The NPR Politics Podcast - The US Tried To Keep ICE Abuse Reports Secret. Here's What's Inside

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

NPR obtained secret government inspection reports, which described "negligent," "barbaric" and "filthy" conditions inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.For more than three years, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the federal government fought NPR's efforts to obtain those records. That's despite a Biden campaign promise to "demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE."This story contains graphic descriptions of mistreatment and death.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Kelsey Snell, and investigations correspondent Tom Dreisbach.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is David and Brandon, and we just loaded up my U-Haul from Richmond, Virginia, and we are on the road south to Oakland Park, Florida, where I'll finally be able to live close by to my boyfriend after meeting online three years ago during the COVID lockdowns. This podcast was recorded at 2 11 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, August 29th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I will be all settled in my new place and starting my new life together with my boyfriend. Okay, enjoy the show. It's very exciting. Yeah, I just love when people share their lives with us. Yeah, and we're very glad that we get to be a part of, you know, hopefully you're listening while you're driving.

Yeah, we have a great backlog of podcasts we can listen to while you drive. Congratulations. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover politics. And Tom Dreisbach is joining us from California at NPR West. Hey, Tom. Hey, how's it going? Excellent. So if you listened to our pod yesterday, we did a show about how immigration is affecting life in New York City. Today, we're going to continue that conversation with a look

at a different part of the very broken U.S. immigration system. And Tom, you have spent years fighting to get government records about detention facilities, which are overseen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. And what you revealed are, quote, barbaric and negligent conditions in these facilities. Let's start with this. What are these facilities? Who's being held in them? How did they end up there? Sure. So these are, yeah, as you mentioned, facilities run by ICE, and they run what is known as a civil detention network. So what's important to realize about ICE detention versus other parts of detention, like jails or prison, is that ICE detention is civil, not criminal in nature. It's not like prison where

you're serving time for punishment. It's basically to make sure that immigrants who are in deportation proceedings show up for their court dates before an immigration judge. And so that includes people who come to the border seeking asylum, and they're going through the court case to determine whether their asylum case is valid, whether they're people in the court case to determine whether their asylum case is valid, whether they're people in the country who are here illegally, or at least in the eyes of the government here illegally, and that are fighting deportation. It can also be people who have a green card, and after a long time, the government decides to try to deport them,

and they're contesting those orders. So right now, it's about 30,000 people in ICE detention from those three general kind of groups. The government says they prioritize people who are public safety threats for detention, and then other folks end up on alternatives to detention like GPS monitoring, that kind of thing. Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because I think that is a confusing point for some people, the idea that a detention facility and a jail might be somehow different. And I think it's worthwhile just kind of to explain that. Yeah. And it's something that people just generally don't have an understanding of that when you're sent to detention, you kind of have a sense that, well, this must be punishment. You must be punished for something. But actually in the handbooks that they give to people when they end up at detention, it says, this is not prison, you know, like big,

all caps letters. But what detainees say, people who actually spend time in these facilities, is conditions are essentially just like prison. And in some cases, you know, the vast majority of these facilities are run by private prison companies, private contractors that contract with the government. A smaller number are actually jails that will house people on behalf of ICE. So the lines between what is jail, what is punitive, and what is civil ICE detention can get very blurry. So tell us what got you interested in this particular corner of the immigration system and the links you had to go to to find out what these conditions are like.

Yeah, I first started looking into ICE detention in, let's say, around 2018 or so. And there were reports coming out about a facility that's near where I live, Los Angeles. And near us, about an hour and a half away, there's a facility known as the Atalanto ICE Processing Center. And there had been reports of a hunger strike there, which was met with, in the view of advocates and lawyers, an undue use of force that hunger strikers were pepper sprayed and then put into hot showers, which then intensifies the effects of the pepper spray. And that then became a lawsuit. And I just thought, well, this corner of, you know, America's immigration system is often quite opaque.

