Mario Rodas, Sr. first found out there was a deadly virus spreading through the country while he was watching television at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts. In early March, Rodas had been pulled over and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while driving to the supermarket with his wife, a legal resident and the mother of his three U.S. citizen children. Since then, he’d been in the custody of ICE, mostly at Plymouth.

The more Rodas heard about the disease, the more fearful the 59-year-old became.

“I was scared for my health,” he told the ACLU. “I was worried because I have diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. It was stressful, you know?”

Just days later, word spread through the prison — a staff member had tested positive for Covid-19. When they heard the news, Rodas’s son — also named Mario — and the rest of his family were terrified.

“Just do whatever you can to stay alive and hopeful,” he said he told his father over the phone. “We are doing everything we can to get you out of there.”

Across the country, there are nearly 36,000 people in the custody of ICE on an average day. Some are in county jails and state prisons, others are in facilities run by private contractors like the GEO Group. Many are asylum seekers who have asked the U.S. to protect them from persecution abroad. Others — like Rodas — are undocumented workers who lived in the U.S. for years before being swept up by ICE.

Now, public health officials say that overcrowding and poor access to sanitation inside ICE detention facilities is a crisis in the making, with two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security calling them a “tinderbox” for infections in a letter to Congress on March 19.

“As local hospital systems become overwhelmed by the patient flow from detention center outbreaks, precious health resources will be less available for people in the community,” they wrote.

Across the country, tensions are rising inside of ICE facilities, with detained immigrants and their families fearing that cramped conditions and an indifferent bureaucracy are a deadly threat to their safety — and to the wider public’s health. So far, at least 20 detainees and dozens of staff at facilities housing them are confirmed to have contracted COVID-19. Many others are under quarantine, raising fears that the virus is spreading undetected and potentially infecting guards who shuttle in and out for their shifts before returning home.

These numbers are likely a significant underestimate due to shortages of COVID-19 tests. In a hearing last week on an ACLU lawsuit, an attorney working for the government admitted that there were no tests available at two Maryland facilities, while simultaneously arguing that detainees there were not at risk due to the lack of confirmed cases. ICE has said they aren’t required to disclose information about staff at privately-run detention facilities who have tested positive.

“The nature of these facilities is such that it’s really impossible to engage in the social distancing that we’re all practicing right now,” former director of ICE John Sandweg told Democracy Now.

After the staffer at Plymouth fell ill, Rodas said that guards started bringing him and the others in his cell block to meals in shifts. But each group was still as large as 80 people at a time, and none were given masks or gloves to wear.

“The government is asking everyone to stay home and not have physical contact with other individuals. But meanwhile, my dad was out there amongst 80 to 150 other individuals, and you don’t know if they could potentially have something and be contagious,” said Rodas’s son.

Realizing the danger he was in, Rodas’s lawyer, Kerry Doyle, reached out to friends at the ACLU of Massachusetts. On March 25^, the ACLU filed a petition asking a judge to order ICE to release Rodas along with another detained immigrant on the grounds that their medical conditions placed them at high risk for COVID-19 complications, in violation of their constitutional rights.

Two days later, the judge issued a ruling. Rodas would be able to go home.

“They released him on pretty strict conditions,” said Doyle. “He has a GPS bracelet.”

Rodas’s son rushed to Plymouth to pick him up. “I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it,” he told the ACLU. Now, Rodas is quarantining in a room in the house until 14 days have passed since his release.

“I think that the whole thing highlights how easy it is for immigration [authorities] to release detainees that have cases that are low priority and allow them to go back home during these very uncertain times,” said his son.

Mario Rodas, Jr.

The suit that led to his father’s release was one of a series that have been filed across the country in recent weeks seeking similar orders. Fifteen were filed by the ACLU and its affiliates, with over thirty people released from detention as a result of those suits so far.

