As of April 23, Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California had “97 confirmed COVID-positive cases among detained persons,” according to a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The National Immigration Project, among other organizations. Otay Mesa Detention Center has the largest outbreak of COVID-19 cases of any ICE facility in the U.S.

Lindsay Toczylowski, Executive Director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said the novel coronavirus will “spread like wildfire through these facilities” if physical distancing is not implemented.

“Everybody is at risk because of the lack of medical care that's available in these facilities and because of the close quarters that they're being forced to live in,” she said.

Toczylowski said ICE facilities have never properly taken care of detainees.

“Immigration detention facilities have for a long time proven to us that they’re unable to care for the medical needs for the folks that are detained within them,” she said. “There has been a long history of a lack of medical care, and coupling that with this coronavirus outbreak, the pandemic really has highlighted how dangerous these facilities are.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay-at-home order in March, but people in detention facilities have no choice but to interact with hundreds, if not thousands, of people every day.

“We have thousands of people across the country who are in these congregate facilities in ICE detention centers where they are in very close contact, where they are sleeping just a couple of feet away from each other, where they are experiencing a lack of basic hygiene, a lack of soap, a lack of masks, a lack of hand sanitizers,” she said. “They are being forced to eat in groups of 30 to 100 people where there is no protection given to them.”

Toczylowski hopes that ICE will start to listen to Gov. Newsom and L.A. City Mayor Eric Garcetti and “allow people to participate in the social distancing that we know will help save lives.” She said it’s important to do so because it’s not just an issue for those detained in ICE facilities; it’s a public health issue too.

“We have people who work in our communities, live in our communities, who are coming in and out of these facilities all the time,” she said. “And so continuing to have this discretionary detention center that doesn't need to exist in the way that it does, no one has to be there. Our message in the end is that an immigration detention should not be a death sentence in any instance.”

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Toczylowski secured the release of a detainee from Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, CA on April 2, 2020. His underlying health conditions put him at greater risk of dying from complications from COVID-19.

Toczylowski said she’s been fighting for nearly two and a half years to free Jose Velasquez from ICE detention after he claimed asylum in the U.S. when he was 16 years old. 

“He was initially misidentified as an adult and placed into an ICE detention center with all adults while he was still a minor,” she said. “We had faith leaders from around Southern California, we had supporters, we had all sorts of volunteers who were working with us to give him a sponsor, a place that he could live, and despite that and despite the fact that he came here simply for the right to seek asylum, he was being detained.” 

During the nearly 1,000 days that Velasquez was in ICE detention, he developed hypertension “because of the trauma and how depressed he became during this process.” Hypertension is one of the primary risk factors for COVID-19 that leads to complications, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Because of that, we filed a lawsuit in federal court and eventually joined into a lawsuit with the ACLU of Southern California that was successful,” she said. A judge in the central district of California “recognized that the conditions they were being held in were so dangerous in the midst of this crisis that it was unconstitutional to continue their detention.”

Now Velasquez is quarantined in Los Angeles.

“He'll be on his way to a sponsor soon, and he's had a wonderful welcome from the community in Los Angeles with people dropping off food to him in no-contact manners,” she said. “He’s able to see the support and a real demonstration of Los Angeles values through the reception that he’s received.”

Without the proper protective equipment to visit clients in person, Toczylowski and her team at the Immigration Defenders Law Center are protecting their clients’ right to have an attorney during questioning by appearing for them “telephonically.”

“People's rights to due process and their right to have an attorney by their side is severely restricted because attorneys, my entire team, we were told that in order to visit our clients who were in these facilities, in order to go in and represent them in court, we needed to provide our own personal protective equipment,” she said. “And even if we were able to go out and buy those N95 masks, able to buy goggles, able buy gloves - which we're not because those are sold out all over Los Angeles - even if we were able to, we would be taking those from frontline medical workers in order to just go into a detention center and represent our clients.” 

She said her team’s primary focuses at the moment are federal litigation and negotiating with ICE to free their clients.

“We know that [ICE detention centers] are really tinder boxes. They could become essentially death camps as soon as COVID-19 starts to spread throughout them,” she said.

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