A group of migrants seeking asylum in America say they were forced to clean a detention center plagued with a large number of COVID-19 cases without proper personal protection, NBC News reports.
Migrants held at an Arizona Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center wrote a letter, obtained by NBC News, outlining their conditions.
"This is a life or death situation," a translation of the May 18 letter stated.
The letter was sent to legal advocacy group Florence Immigrants & Refugees Rights Project, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of some of the migrants in the facility.
They wrote their plea for help from inside one of 24 “tanks,” which hold 120 men each at the La Palma Correctional Center outside of Phoenix, which is operated for ICE by the for-profit company CoreCivic.
As of June 7, ICE reported that 78 people inside the facility tested positive for the virus, according to NBC.
"Our clients have told us over and over again it's impossible to practice social distancing in detention,"Laura Belous, an advocacy attorney with the Florence Project, which filed the lawsuit along with the ACLU, the ACLU of Arizona and the law firm Perkins Coie told NBC News. "It's impossible to maintain that six feet of distance when the telephone you're sitting on to talk to your lawyer is one to three feet from the other guy on the phone. When you're in communal showers. When 40 to 50 guys are touching the same door. That disease is going to spread like wildfire. And the fact is, it has. People shouldn't have to choose between their health and an immigration case. This is a situation that was completely avoidable."
The letter states the migrants were forced to work in the kitchen without proper personal protective equipment. Two migrants said they were asked to clean the trash where sick patients were treated. One said he had to clean a cell that was covered in feces without gloves.
During lockdowns, they wrote they were not allowed to shower for days. They reported receiving “disposable masks of very poor quality in the month of April" and "2 cloth masks" in May. On weekends, they wrote, they often went without toilet paper and other basic hygiene supplies.
When the kitchen closed in mid-May due to coronavirus concerns, they wrote that they were given boxed meals with two slices of "rotted" ham on bread.
Lawyers for 13 migrants held in La Palma and nearby Eloy Detention Center, which also has positive COVID-19 cases, described the facilities as "tinderboxes on the verge of explosion,” in a federal lawsuit filed Monday.
The lawsuit is asking for the migrants to be released because of the risk of infection from the virus. The lawsuit states the migrants are being unlawfully detained because their asylum hearings have been delayed.
An ICE spokeswoman declined to comment on the pending litigation, but told NBC News that ICE has been following all CDC guidelines related to COVID-19.
"The health, welfare and safety" of detainees is "one of ICE's highest priorities,” she told NBC.
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