FREE ALL IMMIGRANT DETAINEES TO STOP THE MASS OUTBREAK AND SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS IN DETENTION CENTERS
SHUT DOWN CONCENTRATION CAMPS NOW!
Stop ICE Raids NOW!
BAMN held a press conference on Monday, March 16 at 4PM at the Levin Federal Courthouse, in Detroit where we filed an emergency motion demanding the immediate release of I.C.E. detainees from detention facilities. Detentions, jails are sites at high risk of mass spreading of disease and pandemics. They have high concentrations of population in
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wded spaces. The tragic and preventable deaths in I.C.E. detention centers at our southern border were the result of close quarters allowing disease to spread rapidly, the lack of medical care, food and water, squalid conditions with no soap, people being forced to drink out of toilets, etc. These conditions predate coronavirus outbreak and guarantee the exponential spread of the disease among a population already in poor health and extremely vulnerable. Detainees are not provided with basic soap and water let alone masks or hand sanitizer. To continue to hold immigrants in such dangerous conditions during a global pandemic is tantamount to genocide.
ICE agents over the past week have continued to make arrests in some of the regions hardest hit by the virus including California and New York.
BAMN filed for the Court to release Iraqi detainees whom BAMN represents, Ali Al-Sadoon, Oliver Awshana and Wisam Hamana. Oliver has won his case, one of the rare cases in which the immigration judge determined torture and death if he is deported. Wisam and Ali have both won stays of deportation.
The ICE detention centers at Calhoun and St. Clair which house Ali Al-Sadoon, Oliver Awshana, and Wisam Hamama suffer from overcrowding and poor health conditions.
Federal prisons and many state prisons, including all Michigan State prisons have banned visitations, including most attorney visits, citing the obvious potential for the spread of the virus among prisoners and staff in close quarters. Rather than denying detainees their rights to visitation and proper legal representation, they must be released from these dangerous and deadly conditions where they are certain to be exposed to the virus through guards, other prison staff, through food coming in, through new inmates and through those who have already been exposed as of this moment.
In Ohio, judges in Cuyahoga County held a special Saturday morning session to try to settle cases and expedite the release of hundreds of inmates to prevent an outbreak and rapid spread of the coronavirus within the jail.
Trump’s denial of science, spreading of lies and xenophobia, active blocking of mass testing, etc. has made the U.S. is the most ill-prepared of any industrialized country to deal with this crisis and we certainly have many more positive cases than we know. This makes the release of detainees a matter of life and death of the greatest urgency.
