By Ashoka Mukpo, ACLU Staff Reporter

In the 1980s, fewer than 2,000 people were locked up in an immigration detention facility on an average day in America. 

Since then, that number has skyrocketed, quadrupling from 7,475 to 32,985 people detained by ICE per day between 1995 and 2016. Under the administration of President Donald Trump, the numbers have shot up even higher — at one point last year, a staggering 56,000 people were behind bars each night in an ICE detention facility. When asylum-seekers and other migrants in Customs and Border Protection facilities are included, the total figure rises to nearly 80,000 people detained by the U.S. government per day.

This explosive growth of the U.S. immigration detention system tracks the rise of mass incarceration in America, prompted by punitive legislation passed by Congress in the mid-1990s around the same time as the infamous “crime bill,” and later through a massive post-9/11 expansion. Since then, the number of detained immigrants in the U.S. has grown nearly every year under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Now, it’s a sprawling prison system, with 40 new immigration detention centers opening their doors just since the beginning of the Trump presidency alone. 

For immigrants caught in this system, life is often a nightmare of rampant medical neglect, overuse of solitary confinement, sexual abuse, excessive use of force, arbitrary transfers to other facilities across the country, unreasonably high bond costs, and long periods spent away from family members and loved ones.
 
The COVID-19 crisis pulled the curtain back once again on the abuse and neglect that is deeply embedded in these detention facilities. While the rest of the country hunkered down in their homes, immigrants in detention have been forced to confront the pandemic in cramped conditions without adequate cleaning protocols or in some cases even basic sanitation supplies like soap. Guards have violently retaliated against immigrants protesting those conditions, and ICE has resisted efforts to secure their release for public health reasons.

A combination of lawsuits and public pressure eventually forced ICE to release more than 1,000 people from detention because of concerns over the spread of COVID-19 between mid-March and early May. Legal actions brought by the ACLU have secured the release of more than 450 people so far. But there are still more than 21,000 people in immigration detention — a drop since last year’s high that is largely attributable to a near-total shutdown of the southern border.
 
Whenever a new administration takes office, it will inherit an immigration detention system that has become an out-of-control, wasteful, and cruel behemoth. Drastically reducing the number of people trapped inside that system will be a crucial first step towards establishing a more humane and responsible immigration policy.
 
In recent weeks, the ACLU interviewed a number of immigrants who were released from detention due to concerns over the COVID-19 crisis. They shared the following stories of what it was like to be incarcerated in an immigration detention facility during the pandemic.
 
*Note: interviews have been condensed and edited.

JESUS

Dreamer, born in Mexico.
Detained at the Pike County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania for over 12 months.

Credit: Marco Calderon for the ACLU

“My mother and father had been here for a long time. When I was 7, she came to pick us up in Mexico, and we crossed somewhere in Arizona. I’ve been here ever since then.
 
“At a young age I started working in restaurants. When I got to high school, in my mind I said, ‘Okay, what’s going to happen?’ I can’t get financial aid, at that point there was no DACA, so I wound up dropping out. I can’t complain about it because I became a plumber, which is what I’ve been for the past 18 years.
 
“My wife is an American citizen, and my kids were all born here. I’ve never been to Mexico. I mean even though it’s my country, it’s a strange country. I’ve been here all my life. I have an 18-year-old daughter, along with a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old, and my son, who’s 5.
 
“We recently moved to Pennsylvania, where I purchased a property to fix up and started working with a real estate company. We’re trying to build a future for our kids.
 
“I was already on ICE’s radar from a DUI in 2010. They picked me up at my house on April 2, 2019. I came out to warm up the car to bring my kids to school, when an officer grabbed me by my neck. They showed me their badge, which said ICE, and I realized they’d come for me.
 
“I told my wife to contact my lawyer because she was begging them, you know, saying ‘He didn’t do anything wrong. Why are you taking him?’ The kids were crying. It was very sad, but I asked my wife not to beg them. They took me to Pike County [Correctional Facility], and that’s when it started.
 
