The Coronavirus Tragedy at Farmville Detention Center: The Root Lies in Immigration Detention Itself
Dorm rooms at Farmville Detention Center, where 93% of detained immigrants tested positive for COVID-19 this summer. The facilities make social distancing and other health precautions nearly impossible, which drove the spread of the disease. Photo via CAIR lawsuit from April 2020.
In July 2020, one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the nation did not take place in downtown Manhattan or any other major city. It was in ICA-Farmville Detention Center, a private prison located in Farmvilla, Virginia which incarcerates between 500-800 undocumented immigrants. After 74 immigrants were transferred from hotspot states to Farmville and not tested or adequately quarantined, the virus spread among the entire population. At its apex, a staggering 93 percent of inmates tested positive for COVID-19. Seven were hospitalized, and a 72-year-old man died.
The coronavirus outbreak in Farmville was a preventable tragedy. But it was not an isolated one. The factors that exacerbated the outbreak were endemic to prisons. Across the United States, prisons, jails, and detention centers have become hotspots for COVID-19 as early as March. According to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that has been tracking coronavirus cases in state and federal prisons, 225,946 people in prison have tested positive for the coronavirus as of December 2020. According to researchers, prisons and detention centers are highly susceptible to viral disease outbreaks because of their crowded living conditions, often inadequate hygiene facilities, and spread through introduction of new inmates or guards. Detention centers, which are mostly run by private government contractors, have turned a profit by cutting corners on measures to keep inmates safe with little oversight, sparking activist outcry. The severity and deadliness of the COVID-19 outbreak at Farmville and other detention centers were consequences of the immigration prison industrial complex.
At Farmville, the gross neglect for the public health of inmates was rooted in the structure of for-profit detention itself. The factors that created conditions for viral disease to spread—namely lacking sanitary facilities, overcrowding, and unnecessary transfers—had been part of Farmville’s operation strategy since its opening. These conditions were maintained and even worsened when coronavirus threatened the vulnerable population at Farmville, because they served the interests of detention corporations and Virginia local and state politicians who directly benefit from the presence of these corporations.
While Governor Ralph Northam directed Virginia residents to stay home and avoid crowded indoor spaces, immigrants were taken from their homes and detained unnecessarily and dangerously. As a result, incarcerated immigrants were systematically excluded from public health precautions.
Farmville is a case study that demonstrates how long standing, politically and economically calculated public health disparities within prisons and immigration detention centers have revealed themselves in full force amid the Covid-19 pandemic, to devastating effects. And even if there is political will to do so, these are trends that the Biden administration will not easily be able to reverse.
A Nation of Incarcerated Immigrants
In the past 20 years, an immigration industrial complex has expanded dramatically in the U.S., systematically prioritizing detention and the profit it generates over interests of public health. Law scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow and Ava Duvernay, the documentary filmmaker and architect of 13th, made “prison industrial complex,” a household term, denoting the rise in prison populations since the 1950s as the result of bureaucratic, political, and private prison industry interests that encouraged incarceration.
Although border detention has been a practice since the early 1900s, the immigration carceral increase dates to the mid-90s. In 1996, at the height of national backlash against immigrants, Congress passed a series of laws that led to greater detention and deportation for non-violent offenses, including entering the county without inspection by a border patrol agent. With greater levels of detention incentivized through law and corporations that had grown rich off of the war on drugs looking for new opportunities for expansion, in the past twenty years hundreds of private detention centers cropped up across the U.S., and a booming industry emerged.
In 2018, 42,000 immigrants were detained daily across 200 detention centers. 70 percent were in for-profit centers. (By comparison, just 8 percent of those in state and federal prison populations were incarcerated in privately-owned prisons in 2017.) Because such a high proportion of detained immigrants are held in private facilities, it is necessary to examine detention under the lens of private prison industry interests as well as political interests. Scholars have documented the emergence of an immigration industrial complex, intermeshing government agencies (ICE and the agency that controls it, the Department of Homeland Security), private prison corporations, contractors for food and healthcare services, and local governments where detention centers are constructed. There is “little consideration for human rights” when profit is concerned.
