This piece originally appeared on the ACLU of New Mexico’s blog.

The privately-run ICE detention center in Torrance County, New Mexico failed its government inspection earlier this year, with a newly released report finding severe understaffing, unsanitary food, and visitation rules that were inaccessible to people with no money, among other complaints.

The failed inspection is the latest in a series of troubling news for the Torrance County Detention Center, which earlier this year reported a massive COVID-19 outbreak among detainees and staff, as well as reports of guards using harsh chemical agents in response to a peaceful hunger strike protesting conditions at the facility.

The Torrance detention center in Estancia, southeast of Albuquerque, detains male migrants for ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as men and women for Torrance County. It is managed by CoreCivic, a private for-profit prison corporation based in Nashville, Tenn. The inspection was conducted from July 27 through 29 by The Nakamoto Group, a private contractor that inspects ICE detention facilities. ICE has 60 days from the completion to post the results online.

Allegra Love, an attorney with the El Paso Immigration Collaborative who has worked with detained migrants at Torrance and other ICE facilities, said The Nakamoto Group inspections are notoriously friendly to the facilities and failures are rare.

“I’m surprised that they failed the inspection because I’ve worked in detention centers for the last seven years and they’re all really terrible,” Love said. “You’re never at one that is good or that treats their detainees well, but they all pass their inspections.”

ICE and CoreCivic did not respond to requests for comments about the inspection, which found the facility “does not meet standards.”

During their July review of Torrance, The Nakamoto Group inspectors found 22 deficiencies in how ICE detainees were held, including four categorized as deficiencies in priority components.

Among the most concerning for Love is severe understaffing. Although not a specific deficiency, inspectors noted that “the current staffing level is at 50 percent of the authorized correction/security positions. Staff is currently working mandatory overtime shifts.”

Love said she’s had trouble connecting with a client at the facility, with a staff member saying it would take two weeks just to schedule a legal call. Lack of staff, she said, is a security concern.

“This is not a greenhouse or coffee shop,” she said. “They’re in charge of people’s well-being and safety.”

Twelve of the complaints cited by investigators focused on food preparation, including safety and sanitation concerns with how food was prepared and presented. Food service should be “under the direct supervision of an experienced food service administrator,” the report said. Inspectors also found the facility’s dishwasher wasn’t hot enough to actually sanitize dishes.

That didn’t surprise ​​Ernesto Rodrigo Callado, who was detained for 10 months at Torrance and even worked in the kitchen for a time. The food, he said, was often flavorless and undercooked and was a constant source of complaints.

“The beans were hard, you could throw them at the wall three times and if you kept going you’d break the wall,” Callado said. “They made rice that tasted like going to the yard and eating dirt.”

He said except for a few dishes he tried to prepare his own meals and buy food from the commissary instead.

Alvaro, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities, said he also worked in the Torrance kitchen and noticed food that smelled bad. People often had stomach aches that he attributed to the food.

“Just because we’re immigrants doesn’t mean we have to eat like dogs,” he said.

Inspectors also found deficiencies in visitation access. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the facility replaced general in-person visits with paid video calls through tablets, making them inaccessible for detainees without money.

Callado said the tablets were often slow to load and even just waiting for a photo his family had sent him to load could quickly become unaffordable.

The report also noted grievance paperwork and medical grievances were not being maintained properly in detainees’ files and directed the facility to ensure grievances are filed as required. ICE received 43 grievances from detainees at Torrance in the year leading up to the late July inspection, two-thirds of which have been substantiated.

The two other ICE detention facilities in New Mexico, in Otero and Cibola counties, passed their inspections from The Nakomoto Group in January and May respectively.

The ACLU previously called for the closure of the Otero County Processing Center for its long history of inhumane treatment, including denial of access to medical care, retaliatory use of solitary confinement and more. And last year Reuters uncovered numerous unanswered calls for medical attention, inadequate mental health treatment and quarantining procedures and more at Cibola County Correctional Center’s now-closed transgender detainee unit.

Earlier this year, the ACLU of New Mexico filed a lawsuit alongside the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center on behalf of nine former Torrance detainees and the Santa Fe Dreamers Project against CoreCivic and Torrance County. The lawsuit alleged CoreCivic sprayed the men with chemical agents in response to a peaceful hunger strike. The men were protesting inadequate precautions against COVID-19, poor living conditions, and the withholding of status updates on their immigration cases.

Zoila Alvarez Hernández, an immigrant rights attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico, said The Nakamoto Group was correct to fail Torrance after all of the issues at the facility.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that a third-party vendor that (ICE) contracted actually did their job and reported it,” she said. “However, I am not optimistic that CoreCivic and Torrance County will take corrective action to address the deficiencies that were pointed out in the inspection.”

In late May, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility, which by then had infected 110 detainees and 16 staff members. There have been 370 COVID cases among people detained by ICE at Torrance, according to the federal agency.

By late May, during the COVID-19 outbreak, Torrance had an average daily population of 29 people in immigration custody, according to data from the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. By late August, the average daily population was up to 126.

For Love, that raises the question of why detainees were sent to Torrance if it wasn’t adequately staffed, among the other deficiencies noted in the inspection.

“Why are they still there,” she said, “if we can’t meet their very, very, very basic needs?”