“When you first get there, you’re nervous. You don’t know what’s going to happen. So it’s very scary. You have people in there that get so stressed that they break down.
 
“And if they see that they send you to the nurse, who asks, ‘How are you feeling? Are you stressed?’ Well yes, of course.
 
“But if you start answering the questions honestly, all of a sudden they put you in what they call the turtle suit,* because they’re afraid you’re going to hurt yourself. So then you’re locked up in solitary for two or three days while they observe you. It makes it so much worse. You can’t contact your family. It’s really sad.
 
“Seeing your family through glass is hard. I told my wife after the first time she visited me that unless the kids really want to come, I don’t want you to bring them. It’s like you’re in there trying to distract yourself and once you see each other it’s like reopening a wound that’s closing.
 
“Once COVID started going we started hearing rumors that it was already in other cell blocks. The [ICE staff] kept on quitting. They were overworked always, but once COVID hit forget it, they were understaffed. It came to a point where we’d be on lockdown for 23 and a half hours a day.
 
“I’m high risk — I have high blood pressure and asthma — so they released me. When I got into the car, me and my kids just started hugging each other and crying. As a child I went through so much domestic violence. I didn’t want my kids to go through anything like that so I’ve always spent as much time as I can with them.
 
“Not being with them for a whole year was extremely hard, and seeing them again was the most amazing thing. And here we are, you know. Trying to push forward.
 
“I’m only out because of the coronavirus. Once it’s over, I’m scared that they might come and pick me up again.”

*An “anti-suicide smock” that resembles a straitjacket.

ADRIAN AND YASMANI

Asylum-seeking couple originally from Cuba.
Detained at Otay Mesa Detention Facility for over three months. 

Credit: Saul Martinez for the ACLU

Adrian: “Before I left, I was in charge of sending doctors on mission trips to other countries.”
 
Yasmani: “I worked at a radio and television agency, organizing programs and broadcasters for the night schedule.
 
“We left Cuba for Guyana, traveling to Brazil and then up through the Americas into Mexico. We were in Tijuana for months until our numbers were called so we could turn ourselves in at the border in San Ysidro [outside of San Diego, CA].”
 
A: “After being detained in a border detention center known as a ‘hielera,’ we were transferred to the Otay Mesa detention center. It was horrible there, like another world. When the coronavirus started, we went on a hunger strike because they weren’t giving us masks. [The guards] started attacking us. They would show up dressed all in black with tear-gas guns and threaten us, saying go back to your rooms.
 
“We didn’t want to; we wanted to be taken out of there. We did things right, waiting for the process in Mexico only to be treated like that. They didn’t care. They had masks and we didn’t.
 
“They took away about seven people from our pod, because a guard had coronavirus. He would take his mask off and walk around coughing. After he stopped coming to work for about two weeks, they placed our pod in quarantine.
 
“Everyone realized that our pod had coronavirus and that’s when we started worrying more. We were trapped in there, but they didn’t adopt any measures; they didn’t give us anything and we couldn’t keep any distance. In fact, if someone got sick, they would take that person out of the pod for a week and after that they would bring the person back. As someone who is HIV positive, I feared I would not survive if I got sick in there.”
 
Y: “After being released, we felt good to breathe fresh air again. But in my case, I also feel bad because I have an ankle monitor on — you feel like you’re still a prisoner. They call you at night at all times and again at dawn. During the process, you can’t work. We don’t have jobs, and we aren’t independent.
 
“But I think, if we made it this far, it was God’s will — we just need to wait it out until the process happens.”

NAHOM

Refugee and lawful permanent resident, originally from Eritrea.
Detained at the York County Prison in Pennsylvania for two months.

Credit: Allison Shelley for the ACLU

“I came here when I was 8 years old, from Eritrea with my family in 1998. We had gone through a lot of war, turmoil, and civil unrest. We were able to come to the United States as lawful permanent residents thanks to literal miracles from relatives here, and I’ve been here ever since.
 