You don't hear a lot about what happens inside ICE detention. And so I started filing records requests. There's the Freedom of Information Act, which anyone in America, not just journalists, can use to get information about what the government is doing. And I just started filing requests related to Adelanto. And I got this really damning report filed by an office inside the Department of Homeland Security called the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. And basically they send experts in like medical care, mental health care, environmental health into these ICE detention facilities to look at and investigate claims of abuse. And they found in the case of Adelanto, medical negligence,

undue use of force. And in one case, you know, medical negligence that contributed to bone deformities and even potentially detainee deaths. And so the allegations were quite serious. At that point, I said, well, let's get all of these reports from all of these inspectors across the country because we were just looking at one facility, but this is an entire detention network. And the government then fought back and said that they would not release any of these files to us at all. They found more than 1,000 pages, and they said, you're not getting a single page. So it took you a long time to get this information. What is the span of time in which you're looking at these reports? getting a single page. So it took you a long time to get this information. How, you know, what is the span of time in which you're looking at these reports? When did all of these incidents

happen and where did they happen? Yeah. So I first filed this FOIA request regarding all of these reports for all these facilities across the country in December 2019, which feels like a lifetime ago. It's pre-pandemic. Yeah. Luckily, NPR, our lawyers who work with us here and outside lawyers, they decided we should file a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the government to hand over these records. We then got into the legal process and during COVID, which just really slows things down. But last fall, we won our case before a federal judge in Washington, D.C. The judge said the government had violated the Freedom of Information Act. They owed us these records. They had to hand them over. Initially, the government even appealed.

They were going to take it to the U.S. Court of Appeals. They ultimately dropped that appeal. And then earlier this year, we got the files, more than 1,600 pages in total, which cover this period from that original FOIA request. So from 2017 to 2019 was a period covered by the records we ultimately got. So just to be clear, the story that you have is about what was happening in these facilities during the Trump administration, but the Biden administration also fought releasing this information. That's right. And we weren't sure as, you know, the administrations changed over in early 2021, we weren't sure if that would change the government's posture on any of this. In fact,

my earlier reporting on Adelanto, I had actually quoted then Senator Kamala Harris, who's now the vice president, and she was quite critical of the conditions we revealed in that report. So we weren't sure if they would change their posture at all. They did not. They ultimately continued the fight to keep these records secret and in violation of the law, as the federal judge found. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, what these records reveal. Hey there, Tamara Keith here,

senior White House correspondent, and a quick plug for our latest bonus episode. It's a new trivia game for Politics Podcast Plus listeners, where we test your knowledge of the latest political news. Is it a special counsel? Or no?

Oh, yes? Yes. Take your guns in. Okay. Have confidence. Check out that episode and find out how you could have a chance to play if you're an NPR Politics Podcast Plus supporter. And we're back. And Tom, you fought to get these documents, 1,600 pages in all, spanning 2017 to 2019. What story do they tell? And are there any particular stories that stand out to you? Yeah. So these documents cover more than two dozen ICE facilities across the country, both facilities that are run by private corporations that contract with the government, and in some cases, local jails. And they tell a really, in what one advocate from the ACLU told me, a damning and chilling story

about the state of immigration detention in this country. And some instances that really stick out to me, there was a facility in Pennsylvania, an ICE detainee who was mentally ill, was strapped into a restraint chair, so they have restraints on your legs and your arms and your body, and was subjected to a strip search. And the strip search was specifically conducted, it was a male detainee by a female guard. It was a group of male guards gave the female guard the scissors to cut off his clothes and conduct the strip search. And the inspector said that kind of cross-gender strip search was barbaric and violated basic principles of humanity. Overall, one of the most notable examples from the documents relates to the death of a man named Kamiar Samimi, who died at the Aurora,

Colorado Ice Processing Center in 2017. He had been taking methadone for decades. He had lived in the United States since the 1970s. He originally came from Iran, and he was taking methadone to manage opioid use disorder. And when he was brought to the ICE detention facility, they cut him off cold turkey from his medication and he just went into severe withdrawal. So it's vomiting, sweats, heart palpitations. At one point he vomited blood clots and at no point during his time in ICE detention did the doctor ever examine him.

The nurses, ICE records show, missed multiple medical checks and missed medication that they were supposed to give him to help manage his withdrawal. And ultimately, he died about two weeks after entering the facility. I talked to his daughter, Netta Samimi Gomez, and she was the first person to be told by ICE that her father had passed away. And she filed a lawsuit against the company that runs the facility where her father died. And she has since become an advocate for other people who are locked up in ICE detention. If my dad was still here, he would be yelling

and letting everyone know what happened to him. He was very much the kind of person that would tell you what was going on, how he felt about something. I guess I'm taking up that mantle. He's not here to use his voice, so I can use mine. The medical inspector for ICE who went into the facility and looked at this case said it was simply, quote, astonishing what had happened and that it was a failure on many levels. And they were concerned specifically that ICE and the facility were not taking the depths of problems revealed in this death seriously enough.

