people in the midst of a pandemic. But for ICE, operations under Covid-19 have been business as usual.
Even though millions of Americans have disrupted their lives in a bid to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, lawyers across the country say immigrants are still being arrested despite the pandemic. (An ICE spokesperson didn’t clarify how many arrests the agency has conducted since mid-March, because ICE releases enforcement data by quarter.)
“The intake numbers in detention have definitely not gone down,” says Nyasa Hickey, director of immigration services at Brooklyn Defender Services. “We have reports from detained clients that people are continuing to come in, that new people aren’t being quarantined.”
Little has changed for the ICE officers who arrest immigrants, the facilities that detain them, and the judges who preside over their cases. In Los Angeles, ICE officers carried out arrests last week while wearing masks and…