“In 2007, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. In the span of a few weeks, I went from weighing 200 pounds to 140. It altered my life completely. I was taking pain medications and anxiety medications. What got me into trouble with immigration was prescription fraud.
 
“I took a plea bargain because I thought it wouldn’t affect me in a negative way. I wasn’t thinking about immigration, I was just thinking about my parents back home. She’s 78, and he’s 91, and I needed to take care of them. They didn’t inform me it would affect me like this.
 
“Immigration picked me up from the jail and brought me to the York County Prison.
 
“The food there made me sick because of my Crohn’s disease, and I started losing weight. I couldn’t see a full-fledged doctor, just nurse practitioners. They didn’t really understand my condition, and it took awhile for them to get my medication. They treat you like you’re the scum of the earth. What I heard from other people as well is that they would treat a severe issue as if it was something to put a Band-Aid on.
 
“When COVID started, people went on hunger strike because the guards had masks, but we didn’t have anything. And they’d just wear them when they felt like it.
 
“They didn’t offer us anything until people stopped eating. It took a long time. There had already been a confirmed case in the jail, and they hadn’t done anything about it.
 
“I was amazed to get out. It was a literal miracle. I could properly take care of myself and have some sort of control over my life and health.
 
“I went straight to my mom and dad’s. They cried. They had thought the worst, since I’ve never been that long without them before. They were happy, but they were crying and worried at the same time.”

ALEJANDRA

Asylum-seeker, originally from Mexico.
Detained at the Eloy Detention Center for 8 months and the La Palma Correctional Center for 3 months. Both facilities are in Arizona.

Credit: Drew English for the ACLU

“Before turning myself over to immigration, I was waiting in Nogales, Mexico. I had trouble with the mafia there, and they cut off the thumb on my right hand. They told me to leave and that they didn’t want to see me again. I was in very bad shape, bleeding so much.
 
“I told a social worker that I was really scared and being followed, so she took me to [Border Patrol], and they said if I was in danger I should present myself at the port of entry.
 
“From Nogales they took me to the Eloy Detention Center, still in Arizona. At Eloy, they don’t have special conditions for trans women. They have us mixed in with the men. We suffered a lot of discrimination and abuse, but thankfully it didn’t go beyond that. 
 
“Eventually I was transferred to La Palma [Correctional Center]. When the coronavirus situation first happened people were all crammed together, with no face coverings. They didn’t give us hand sanitizer or gloves, none of that. The [corrections officers] would work and cough, without any face coverings or protection. And they come from the outside while we are inside. I think that’s how people started getting infected.
 
“A lot of people complained, but that’s when you realize they don’t care what you say. ICE said our right was to shut our mouths, take it, and wait for our turn to get out or be deported.
 
“When they told me I was getting out, I was so happy, because I’d been detained for nearly a year. I’m doing really well with my sponsors now, they’re beautiful people. They treat me very well. After so much struggling, here I am.”

ROGELIO

Undocumented resident, born in Guatemala. Has lived in the US since 2013.
Detained for 15 days at the Plymouth Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, then for three and a half months at the Strafford County Department of Corrections in Dover, New Hampshire. 

Credit: Channing Johnson for the ACLU

“When I first arrived, for about three years, I worked at pizzerias and restaurants. Now I work in construction. I like to spend time with my family and study English – that’s my hobby.
 
“It was just a day like any other. I was on my way to work at my construction job when ICE stopped us — they said it was a routine check, and that’s when they caught me.
 
“In detention, they give you a manual of what the rules are. They claim that you can go out in the courtyard and have fun or whatever, but it’s a lie. There’s no courtyard. I wouldn’t wish detention on my worst enemy because it truly is horrible. Some of the officers were very kind, but others just mess with you. One night my face and teeth were hurting and I told one of them I needed a painkiller. He said, ‘If you don’t go to bed, I’m going to put a mark on your record and send you to the hole.’
 