Alfredo Garza was one of those lucky few. He was released on March 26 from the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, a private facility run by the GEO Group in Washington, following a suit filed by the ACLU and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Garza suffered a heart attack while detained this past January and says he was chained to a bed in the hospital while receiving treatment.

“Doctor care is terrible there,” he said. “The worst there is.”

In 2018, an investigation by Seattle Weekly revealed that the Tacoma facility had been providing substandard medical care to immigrants housed there.

Washington was the first state in the country to experience a substantial outbreak of COVID-19, and in early March Garza says that he and others in the facility became afraid when another detainee fell ill with what they assumed was COVID-19.

“They took him out in a suit, like one of the people who catch bees,” he said.

Geo Group and ICE have not confirmed any cases of COVID-19 in Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, but Garza says that his unit was placed under quarantine and kept away from contact with others anyway:

“We said, ‘Hey we need sanitizer or chlorine.’ But they said, ‘No, we don’t have any.’”

After the ACLU’s suit was filed, Garza was released along with another detainee who suffers from high blood pressure. Since then, 80 people housed in the facility have gone on hunger strike to raise attention to the danger they say they face from the pandemic.

“I have a friend who has diabetes and he was worried when he found out that there were people with coronavirus inside,” Garza said. “They didn’t even tell him, ‘Hey, we are going to put you somewhere else’ or ‘We’re going to do something.’ They don’t care if you die.”

Despite widespread calls from public health experts that the detained population must be drastically reduced in order to prevent COVID-19 from spreading unchecked and taxing the healthcare system, so far ICE has largely refused pressure to release people in its custody.

On Tuesday, the agency indicated it had identified 600 detainees deemed “vulnerable” to COVID-19, and released 160 of them. But that same day, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked a judge to stay a ruling that would have released 22 detainees with medical conditions from two county jails in Pennsylvania.

“Families were getting ready to pick up their loved ones when the stay came down,” said Michael Tan, Deputy Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU. “ICE is playing an unacceptable game of Russian Roulette with people’s lives.”

Karlyn Kurichety is a supervising attorney with Al Otro Lado, a California-based organization that provides legal services to asylum seekers and other immigrants. She says that her clients in the Adelanto ICE Processing center — another Geo Group-run facility — are scared.

“It’s just cruel and really disturbing, there’s basically no precautions being taken,” she said. “The detainees are not given any information about COVID-19. There are no signs, no talks, no advisories, nothing of that nature.”

Adelanto has put strict measures in place requiring visiting attorneys to wear N95 masks — despite the fact that even health care workers in the state aren’t able to find them. Since then, Kurichety says she hasn’t been able to visit her clients —most of whom are asylum seekers — or arrange a non-recorded phone call to discuss their case.

Recently, she says she spoke with one client who told her that two people in his dorm collapsed with symptoms that sounded like those of COVID-19. The dorm was subsequently placed under quarantine. Another said that he’d been cleaning his cell with body wash.

“It’s like if you wanted to design a situation where a virus would spread, this is what you’d do,” she said.

On March 30, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of six detainees in Adelanto with serious medical conditions, arguing that “without a rigorous testing regime, it is impossible to conclude that COVID-19 has not already entered Adelanto.”

Two days later, a federal judge ordered all six released.

But Kurichety says that those who remain are fraying emotionally.

“They’re really scared. I would say it’s almost like panic,” she said. “Their families, too, because we’ve been talking to their sponsors and sometimes they break down in tears. They’re really frightened for their loved ones.”

Ashoka Mukpo, Staff Reporter, ACLU

This post is originally published in South Florida Sun Sentinel.

The young man, born in Southeast Asia but a U.S. citizen for many years, was in a Home Depot in Sarasota with a white female friend weeks before the recent statewide shutdown due to COVID-19. He realized they were being followed aisle to aisle by a white man. The young man is 5’ 3’’ and slim; the man following him was about eight inches taller.

Finally, the other man approached the woman.

“Are you with him?” he demanded. She said it was none of his business, and he turned to the Asian man.

