Federal government making more people sick in US

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is increasing the risk of the COVID-19 pandemic by transferring sick incarcerated refugees between detention centers in various towns.

Politico cited a report from Natchez, Miss.where the local population were alarmed when in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic lock-down, ICE brought some 200 incarcerated refugees to its privately-run detention center in Adams County, where Natchez is the county seat.

“There was a whole lot of huff up,” said William Thames, co-chairman of the local COVID-19  task force and a retired oncology pharmacist.

Thames said the task force received many calls from local citizens and employees scared of how the new arrival at this dire time could affect them.

“We’ve seen in the press about how prisons and detention centers are like petri dishes for the virus. And these detainees have been to three or four other places before winding up here. We were very worried that the detention center might be a vector, so the alarm was sounded,” he said.

However, ICE neglected the warnings issued by local officials and a little over two weeks after ICE transferred new incarcerated refugees to the Adams County Correctional Center, the town mayor, Darryl Grennell, posted an alarming message on social media.

“[W]e now have 5 confirmed positive Coronavirus ICE detainees and one positive employee at the Adams County Detention center, identified yesterday, Monday April 13, 2020,” Grennell wrote on Facebook. “We pray that this doesn’t evolve into a significant in-house outbreak and spill out into the public at large. In Adams County, we now have 62 cases—a 200% increase in the last week. God be with us.”

Despite the warning by the mayor and others, ICE continued in the ensuing weeks to transfer more incarcerated refugees from all over the country and the outbreak has continued to grow: Now, at least 15 detainees at the Adams County facility have tested positive for COVID-19, according to ICE’s official count as of May 4. 

However, public health experts says the actual numbers were likely to be much higher than what was stated.

ICE only tests small numbers of people with serious symptoms, so “by the time you have about 10 confirmed cases in a detention center, you already have an outbreak,” says Mary-Katherine Smith McNatt, a professor of public health at A.T. Still University of Health Sciences who has studied outbreaks in ICE detention centers. 

As of May 4, ICE had tested only 1,285 of the roughly 30,000 detainees in its custody for COVID-19; about half were positive, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, Thames said it was unclear to what degree the detention center’s outbreak had affected the surrounding community. However, one thing was clear: Adams County is one of the hardest-hit regions not just in the state, but in the country. 

The US coronavirus death toll is currently about 70,000 out of more than 250,000 people who have died across the globe from the virus.

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