“We saw the news about the virus and started getting worried, because they were still bringing people in off the streets. We got scared when some people inside started having dry coughs. We were in bunk beds, all together, and couldn’t keep distance. There were a lot of sick people. I couldn’t say whether they had coronavirus or not, but they were rushed to the detention infirmary for eight, nine, 10 days. Some didn’t come back, and we never found out what happened to them. That’s when we got really scared, because we didn’t know what was going on.
 
“When I was detained, my wife was six months pregnant. I wasn’t there for the birth of my first-born child. That’s what I cared about — being with them. When I was released, he was about two weeks old.
 
“I was really happy, because I felt like I’d been in a contagion zone. I wouldn’t like to go back, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

DAMARY

Asylum-seeker, originally from Cuba.

Credit: Gary Bogdon for the ACLU

“I flew from Cuba to Nicaragua and then traveled by bus through Honduras, Guatemala, and then Mexico. I crossed the border, and immediately turned myself over to Border Patrol. From there, I was sent to detention in McAllen, Texas for several  days and then was transferred to Michigan where I remained for months until my release.
 
“I traveled by plane with my hands and feet in shackles. They said in case of an emergency you had to put on your life vest and oxygen mask, but if anything had happened I wouldn’t have been able to do it because of the shackles.
 
“I won’t say they treated me badly — nobody beat me — but I suffered a lot while detained. I had never been in prison before that, and everyone suffers there.
 
“I have high blood pressure and gastritis, so the coronavirus was a big worry for me because I’m a vulnerable person. If I were to catch the virus, I would be in more danger than most.
 
“We were at risk, some people there didn’t wear masks and they could infect us. Not everyone practiced social distancing around us. We were all very worried, and every day we became more vulnerable to catching the virus. But a person who is afraid to go back to their country and wants to fight for political asylum has to wait as long as it takes.
 
“When I was released, I was so happy. I didn’t know what to do so I cried and laughed. Now I’m home with relatives complying with all the immigration proceedings. But I know a lot of people who are still there are at risk and suffering. People that I came to care about a lot since we were there together for so long. It’s very painful.”

By Jessica Ayoub, ACLU Public Engagement Strategist

When voters resoundingly chose Karen McDonald in the August 4 primary to become her party’s nominee for Oakland County prosecutor, the ACLU of Michigan considered it a major win. Not for a particular candidate, but for the policies that can help us end our community’s overreliance on incarceration and eliminate racism within our criminal legal system. Voters are increasingly seeking the kinds of policies at the heart of our Smart Justice Campaign, as illustrated by this race and many others across the country.

Oakland County is one of the state’s largest counties. It has Michigan’s second-largest jail population and some of the greatest racial disparities in the criminal legal system statewide. For instance, Black people are six times more likely to be admitted to the Oakland County Jail than white people — even though they only make up about 14 percent of the county’s total population. There is no doubt that the recently ousted prosecutor played a significant role in getting the county into this shameful predicament, and a prosecutor committed to reform can help get us out.

The prosecutor’s role is uniquely powerful. No single person has as much control over the fate of individuals caught up in the criminal legal system than the local prosecutor. Elected as their county’s chief law enforcement officer, prosecutors must strive to reflect the views and priorities of their community members, who are increasingly supporting measures to end mass incarceration and demand transparency in decision-making.

Michigan is among the many places where this is happening.

Earlier this month, a story in the The Intercept took note of the growing momentum behind the movement to elect progressive prosecutors:

“On Tuesday night [Aug. 4], the movement realized a major step forward, with reformist prosecutors . . . winning Democratic primaries in counties covering at least 3 million people in four states.”

One of the people featured in The Intercept’s story was McDonald, a reform-minded candidate who defeated 12-year incumbent Jessica Cooper in what was described as a huge upset to win her party’s nomination for the Oakland County prosecutor job.

