ICE's "Non-Punitive" Immigrant Detention Centers Inflict Plenty of Punishment

New documents reveal unprecedented look at what goes wrong at ICE detention centers across the country, from medical negligence, to verbal abuse, and even death.

A new in-depth investigation of ICE detention centers across the country by Tom Dreisbach at NPR lays bare the contradiction between civil immigrant detention as allegedly “non-punitive” and the highly punitive conditions that migrants experience.

Using a trove of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as well as interviews, Dreisbach makes a variety of discoveries of specific, concerning, and rather heinous abuses of immigrants in ICE custody. Here are just a few of the lowlights:

• One man was found to be HIV positive but was never told about the finding.

• Another person with an open never received basic care for the wound.

• A pregnant woman was provided only with Tylenol after a fall and complaints of severe pain.

• There are several cases of excessive use of force.

• Bugs were found all over food areas in a facility with no apparent attempts to mitigate them.

• One inspector said: “The medical clinic at Stewart was among the dirtiest medical spaces I have ever seen in a U.S. detention facility.”

• Another inspector heard “multiple staff make comments such as, if detainees do not like the treatment, they should not have come to our country.”

• A close look at the death of Kamyar Samimi in ICE detention.

• …I’m not even sure I’ve begun to capture the full range and depth of gut-wrenching examples in Dreisbach’s article.

For more on Stewart Detention Center in particular, and on recent efforts to document detainee complaints, read my previous post here.

Dreisbach’s article itself is a masterclass in investigative journalism: not a wasted word, links to every reference, and a long reference list at the bottom of all of the FOIA documents he received and analyzed for the article. These documents are hosted in DocumentCloud, a PDF management platform from our good friends at MuckRock, which has the benefit of allowing Dreisbach to link directly to the sections of government documents that contain his findings.

Screenshot of Dreisbach’s annotation in DocumentCloud.

I rarely use Substack posts to refer you out to a single news article, but I make exceptions for exceptional work. I highly recommend that you set aside some time to read and digest “Government's own experts found 'barbaric' and 'negligent' conditions in ICE detention” as soon as you can. It’s gutwrenching and it contains mentions of death and abuse, so you may need to be in the right frame of mind to read it. But I believe we have an obligation to understand what is happening inside of these facilities and to educate others about it.

The article includes an audio version that is also featured on NPR’s Up First today. Here are the links to today’s show on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Image from NPR article, credited to Chris Carlson/AP.

Support public scholarship.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to support public scholarship and receive this newsletter in your inbox, click below to subscribe for free. And if you find this information useful, consider sharing it online or with friends and colleagues.