“Why are you here?” he demanded. “You should not be out now. Your people bought the Chinese virus here.”

The young man advised his interrogator that he isn’t Chinese; he’s from Laos. He said he hadn’t been out of the U.S. in 15 years, but that it wasn’t anyone else’s business. The would-be “virus vigilante” eventually retreated.

For the young man, it wasn’t the first time since COVID-19 arrived on our shores that he’d drawn unwanted attention. Days earlier, sitting on Lido Beach in Bradenton, he was approached by a group of elderly white people. He said they told him he needed to take the virus seriously.

“You are affecting us all,” said one. “You need to leave the beach,” said another.

The young man took the swim he’d planned and left. But he noticed that many other people were on the sand, and he — the only Asian — was the only one they approached. Wanting to avoid more harassment, he asked not to be identified for this article.

Around the country, Asian Americans have reported incidents of harassment since the coronavirus reached the U.S. Much of it has been verbal abuse, but people have also been spit on and otherwise attacked.

John Lantigua is an investigator for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida.(Courtesy ACLU of Florida)

On March 14, a Burmese man was stabbed in a Sam’s Club outlet in Texas. One of the two children with him was also stabbed. They survived. Police said the assailant admitted doing it because he suspected they were carrying COVID-19

President Trump recently posted a Twitter message in defense of the Asian population.

"It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States, and all around the world," Trump tweeted. "They are amazing people, and the spreading of the Virus is NOT their fault in any way, shape, or form."

But this was after he had repeatedly and defiantly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” Asian American leaders have blamed that rhetoric for contributing to an increase in racist incidents.

The term “Chinese virus” has spread to Florida. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott uses it. And when Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered state parks closed March 23 a sign was posted at Blue Springs State Park in Gilchrist County: “By order of Governor DeSantis ALL state | parks are now closed to all visitation due to the Chinese Corona Virus.”

According to Winnie Tang, president of the Asian American Federation of Florida, state officials say that was the only park that used such language, that it was not authorized by Gov. DeSantis and has since been taken down.

Tang, 58, is of Chinese descent, has lived in the U.S. for more than 40 years and became a citizen in 1996. She is among 450,000 Asians in Florida, according to the 2010 Census.

It pains Tang to hear of racial targeting of Asians in the state. Before school was suspended, she was told of Asian children being taunted by other kids. Recently, two young Chinese people walking in a Weston park reported being assailed with chants of “coronavirus” by a person nearby.

According to Next Shark, an Asian affairs website, an Asian female musician who lives in Davie received menacing texts saying she would not be hired again until “you surrender your Chinese passport and renounce your Chinese citizenship.”

One Miami-Dade woman of Korean descent said she received so many nasty looks while in her car or on the street in past weeks, that she now sends her white husband to do any necessary errands. Also from Miami, an Instagram video was posted showing a man chasing an elderly Asian woman down the street with a bottle of sanitizer. Some call it a joke, but it is not a joke to many Asians.

Tang assumes other minor incidents have occurred but not reached her. So far Florida has been lucky that no serious acts of violence have surfaced. But the FBI has warned that, even with the population in general staying close to home, incidents may increase nationwide as the crisis worsens.

Tang hopes solidarity will prevail in Florida.

“Many Asians have been here in Florida a long time and contributing to the community,” she says. “Using language like ‘Chinese virus’ jeopardizes them. It’s irresponsible. It gets scary”

“We are all facing the same public health emergency,” she says. “The virus does not discriminate by race. This is no time to be pointing fingers.”

Louisiana has emerged as a COVID-19 hotspot, with among the highest contraction and growth rates in the nation. The state also has the highest prison and pretrial incarceration rates in the world. Those two facts might not seem related, but they are already interacting in a tragic way: Conditions in jails and prisons make them highly vulnerable to COVID-19, allowing the virus to spread like wildfire. The potential impact could be devastating for incarcerated people and the broader community, which is already under immense strain. Already, five people incarcerated at a federal prison in Oakdale have died from coronavirus complications. 