Part of what makes the win so heartening is the margin of victory. Voters soundly rejected Cooper. In doing so, they also rejected years of tough on crime policies.

For instance, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole should be resentenced, and that life sentences should be sought only in “rare and unusual circumstances,” Cooper responded by contending that 90 percent of the children her office had locked up for life should never be released. In other words, in her view, nearly every case represented a “rare and unusual circumstance,” demonstrating an extreme lack of both compassion and common sense.

Cooper moreover was notorious for her harsh prosecution of medical marijuana cases, refusal to participate in drug treatment courts, and an overall lack of transparency from her office. McDonald, on the other hand, campaigned on ending cash bail, investing in alternatives to incarceration, and holding police accountable.

The primary election outcome was also encouraging in Washtenaw County, MI, where progressive candidate Eli Savit won the Democratic nomination for county prosecutor with more than 50 percent of the vote in the three-way race.

“Savit ran on eliminating cash bail, ending coercive plea bargaining, focusing on rehabilitation and reintegration for people who’ve completed criminal sentences, and moving away from a ‘jail-first’ mentality by prioritizing diversion and treating mental health, trauma, and addiction outside of the criminal system,” The Intercept reported.

The National ACLU and several of its state affiliates, including Michigan, have been deeply committed to these reforms.

As a nonpartisan organization, the ACLU does not support or endorse candidates. Instead, we worked hard to make sure voters knew the policy positions of prosecutorial candidates on a variety of issues related to racism and over-incarceration by launching our “Power of Prosecutors” campaign in June. We then sent a briefing guide to all 114 county prosecutor candidates throughout the state. That guide, “The Power of Prosecutors: A Platform for Smart Justice,” outlines the critical policy reforms we think are needed to end mass incarceration. Moreover, we asked each candidate to submit a survey outlining their positions on combatting racism, police accountability, clearing marijuana convictions for now legal amounts, investing in alternatives to incarceration, and other factors key to overhauling the criminal legal system.

We invested greatly in making sure Oakland County voters, in particular, knew the candidates’ positions on key issues. To that end, we spread our message through a television ad that reached more than 98 percent of voters, digital ads that reached more than one million people, direct mail to 80,000 households, nearly 40,000 calls and more than 400,000 texts to voters about the candidates.

This work paid off. Along with informing voters about the platforms of candidates in the primary, we significantly built our capacity by recruiting about 1,200 new volunteers, which will allow us to continue this push into the November general election.

We will continue educating voters about the importance of prosecuting attorneys, and about candidates’ positions on reform. Most importantly, we will be there reminding voters to make their voice heard — our criminal legal system and democracy depend on it.

By Udi Ofer, ACLU Director, Justice Division

As Democrats gather this week to nominate their presidential candidate, they will also adopt the party’s proposed platform. On criminal justice reform, the platform continues to move the party away from its harmful tough-on-crime past. But it also misses an opportunity to respond to Americans’ desire to seek transformational changes in the criminal legal system.
 
For the past 60 years, presidential politics have played an outsized role in criminal justice policy-setting, despite this issue being largely the domain of states and localities. Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 90 percent are under state or local jurisdiction.
 
Barry Goldwater was the first national politician to focus on criminal justice issues as part of a presidential election, invoking tough-on-crime rhetoric and racist attacks on the civil rights movement. The five-term U.S. senator from Arizona was the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and ran on a law-and-order platform that denounced the civil rights movement as lawless and equated it with criminal behavior. He lost the 1964 presidential election, but his candidacy provided a boost for future law-and-order candidates.
 
In the 1968 elections, Richard Nixon made law-and-order a central theme of his winning campaign, dedicating 17 speeches to the topic. He deployed the “Southern strategy” to appeal directly to Southern white working-class voters who opposed racial desegregation and the advances being made by the civil rights movement.
 
It was during the Reagan administration that the full development of the law-and-order strategy began to take hold. While Nixon called for a war on drugs in 1971, President Ronald Reagan brought Frankenstein to life — dramatically increasing law enforcement budgets and slashing funding for drug treatment, prevention, and education.
 
