LOS ANGELES _ Last month, as the coronavirus spread through federal immigration detention centers around the country, officials at the Mesa Verde facility in Bakersfield rejected a suggestion to test all detainees there because it would be difficult to quarantine those who tested positive, the officials said.
In a July 6 email, Janese Mull, the acting field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Francisco, said lawyers for ICE had advised that it was in the facility's best interest to look into conducting COVID-19 testing for all detainees.
But Brooke Sanchez Othon, a clinical operations specialist at Wellpath, a private Nashville-based health care company that provides services to ICE detention facilities, pushed back against Mull's direction. The proposal to test all detainees, Sanchez Othon wrote, already had been denied "due to the housing restrictions we face."
"Testing all detainees will potentially cause the same housing issue we had last week but on a larger scale," Sanchez Othon continued, referring to the problem of quarantining infected detainees. "Completing the testing is not the issue it is just what we will need to do with the results once they are received."
The email exchange, obtained by lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and the public defender's office of San Francisco, provides a strikingly candid look at how ICE has failed to contain the spread of the coronavirus in its facilities, critics of the agency contend.
This week, a COVID-19 outbreak emerged at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center, where about 120 detainees are being held. So far, 14 staff members and nine detainees have tested positive.
Detainees and immigrant rights advocates described a chaotic situation there, with at least two men hospitalized and several more displaying symptoms of the virus while being housed in large dormitories with others who feared becoming infected. As test results trickled in, the staff ran out of quarantine spaces, at one point reportedly placing two men in a bathroom for hours.
An ICE spokesman declined to comment because of pending litigation. GEO could not be immediately reached for comment.
On Thursday, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a searing ruling, saying that ICE has "responded to the health crisis in such a cavalier fashion" that it has "lost the right to be trusted."
"The documentary evidence shows that the defendants have avoided widespread testing of staff and detainees at the facility, not for lack of tests, but for fear that positive test results would require them to implement safety measures that they apparently felt were not worth the trouble," Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in granting the temporary restraining order.
Chhabria ordered officials to administer weekly rapid COVID-19 tests to all detainees at the facility and not take in new detainees.
Emails and other documents obtained by the lawyers, who sued the federal government in April over conditions at the facility amid the pandemic, provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at ICE's response to the novel coronavirus.
Detainees in dorm B demanded to be tested for days before facility staff supplied tests late last month, advocates and detainees said. In an email sent Wednesday, an attorney for the federal government said that 78 detainees in the remaining three dormitories at Mesa Verde were tested and seven others refused testing. Detainees from dorm B were moved into dorm C so that dorm B could be designated for those who test positive.
In a May 18 memo, Nathan Allen, the warden at Mesa Verde, laid out a COVID-19 testing plan. Testing would begin two days later, and detainees who refused to be tested would be held together in a dorm for 14 days. Those who tested positive would be moved to medical isolation areas or a general population living area, depending on the number of people.
"Any detainee who tests positive will be quarantined appropriately according to CDC guidelines," he wrote.
But that plan was not executed, documents show.
Three days later, the assistant field office director, Alexander Pham, wrote in notes from a conference call that, because of constraints that the ICE Health Service Corps guidelines would put on housing resources, "we will be limiting the scope of testing as much as possible."
Further correspondence makes clear ICE and GEO Group's indifference to testing, and their inability to agree on a consistent strategy, advocates say.
Another heated exchange began May 21 when Wendy Baca, the acting health service administrator for Mesa Verde, addressed by email concerns that she had with the warden's plan for testing "street arrests" _ those brought to the facility after being arrested by ICE rather than being transferred in.
Baca said that testing those detainees immediately and then releasing them to the facility's general population right after they test negative "will not ensure COVID-19 does not make it into the facility. This is due to the incubation period (generally 14 days) needed to trigger a positive COVID-19 test result."
Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director for ICE in San Francisco, replied by email bluntly: "It appears GEO has no interest in conducting asymptomatic testing AND the test kits GEO secured are not the IHSC (ICE Health Service Corps) recommended type. You can't make this ... up."
On May 26, the warden, Allen, wrote that the acting field office director "would rather not have staff testing" because it would affect Enforcement and Removal Operations, the arm of ICE that handles deportations.
A month later, an executive with the GEO Group, the private prison company that manages the facility, scolded Allen, saying that his testing plan fell short of identifying mitigating strategies for incoming detainees who don't consent to being tested but are placed directly into a housing unit anyway.
"We cannot just throw up our hands and say there isn't anything we can do," said Paul Laird, GEO's western region vice president. "We should at minimum identify specific areas within the unit for new arrivals. Maybe it is in a row of bunks in the front, maybe in the back etc, but we can't just scatter them throughout the unit without any controls.
"Whether it be tape on the floor, privacy curtains, or any other strategy you can identify, it would be better than just saying we are unable to do anything."