ICA-Farmville: A Private Prison Comes to Virginia
Farmville reflects national trends in the growth of for-profit immigration detention—attractive to governments . The facility is operated by Immigration Centers of America (ICA), a for-profit prison company that receives funding from ICE on a per-resident, per-day basis. The municipalities that house ICA facilities receive cuts of this funding. Facilities also create jobs, lucrative for regions where manufacturing has dried up and employment options are few. ICE-contracted private corporations like ICA or its more well known competitor, CoreCivic, pump millions of dollars into local economies through government contracts and taxpayer money. According to former town manager Gerald Spates, the facility contributes $1.8 million federal dollars annually into the local Framville economy. Politicians are incentivized to keep facilities like Farmville open despite public health risks.
Historical overcrowding and under-developed sanitation infrastructure at Farmville have allowed the ICA and government agencies to profit at the expense of public health of detained immigrants, which partly explains why COVID-19 cases rose so dramatically at Farmville. Healthcare in detention centers is routinely lacking, often due to understaffing and overcrowding. Other staples of detention, including close quarters, inadequate cold weather clothing, and lack of access to sanitation facilities as basic as water and soap also beget disease. As a result, there have been outbreaks of pneumonia, measles, and other respiratory diseases in detention facilities across the U.S.
Resulting from systemic neglect of public health, reports of unsanitary conditions and rapid spread of disease within Farmville have surfaced in recent years. In 2015, detainees reported finding maggots in their food, which some attributed to cost cutting measures between ICA and their food contractor. Indeed, overcrowding and inadequate quarantine facilities exacerbated a 2019 mumps outbreak that infected 26 guards and detainees. After the outbreak subsided, ICA made no changes to its existing policies, leaving them ill prepared for the coronavirus pandemic.
These incidents are rooted in the very design of the facility. Before Farmville was scheduled to open in 2008, ICE wanted to delay the facility’s opening and downsize the proposed incarcerated population from 800 to 500, citing ICA’s lack of compliance with standards for having sufficient beds per inmate and medical facilities. However, Ken Cuchinnelli, then the Virginia Attorney General, reportedly used connections within ICE to open the facility as scheduled, ensuring that ICA could make its money and that Farmville would get its cut. In turn, Cuchinelli received campaign contributions from the ICA and would go on to be the acting deputy secretary of the DHS.
This anecdote illustrates how the immigration industrial complex undermines public health concerns for profit: for ICA, having more inmates and running the risks of overcrowding is preferable because their contracts are on a per-head basis. Cutting corners on sanitation infrastructure also saved ICA money (and the town of Farmville). Because involvement with companies like ICA trickles benefits to the surrounding area, politicians like Cuchinelli are incentivized to keep facilities open despite human rights abuses.
Fateful Flights and Overcrowded Facilities
Although historically poor public health and crowding infrastructure laid the foundations for the rampant spread of coronavirus, what most directly contributed to the COVID-19 outbreak was the transfer of 74 detainees from Florida and Arizona. Respiratory diseases like mumps and COVID are highly infectious in close proximity. While ICE authorized some releases due to the dangers of the pandemic, Farmville was at more than half of its capacity when it struck.
When the 74 immigrants were transferred to the facility, it became even more overcrowded. The prison’s pre-existing infrastructure and lack of hygiene resources exacerbated the outbreak. Photos from inside Farmville show that beds are close together, grouped in clusters of four or eight—well suited for ICA’s prized “economic efficiency,” ill-suited for a virus that spreads most effectively within 6 feet. Despite the mumps outbreak that occurred just a year prior, Farmville did not provide large enough quarantine facilities. When they ran out of space, guards forced immigrants out of quarantine despite showing symptoms.
The physical construction of Farmville reveals a utilitarian mindset conducive to incarcerating at highest possible rates and thus profiting off of lucrative per-diem contracts. The fact that no alterations were made to this space demonstrates that disease spread prevention was not made a priority by ICA. One young man detained at Farmville told reporters that he was not permitted to visit a doctor or get tested for COVID despite showing symptoms of a fever, a cough, headaches, body aches and trouble breathing; he said he only received Tylenol as treatment and was not isolated from his eighty person dorm. Frequent hand washing also became more difficult, because there were too few bathroom sinks available. According to other detained immigrants, some sinks had never had running water, and others were closed down sporadically and were sanitized infrequently. The testimony points to how overcrowding and poor sanitation infrastructure exacerbated the spread of COVID-19; as stated previously, these structures are part of what has allowed immigration detention centers to become so profitable at the expense of human rights.