And I understand the congressman from that district, Jason Crow, he had a response to all of this, right? Yeah, Jason Crow, a Democrat who represents Aurora and represents the district where this happened, he has been very active in oversight of the Aurora Ice Processing Center. And in ice facilities in general, that's something that has been a major focus for him. Yeah. And there was actually another death at that same Aurora facility just last fall. And his staff, he managed to get a law passed where members of Congress can make unannounced visits essentially to ICE facilities to conduct their own kind of inspections and oversight. And his staff routinely goes to this facility, conducts their own oversight in addition to what ICE and Department of Homeland Security does. And he has been expressed a lot of outrage about a death, this most recent death

at the facility last fall, a man named Melvin Ariel Calero-Mendoza. We actually obtained the 911 call made from this facility when Melvin Calero-Mendoza had a medical emergency and collapsed. And on that 911 call, the detention officer did not know the medical emergency, did not know the age of the man, did not know actually even the facility's address when he first asked. And so it led to these delays in what appears to be a disorganized response. And Congressman Crowe expressed a lot of outrage and frustration at that instance, which we uncovered. I want to get to the broader politics here, which is, you mentioned it, then Senator Kamala Harris, now vice president, was very critical of what was happening in these facilities. President Biden, I believe, when he was campaigning, pledged to close private ICE detention facilities. Your reports are from an earlier time, but it doesn't sound like things have completely changed and these facilities are still open. So is this a

promise not kept? Well, that's right. Advocates and immigration attorneys told me conditions have not improved since 2019, which is the period that these inspection reports cover. They say COVID in particular led to a deterioration of conditions inside, largely because a lot of people were sent to solitary confinement. There were also reports about increased use of force inside these ICE detention facilities. And President Biden, well, as a candidate, made a very bold promise to end the use of for-profit detention. And that makes up the vast majority of ICE detention. But once in office, his administration did not take steps to close or end for-profit detention in this country. In fact, they're currently in

court right this week in New Jersey fighting a state effort to close a private detention facility for ICE in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And advocates say this is quite clearly a broken promise that Biden promised to do this. He has not done it. And in fact, in some cases, appears to have done the opposite. In another case in Pennsylvania, the Biden administration had taken executive action to end for-profit prisons run by the Bureau of Prisons. But in Pennsylvania, they just essentially converted a for-profit prison into a for-profit ICE detention center. And so the Biden administration says that they still want to move away from for-profit detention, but they need Congress to act. Yeah, this is part of why we keep a record of what people say on a campaign trail, right? It's because these promises are meaningful and

there are very few modes of accountability other than reporting like Tom. So that's really very important work. Tom, what other threads are you following now? So the main thing was, right, we got reports up to 2019. So we are now pursuing the reports that are more recent. We've got this court ruling in our favor. We hope that that convinces the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to provide the newer reports. We're still fighting for those. So we're going to look for changes. You know, the DHS, ICE, they did not really engage with us on this reporting.

They did not make any officials available for comment. They provided a, frankly, fairly boiler plate statement. We're hoping to get more information about how conditions have evolved inside ICE detention. We are also looking forward to a specific detainee death review in that more recent death at the Aurora Ice Processing Center, where we got the 911 tape. And we hope to get more information about how that person died, how Melvin Calero-Mendoza died, what steps may have been missed. His family believes that medical negligence may have played a role in that death. So we're hoping to get more information about that and find out what is currently happening in ICE detention.

And Kelsey, does reporting like this, has this reporting increased pressure from Congress, for instance? Well, I think you're seeing Republicans say that there's this is further evidence that the Biden administration is not paying attention to the situation at the border. And that is something that Republicans return to over and over again. And for Democrats, they are using this as an opportunity to speak about this Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act that is kind of languished. And it was introduced by Pramila Jayapal. She leads the Progressive Caucus in the House. I'm not certain exactly where that goes from here, though I will say the end of this year is very busy. The congressional calendar is completely full, and it's hard to see how they will find the opportunity to move forward on this in this moment. Well, Tom Dreisbach, thank you so much for bringing your reporting to the pod.

Oh, thank you so much for having me and for spotlighting this. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.