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11 immigrants sue ICE, seeking release from Alvarado detention center where coronavirus has spread

“An immigration sentence shouldn’t be a death sentence,” lawyer says; federal judge orders U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas to respond by May 29.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle ordered an expedited response from the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas by May 29 on a lawsuit seeking the release of 11 immigrants being held at the Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, where a coronavirus outbreak has spread.

In a federal court filing entered Friday, the immigrants from countries including Mexico, Nicaragua and Kyrgystan are suing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a bid for release from the civil detention center in Alvarado, arguing they are medically vulnerable to the deadly coronavirus.

The suit is one of dozens around the nation that seeks the release of immigrants in the nation’s civil detention system, where more than 1,100 immigrants have contracted coronavirus. Immigration attorneys and public health experts have warned for weeks that the detention centers, jails and prisons are petri dishes for deadly coronavirus contagion.

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But the Prairieland case has highlighted the dangers of routine transfers between lockups during a public health pandemic. The Dallas Morning News first reported April 20 on the transfer to Prairieland of about two dozen immigrants from a Pennsylvania jail where an outbreak had occurred. Several of those immigrants later tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the immigrants and their families.

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The immigrants are particularly vulnerable to the deadly contagion and are unable to safely distance from each in the close quarters at Prairieland, a detention center now holding nearly 500 immigrants, according to the suit. As of Tuesday, 45 immigrants at Prairieland have tested positive for coronavirus, according to ICE.

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The lawsuit alleges that ICE transported a plane of about 80 individuals from three East Coast locations, where there were coronavirus outbreaks, to Prairieland without taking safety precautions,

An ICE spokesperson said the Department of Homeland Security agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation. “However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement with or stipulation to any of the allegations,” ICE said in a statement.

But lawyers for the immigrants countered that ICE should be taking many more precautions.

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“An immigration sentence shouldn’t be a death sentence,” said Sehla Ashai, an adjunct professor with the Texas A&M University law school. The school’s immigration rights clinic, led by law professor Fatma Marouf, brought the writ for habeas, which if granted would compel authorities to consider the request for a temporary restraining order against ICE, the Prairieland warden and others. The Chicago-based law firm of Loevy & Loevy and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Services, or RAICES, assisted in the suit.

The suit and its affidavits also allege that transfers to Prairieland came from two other Texas locations that later became public hotspots for coronavirus infections. In early March, one immigrant plaintiff was transferred from the Dallas County jail, where on March 25 the first public disclosure was made of coronavirus infections. There are about 221 infected inmates at the Dallas County Jail, according to Texas Commission on Jail Standards updates. A judge declined to release several of the inmates there in late April.

Other detainees were bused from the Bluebonnet detention center near Amarillo on April 7, according to an affidavit in the filings. In recent weeks, that detention center has seen the second-highest cluster of coronavirus cases in the nation’s detention system. As of Tuesday, there were 111 cases at Bluebonnet, according to ICE’s updates. Bluebonnet has the capacity to hold about 1000 detainees, ICE has said.

Habeas filings and TRO requests before the federal courts in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals are challenging, said Dan Gividen, the former chief counsel for the Dallas office of ICE. “In this circuit, [the federal judges] are more likely to agree that they don’t have jurisdiction than other circuits like the 9th,” Gividen said.

But Gividen is also critical of the manner in which his former employer has handled detainees as the pandemic spread, and as transfers continued from hot spots of infection.

“Everybody knew what was going on with the coronavirus. Everyone knew detention centers are places it spreads like wildfire,” Gividen said.

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