This story was updated at 2:20 p.m. on October 21.
Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a bill into law that gives Virginia officials the authority to perform health inspections of the two detention centers in the state: the Farmville Detention Center and the Caroline Detention Facility. It passage comes after months of public outcry over the treatment of immigrant detainees during the coronavirus pandemic; At one point, a large outbreak of COVID-19 had infected nearly every detainee at Farmville.
Advocates welcomed the new legislation, which takes effect at the beginning of next year, but cautioned that they want to see the state do more to protect those detained in the facilities.
“Virginia now has a clear statutory mandate to ensure the wellbeing of people detained in Farmville and Caroline, and we need to make sure the Commonwealth takes aggressive steps to respond to this pandemic and prevent more sickness and death behind bars,” said Luis Oyola, an organizer with the Legal Aid Justice Center, in a press release.
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The Virginia state legislature passed a bill on Friday that classifies privately-operated immigrant detention centers as “local correctional facilities,” and that will allow them to be subject to the same health inspections as local jails in the state.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Jennifer Boysko (D-Fairfax), was approved by the state Senate last month. It passed the House on Friday with a vote of 55 to 42 and will now head to Gov. Ralph Northam’s desk.
Its approval comes after both of the state’s immigrant detention centers have seen COVID-19 outbreaks, killing one detainee and causing more than 350 others to become infected with the virus. ICE’s health practices have also come under fire nationally. Last month, a nurse in Georgia filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that ICE was performing mass hysterectomies on immigrants, a practice that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said would be considered “a staggering abuse of human rights” that recalls the U.S.’s dark history of medical racism, including forced sterilization of Black women.
Boysko has said the bill was a response to some of the “egregious and horrible stories of ICE facilities in other states.”
“This bill will give us the teeth to allow our people to go in and make sure that they are being maintained in proper sanitation. Get inspectors in,” Boysko said.
The votes fell along party lines, with Democrats voting in favor of the bill and Republicans voting against it. Sen. Mark Peake (R-Lynchburg), who opposed the measure, said he was worried that interfering with federal control over the detention facilities might cost Virginia the many jobs and millions of dollars they bring to the state.
There are two Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Virginia: The Farmville Detention Center in Farmville, which is run by the company Immigration Centers of America, and the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green. At one point this summer, the test positivity rate at Farmville Detention Center spiked to 93%, and people detained there were reporting nearly everyone around them was actively sick. The facility has seen 339 reported cases of COVID-19. One Farmville detainee, a 72-year-old Canadian man named James Hill, died in August after testing positive for the virus. ICE reports that as of Friday, there are no longer any active coronavirus cases among Farmville’s detainees.
Currently, at least 32 people detained at the Caroline facility are infected with the virus — up from two cases reported in mid-September. An ICE spokesperson told DCist/WAMU last month that once those two positive cases were identified, the facility conducted “voluntary testing of all detainees,” which surfaced additional cases. The agency says people who have tested positive are being quarantined.
In a call with Farmville city government officials and Prince Edward County leadership on Friday, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine also announced his intention to perform more oversight of detention centers in the state.
Kaine criticized ICE over the source of the Farmville outbreak, which has been linked to the June 2 transfer of 74 detainees to the facility from detention centers in Florida and Arizona. Though ICE has repeatedly told news outlets, including DCist/WAMU, the transfer was done to free up space in its facilities and “promote social distancing,” The Washington Post reported that detainees were actually transferred in order to bring ICE agents to D.C. to police protests against racism and police brutality. Government rules prohibit ICE employees from traveling on “ICE Air” charter flights unless there are also detainees on the flight.
Kaine called the transfers “the height of irresponsibility” on the part of ICE.
“But that’s water under the bridge,” he added. Kaine said he now wants to focus on working with ICE and Farmville leadership to make sure the facility implements the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s infection control recommendations. Medical personnel from the CDC visited Farmville in August and later issued a report that detailed some of the factors that prevented the facility from preventing the outbreak, including delays in test results, a lack of rooms to isolate or quarantine detainees, and not enough focus on testing asymptomatic people.
Advocates remain skeptical about ICE’s ability to control coronavirus outbreaks and properly care for the people it detains.
“The key issue, and what they really haven’t been focusing on, unfortunately, is how to prevent the virus from spreading within the facility, and then of course, after that, how to provide adequate medical care for people who do get sick,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director for the Immigrant Advocacy Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, said last month. “If they put all of their eggs in the basket of trying to keep the virus out of the facility, sooner or later it’s going to get in.”
