News

A suicide attempt and new report emphasize deteriorating mental health conditions at Torrance County Detention Facility

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A man detained at Torrance County Detention Facility has attempted suicide in response to his conditions, according to his legal counsel, just as a newly released report details the failures of mental health care at the facility. Since August, three men have reportedly attempted suicide at migrant detention facilities in New Mexico. The first man, Kesley Vial, died by suicide in August at Torrance. Another man housed at the Cibola County Correctional Center attempted suicide in October and survived. Raphael Oliveira do Nascimento, a Brazilian, attempted suicide at the Torrance facility on November 30, Ian Philabaum, codirector of Anticarceral Legal Organizing at Innovation Law Lab, said.

American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico

New government report details reportedly unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Torrance County Detention Facility

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The federal Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Inspector General issued an alert this week to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to recommend that all individuals housed at the Torrance County Detention Facility be relocated due to reportedly unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The 19-page report issued on Wednesday detailed conditions that include a broken toilet containing human waste in a vacant cell in an occupied housing unit, as well as staffing shortages, a lack of hot water access and other issues. Several nonprofit organizations that advocate for the rights of detainees called on ICE to release the individuals housed at Torrance County Detention Facility. The Democrats in New Mexico’s congressional delegation also issued a press release late Friday condemning the “inhumane” conditions and called on President Joe Biden to “act swiftly” to address the reported unsafe conditions. “ICE should no longer defend the inhumane living conditions at the Torrance County Detention Facility.

Allegra Love

Legal experts say Haitian asylum seekers held at Torrance County Detention Center not allowed due process rights

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The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has transported a group of Haitian asylum seekers to the Torrance County Detention Facility and are not allowing the asylum seekers their due process rights, legal immigration experts have said. In addition, the asylum seekers at the Torrance County facility could have witnessed U.S. Border Patrol on horseback with whips confronting Haitian migrants outside of Del Ray, Texas, in September, Allegra Love, an attorney who works with migrants, told NM Political Report. Love said that all the people currently held in immigration detention should be “released today.”

“All of this is unnecessary,” she said. Love said that in addition to the asylum seekers’ due process rights being violated, the U.S. is violating their human rights and the U.S. is in violation of international law in the way it is handling asylum seekers. An ICE spokesperson said that ICE provides access to counsel.

ACLU-NM

Lawsuit against alleges civil rights violations by private prison company, Torrance County

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Nine migrants who were detained in Torrance County Detention Facility and a nonprofit called the Santa Fe Dreamers Project are suing the operator of the facility and Torrance County for an alleged incident when guards pepper sprayed the detainees to disrupt a hunger strike last year. The nine individual plaintiffs are asylum seekers, mostly from Cuba and Guatemala. They engaged in a peaceful hunger strike in May 2020 to protest their living conditions, find out more information about their immigrant status and to protest the lack of COVID-19 precautions at the facility, according to the complaint. The lawsuit alleges that CoreCivic, the private company that runs the facility, violated the individual plaintiffs’ rights to be free from excessive or arbitrary force when the guards sprayed the migrants in a small enclosed space with pepper spray a few days after the migrants began their hunger strike. The lawsuit also alleges Torrance County failed in its duty to care for the people detained in the facility.

ACLU of New Mexico

Questions on COVID-19 among migrant detainees

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When the state Department of Health reported a two-day spike in COVID-19 at Cibola County Correctional Center late last month, activists and lawyers who work with detained migrants didn’t know how many had tested positive. The Milan facility, run by a private company called CoreCivic, also houses federal prisoners under U.S. Marshals Service, as well as county prisoners. “We have one of the largest immigration detention systems in the world,” said Rebekah Entralgo, media advocacy specialist for the California organization Freedom for Immigrants which works with detainees. And she said by phone that the private companies that run detention centers “thrive off secrecy.”

Allegra Love, executive director of Santa Fe Dreamers Project, which provides free legal services to immigrants, said her impression is that the migrant population at the Cibola facility is “low.”

“That information is almost impossible to get and CoreCivic isn’t compelled to tell us daily count numbers,” Love said. New Mexico’s congressional delegation sent a letter to CoreCivic last week because of the recent spike in COVID-19 at the multi-use detention center.

Corecivic

Imprisoned migrants seeking better prison conditions describe an attack by pepper- spraying guards

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ESTANCIA, N.M. – The migrants were on a days-long hunger strike when guards entered their prison dormitory in full riot gear —gas masks, shields and canisters of pepper spray. The officers corralled the two dozen or so inmates into a huddled mass. Two men fell to their knees, begging them not to attack. “Suddenly, they just started gassing us,” said Yandy Bacallao, a 34-year-old asylum seeker from Cuba. “You could just hear everyone screaming for help.”

At least one person collapsed.