By the early 1990s, Democratic politicians wanted to wrest control of criminal justice issues and began a bidding war with Republicans on who could impose harsher penalties. In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime. Weeks before the New Hampshire primary, he flew home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, who was mentally incapacitated. During Clinton’s tenure, he slashed funding for public housing by 61 percent while boosting corrections funding by 171 percent, made it easier for public housing to exclude anyone with a criminal history, and signed into law the infamous 1994 Crime Bill.
 
By 1996, the Democratic Party platform invoked law-and-order rhetoric that differed little from what Republicans expressed two decades earlier:

“The Democratic Party under President Clinton is putting more police on the streets and tougher penalties on the books … President Clinton made three-strikes-you’re-out the law of the land, to ensure that the most dangerous criminals go to jail for life, with no chance of parole. We established the death penalty for nearly 60 violent crimes … We provided almost $8 billion in new funding to help states build new prison cells … [W]hen young people commit serious violent crimes, they should be prosecuted like adults. We established boot camps for young non-violent offenders.”

It wasn’t until 2008 that the tone of the Democratic Party platform began to change, and by 2016, in response to the killing of Freddie Grey at the hands of Baltimore police and other high profile instances of police violence, Democrats called for “reforming our criminal justice system and ending mass incarceration.”

Which brings us to this year’s proposed platform. It blasts police violence and private prisons and calls for a reduction in the nation’s incarceration rate. It supports front-end reforms like tackling the school-to-prison pipeline, fighting mandatory minimum laws and ending cash bail, as well as back-end reforms, such as reentry services for people leaving prison and increasing the use of presidential clemency powers to release people serving long sentences.
 
Compared to past DNC platforms, this year’s proposed platform represents a dramatic shift from the 1990s. The Democratic Party has reversed course on certain positions, now saying it is “unjust — and unjustifiable — to punish children and teenagers as harshly as adults,” the opposite of the party’s 1996 platform. This year’s proposed platform also responds to the Black Lives Matter movement by recognizing systemic racism and calling for a dramatic change in the legal standard for police use of deadly force. And it has reversed course on the death penalty, now opposing it.
 
But even while recognizing this evolution of the platform and the challenges of finding consensus among a party with diverse viewpoints, it is still disappointing to see the platform fail in some respects to meet the demands of the moment.
 
For example, the proposed Democratic platform calls for an end to the “failed war on drugs, which has imprisoned millions of Americans,” yet fails to support policies that would actually end this failed war that has disproportionately harmed Black and Brown communities. Not only does the platform neglect to call for the decriminalization of all drug possession, which would strike a genuine blow to the war on drugs, it fails to even support marijuana legalization, which is supported by a large majority of Americans. The call to end the war on drugs is meaningless without these basic proposals.
 
Moreover, on policing, the platform is silent on the call to slash police budgets and redirect those resources into alternatives to policing, and to reinvest in communities historically targeted by the police. Instead, the platform mostly continues to tout procedural reforms and calls for greater transparency and accountability. These are important reforms, but they miss the mark on what millions of people are marching on the streets to demand — a fundamental reorientation of public safety, divesting resources away from police and into alternatives to police and towards resources that will build long-term safety and stability.
 
Finally, even though during the campaign trail candidate Joe Biden and a dozen other candidates committed to the ACLU to cut incarceration rates by 50 percent if they were to become president, the Democratic Party platform is now silent on setting this or any other concrete reduction goal.
 
The Democratic Party has a terrible track record on criminal justice issues. It has now clearly broken away from this tarnished past, and the party platform recognizes the destructive crisis of mass incarceration. Yet the party still fails to recognize the need for transformational change, and until it does so, it will miss providing a home for the millions of Americans who are tired of tinkering around the edges and are looking for transformational change of a criminal legal system rooted in white supremacy and racism.