The ACLU of Louisiana is fighting back on multiple fronts. This week, we filed a lawsuit against Oakdale Federal Prison to release people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. Last week, in response to a troubling executive order, we sent a letter calling on courts to honor legal timelines for the filing of charges for people in custody, and to uphold due process rights during the pandemic. We are also demanding evidence-based plans for the prevention and management of COVID-19 in state prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities.

Public officials should be doing everything they can to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Instead, buried in Gov. John Bel Edwards’ recent emergency executive order is a provision that could do the opposite. The order suspends legal deadlines for district attorneys to file charges against people held in jail, which violates due process rights by leaving thousands of Louisianans to languish in legal limbo — many held without charge or even access to counsel. Our landmark report of Louisiana’s pretrial system — “Justice Can’t Wait” — found that 57 percent of those incarcerated in our jails are being held for a low-level offense, without charge or conviction. 

History tells us that the consequences of suspending due process at a time of emergency could be disastrous. During Hurricane Katrina, the state issued a similar order to suspend court deadlines to present charges or release people from prisons and jails. The result was catastrophic: thousands were stuck in unlawful detention as a historic disaster inundated Louisiana. As flood waters rose, deputies at the Orleans Parish Prison abandoned their posts and left hundreds of  people in their cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests in the dark, powerless jail. People went days without food, water, and ventilation. Even some prison guards were left locked in their posts to fend for themselves, without any evacuation plan or emergency training. Then, like now, many of those stuck in jail during the emergency had not been charged.

We face a very different disaster in COVID-19, but the lessons of Katrina remain. Louisiana must not abandon people in jails and prisons as a deadly virus sweeps through the state. 

Public health experts and law enforcement officials have warned that jails are “petri dishes” for the spread of COVID-19. Social distancing is impossible in jails, prisons, and detention sites, where sometimes dozens of people are crowded into single cells. It’s also difficult to practice good hygiene, with limited access to soap and water. Hand sanitizer is often considered contraband. These conditions make these facilities a breeding ground for contagious infections and diseases. The larger the number of individuals incarcerated, the higher the likelihood and scope of a related outbreak.

Incarcerated people are not the only ones at risk of contracting COVID-19 — corrections officers are also highly vulnerable. And because these employees return home each night, they can unintentionally carry the virus back to their families and communities. Louisiana is already a COVID-19 hotspot, and the governor’s order to suspend court deadlines — thereby crowding more people into jails and prisons — is a disaster in the making. 

Black and brown communities are likely to bear the brunt of this disaster, as they did during Hurricane Katrina. Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, people of color are more likely to be arrested and charged, and are often handed longer sentences than white people for the same offenses. Nationwide, Black people already face higher infection and death rates for COVID-19, particularly in Louisiana, where about 70 percent of the people who have died are Black. 

Stakeholders in the criminal legal system have the power to mitigate the risk presented by COVID-19. State Supreme Court Chief Justice Bernadette Johnson sent a letter calling on district judges to refuse to funnel even more people into the system. Police officers should use their discretion to issue warnings rather than making custodial arrests, and engage in creative, compassionate problem-solving. And finally, Gov. Edwards must lift the order to suspend court deadlines and release all those incarcerated who are vulnerable to COVID-19, starting with the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions. By taking these critical steps, we can stem the spread of coronavirus throughout jails, prisons, and the broader community. 

Louisiana is already overwhelmed by the COVID-19 crisis. We cannot put even more people in harm’s way by continuing to needlessly crowd jails and prisons. We at the ACLU of Louisiana hope to work with the governor and the State Supreme Court to ensure that these emergency measures are implemented in a way that prevents us from repeating the terrible history of 2005, and protects the public from COVID-19. It is possible to both protect individual rights and protect the public, and we hope to work together to do so.

Alanah Odoms Hebert, Executive Director, ACLU of Louisiana