ICE initially claimed that the early June transfers were done to reduce overcrowding, in line with CDC protocols. However, a Washington Post investigation in September revealed that most of the centers which originally housed transfers were not overcrowded as of June 1: one was at just 35 percent capacity. Farmville, meanwhile, was at 57 percent capacity prior to the transfer. Transferring 74 more people into the facility intensified the conditions for overcrowding.
The Post reporters identified another reason for the transfers. DHS representatives testified that the transfers may not have had anything to do with detainees at Farmville at all, but with the agents transporting them. A DHS memo, stating that federal agents were being sent from Airzona and Florida—following the murder of George Floyd—to Washington D.C., suggests that the transfers were made under the pretense of moving agents to clamp down on the protests. Per ICE regulations, agents cannot be flown on ICE’s planes unless they are escorting incarcerated people on transfers. The introduction of new inmates which—in addition to the substandard protocols that the facility enforced—caused the outbreak to flourish, was not only in violation of CDC guidelines;it was more or less a cover for other DHS activities.
ICA-Farmville and ICE’s compliance—or lack thereof—with public health and safety protocols was contingent on whether this compliance served the political aims of the DHS. The fact that not only the economic but political will in matters not strictly related to immigration at all affects the detained population demonstrates the scope and complexity of the immigration industrial complex.
Moreover, according to another damning independent report released in September, staff did not adhere to CDC protocol during temperature checks: despite 50 percent of detainees being Spanish speakers, staffers conducted screenings entirely in English and they did not ask detainees if they had expressed COVID-19 symptoms. In a separate internal report, ICE blamed detainees for not distancing from each other or for not wearing PPE as the virus spread. But Farmville had been designed—via overcrowding, the spurious transfers, and the lack of quarantine space—to prevent social distancing and good hygiene practices in the first place. Profitability and political will created disincentives to invest in quality healthcare infrastructure or to de-incarcerate immigration facilities at the outset of the pandemic.
It was not until the media started reporting on the outbreak that ICA staff began regularly testing detainees and providing PPE. But by then, the damage had been done.
Demonstrators march on Washington, D.C. in protest of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) "zero tolerance" policy that separated families at the US/Mexico border in June 2018. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
What Comes After Farmville, and the Future of Immigration Detention
Underinvestment in public health infrastructure and overcrowding serve the fiscal and political interests of private detention centers and the industrial complex surrounding them. Despite early warnings from experts, people died and became gravely sick due to the conditions in Farmville, which are historically rooted within the institution of immigration detention.
The situation in Farmville and its aftermath come at a time when many are rethinking incarceration in the context of systemic racism, inequality, and the pandemic which has worsened existing tensions. Nationwide protests over systemic racism and police violence this summer arose in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—countless others amplified voices calling for defunding the police and abolishing jails, prisons, and detention centers. Particularly during a pandemic, advocates and public health experts argued, any prison sentence had “turn[ed] into a death sentence.” Numerous campaigns under the banner of #FreeThemAll and #FreeThemAllForPublicHealth urged state officials to decarcerate prisons and detention centers to prevent more outbreaks. When news broke about the outbreak at Farmville and other detention centers as well as other health abuses—namely, over a dozen forced sterilizations in Irwin County Detention Center, issues related to immigration detention took on greater urgency.
President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden was encouraging to some. Biden, whose campaign platform promised to “Stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration,” sent private prison company stocks into a downfall when his lead over Trump solidified in November 2020. But it is unclear how private immigration detention will be affected by Biden’s proposals, if he even has the political will to pursue them. According to the Marshall Project, companies like GEO Group, CoreCivic, and ICA are deriving increasing amounts of revenue from immigration detention centers as opposed to state and federal prisons; both GEO and CoreCivic acquired 10 year long contracts with ICE this year, which would each extend beyond two terms of a Biden presidency.
So long as immigration detention persists—public or private—the United States enables the spread of disease, death, and manufacture of public health crises. Based on the testimony of public health experts, activists, and currently detained immigrants, the only path forward is to abolish ICE and promote decarceration—to free them all.
Heather Loepere is a junior at Barnard College majoring in History and Political Science currently serving as a Senior Editor at CPR. She was glad to see 2020 go but, let’s face it, our problems are systemic, not annual.