Today on voter registration day, the Biden administration has a crucial opportunity to promote voting access. This past March, the Biden administration issued an executive order instructing federal agencies to put together plans to promote voting access through voter registration. The federal agencies will submit their plans to the White House this month. Especially with the innumerable attacks on the right to vote — more than 400 anti-voter bills have been introduced in 48 states during the 2021 legislative session — the Biden administration must ensure federal agencies propose and implement plans to provide robust and effective voter registration services.

The purpose of the Executive Order on Promoting Voting Access is to “protect and promote the exercise of the right to vote, eliminate discrimination and other barriers to voting, and expand access to voter registration and accurate election information” and to “ensure that registering to vote and the act of voting be made simple and easy for all those eligible to do so.” The order encourages federal agencies to embrace the original intent of the National Voter Registration Act, which dictates that the federal government be actively involved in providing voter registration services. When enacting the NVRA, Congress declared it the “duty of the federal, state, and local governments to promote the exercise of [the] right [to vote].”

Congress passed the NVRA in 1993 to address the discriminatory role voter registration plays in our elections. In the last 25 years, the NVRA has helped address this discrimination and close gaps in registration rates, particularly by requiring states to offer registration opportunities to eligible individuals who interact with state and local agencies such as DMVs and public assistance agencies. But rates of registration among Black and Brown people and low-income people are still disproportionately lower, preventing them from exercising their fundamental right to vote. President Biden’s executive order presents a great opportunity to better achieve the goals and intent of the NVRA by engaging the federal government’s many existing programs to offer eligible individuals a meaningful opportunity to register to vote.

Still, the executive order does not replace the need for federal legislation to protect the right to vote. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Voting Rights Act was weakened by the Supreme Court. The court’s 2013 decision struck down the formula used to identify which states were required to obtain prior approval from the Justice Department, gutting the heart of this landmark legislation. Then, this summer, the Supreme Court substantially weakened another part of the VRA in Brnovich v. DNC, making it more difficult for voting rights advocates to challenge racially discriminatory voting laws in court.

Biden’s executive order does not rehabilitate the VRA or address the lack of pre-clearance for states with prior records of voting discrimination — that must be addressed by Congress. We urge Congress to act now to cement the legacy of the VRA and protect the rights of all Americans by passing the John Lewis Voting Advancement Act. In the meantime, amidst voting rights attacks happening across the country, the administration’s executive order provides an unprecedented opportunity for the federal government to provide meaningful opportunities to register to vote, and expand access to the ballot for millions of Americans.

In issuing the order, the Biden administration demonstrated its strong commitment to ensuring unfettered access to the ballot. But it must see this step through. Given the lack of Congressional action thus far protecting the right to vote, it’s crucial that the administration implement this order expansively and comprehensively. Ensuring our federal agencies do all they can to expand access to voter registration is not only easy, it’s the right thing to do.

Last week the Ohio Redistricting Commission enacted maps reflecting new electoral district boundaries. As the first state in the nation to pass statewide maps this year, Ohio had a promising opportunity to show the country what fairly apportioned electoral district boundaries look like. Instead, the state of Ohio presented a map that was grossly gerrymandered and far from fair. That’s why the ACLU filed a lawsuit this week challenging the Ohio state legislative map as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.

Many states, like Ohio, have used the redistricting process to manipulate electoral boundaries to their political advantage — a practice known as gerrymandering — and to the great disadvantage of voters. It’s a dangerous political practice in which bad actors slice and dice our communities so politicians can pick and choose who they represent. Resulting in politicians who are not accountable to wider population, because they do not have to be. Voters should be choosing their politicians — not the other way around.

Historically, partisan gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district lines to favor one party over another, and the new Ohio map does exactly that. Sadly, this is not new to the state of Ohio. In 2011, the state legislative maps were drawn in secrecy, without public oversight or Democratic party participation (despite a nominally bipartisan process), in a location referred to as “the bunker.” Under that map, Republicans maintained a hammerlock on supermajority status from 2012 to 2020.

That’s why Ohioans, on Nov. 3, 2015 with a 71 percent majority, approved a constitutional amendment to Article XI of the Ohio Constitution with the goal of preventing exactly what happened this week. Among other things, this amendment created a bipartisan Ohio Redistricting Commission which would consist of seven members, including at least two opposition party members. The current commission is composed of five Republicans and two Democrats. After the adoption of the map, even Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose, and Gov. Mike DeWine, all Republican commission members, expressed frustration with this year’s mapmaking process, citing concerns about a “partisan process”.

Further, this year’s newly enacted map draws 67 percent of the House districts and 69 percent of the Senate districts to favor Republicans, assuring Republican veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers. Rather than reflecting voters’ dynamic or evolving preferences, elections under gerrymandered maps like Ohio’s systematically lock in candidates from the legislators’ preferred party, and discourage electoral competition. Politicians from gerrymandered districts are more extreme and polarized than politicians from fair and competitive maps, resulting in policies and laws that do not reflect the will of the voters. For example, despite widespread support for abortion access, free and fair elections, and gun control, the gerrymandered Ohio legislature has consistently acted contrary to the will of the voters.

As redistricting begins nationwide, the ACLU will continue to monitor state legislatures and independent commissions across the country to ensure they heed the Constitution’s fundamental principles of democracy, representation, and equality.