Migrants describe hunger and solitary confinement at for-profit detention center
CNN)The 40-year-old mother found herself in solitary confinement, locked in a cell behind a steel door for 23 hours a day, according to her legal filing and attorney.
The woman, identified in court documents only by the initials R.M., was taken into custody in May while crossing the border illegally to seek asylum. She was separated from her teenage daughter. Now, she’s being held at a privately run immigrant detention facility — effectively, a prison — known as the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.
The facility, which US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said held 1,495 detainees as of June 30, sits within a toxic sludge field and EPA Superfund site where residential construction has been barred. It has been the target of more than a dozen hunger strikes in recent years, each involving from a dozen to hundreds of detainees, over complaints of inadequate food and medical care, among other issues.
Its operator, Florida-based The GEO Group, is fighting two lawsuits in Washington over alleged labor-law violations for a dollar-a-day migrant detainee work program it calls voluntary. And the center has in recent years faced one of the highest number of complaints about alleged physical and sexual assaults against detainees of any facility of its kind in the nation, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained through public records requests by the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants.
GEO Group declined CNN’s requests for an interview. In emailed responses, spokesman Pablo Paez defended the company’s record in detaining immigrants and said it complies with “performance-based standards set by the Federal government” and accreditation guidelines.
“Our employees are proud of our record in managing the Tacoma ICE Processing Center with high-quality, culturally responsive services in a safe, secure, and humane environment,” Paez said. “Members of our team strive to treat all of those entrusted to our care with compassion, dignity, and respect.”
The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement strategy has been a financial boon for GEO Group, which along with its affiliates contributed more than half a million dollars to then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and his inaugural committee, according to Federal Election Commission data.
And GEO Group is not alone.
The private-prison industry as a whole is benefiting from Trump’s border policies. But those lucrative business opportunities are also drawing increased public and legal scrutiny to a system that, advocates say, treats detainees cruelly. And, thanks to the hunger strikes and a grass-roots protest campaign, the public spotlight is now falling on the Northwest Detention Center.