Could reopening detention center lead to a COVID spike in Homestead?
Looking back on the stretch of time she spent working at the Homestead detention center in 2018 and 2019, Susana remembers feeling ill on a regular basis.
Susana’s job put her in close contact every day with many of the thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who were detained in the facility before it shut down. Crowded conditions and faulty hygiene practices — combined with frequent churn of the detainee population — meant “bugs” were constantly going around, she said. Someone always seemed to be battling a cold, the flu or chicken pox.
In Susana’s view, the months-long lung infection that sent her to the hospital while employed at the detention center was directly connected to her working conditions.
“I was sick almost the entire time I worked there,” said Susana, whose name has been changed because of a confidentiality agreement she signed with Caliburn, the private company that had a contract with the Trump administration to operate the facility. “And it wasn’t just me. So many people ended up contracting pneumonia. Everyone got sick.”
The Biden administration is considering whether to reopen the center, but has not yet made a decision on whether to do so. But the prospect of a reopened center — now known as the Biscayne
Influx Care Facility — amid the ongoing pandemic has Susan and others worried: They believe that the facility is ill-equipped to manage COVID-19, and that resuming operations could compromise the health of not just the detainee population, but also that of the surrounding Homestead area, home to large populations of frontline workers and communities of color.
“If they couldn’t keep a lid on the normal flu going around last time, imagine what would happen with this virus,” she said. “There’s no way to control an epidemic there.”
Lis-Marie Alvarado, an immigration activist, is similarly worried. The organization she is affiliated with, the immigrant nonprofit American
Friends Service Committee, was among those that organized a protest earlier this month demanding that the detention center remain closed.
“Keeping the detention center closed is the only way to keep immigrant children safe and it’s the only way to prevent a COVID-19 outbreak into the community. I believe that a failure to do so would result in more infections and deaths in Homestead, which is already a community that faces existing health, environmental, economic and social inequities,” she said.
“Many people in Homestead are struggling after the pandemic to find stable income, [but] a detention center is not the solution that our community needs. We don’t need a place that
puts workers at risk for COVID-19 and ... and that locks up people like us, other immigrants. We need solutions for economic hardship that don’t put lives at risk.”
JAILS AND DETENTION CENTERS: COVID HOT SPOTS
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, correctional facilities, jails, and detention centers have proved to be COVID hot spots, in part because inmates restricted to crowded dormitories or cells can’t socially distance, and have limited access to other anti-virus precautions.
To track the spread of the novel coronavirus across the U.S prison population, Kathryn Nowotny, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s Department of Sociology, helped launch the COVID
Prison Project. Data from that initiative shows that incarcerated people are nearly five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 as the general population, and nearly three times more likely to succumb to the disease. And most of the nation’s biggest outbreaks have taken place inside correctional facilities.
“Correctional settings have consistently accounted for the largest case clusters in the US over the course of the pandemic,” Nowotny told the Herald in an e-mailed statement.
Infections inside prisons frequently leak out into the surrounding communities and can spread widely among the general public — a result of the high turnover of residents as well as the movement in and out of guards and visitors. Researchers have
documented spikes in COVID cases and deaths in communities adjacent to incarceration facilities.
While it’s not clear what COVID-prevention guidelines would be put in place at the Homestead detention center once it reopens, social distancing regulations have been implemented inside permanent shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees services for migrant children. In fact, the need to adhere to social distancing guidelines in HHS shelters amid a surge of border crossings by unaccompanied minors is one of the reasons temporary facilities like Homestead are being reopened.
Given the lax adherence to hygiene protocols she witnessed during her past stint working at the detention center, Susana is skeptical that a disease as transmissible as COVID-19 could be contained.
“The kids that were there were 13 to 17 years old,” said Susana. “How many workers would have to be there to make sure the kids are washing their hands, and staying six feet apart and wearing a mask basically the entire day?”
What could compound the potential COVID risk of reopening the center are the characteristics and vulnerabilities of its likely workforce. When she was an active employee, Susana says that many of her colleagues lived in multigenerational households, with some relying on public transportation and coming in contact with many people to get to work. Most of the folks who worked at the center, including Susana herself, lacked health insurance.
Having to work at the center during the pandemic “is something that could gravely impact that community” of workers, she said.
People with no intention of working at the center — but who live nearby — are also getting jittery. That includes Reyna, a farmworker who declined to provide her full name because of her immigration status. She says she lives less than 10 minutes away from the detention site.
“The truth is, I think it’s a bad idea for this to reopen. In first place because of the kids who could get sick, and then also because of the people who live nearby, like I do,” she said. “We could get sick too.”