Government medical advisors ask ICE to vaccinate immigrant detainees

Two medical advisers for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) urged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to expand Covid-19 vaccinations to migrants at detentions centers, reported CBS news.

In a letter addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ICE Acting Director Tea Johnson, Doctors Scott Allen and Josiah Rich raised their concerns about the current Covid-19 measures and practices at detention centers. According to the doctors, ICE is not adequately preventing the spread of Covid-19 in immigration detention settings.

“While ICE, CBP and DHS have implemented a number of the recommended strategies, they have often been slow and inconsistent in their efforts to rapidly deploy effective measures in limiting the spread of COVID-19 in the facilities and the surrounding communities,” reads the letter.

“In our own inspections of ICE facilities, for example, we have seen and documented inconsistent enforcement of mask use in detention centers, inconsistent testing and surveillance, and a failure to develop facility level infection control plans—all critical measures to control the spread of what we know is a highly transmissible, life-threatening illness,” the letter continues.

The letter comes as Covid-19 infections in detention centers have dramatically increased by 848 percent since the start of the year, according to ICE statistics. On Wednesday alone, ICE isolated 2,702 positive detainees, compared to 285 cases reported on January 3, reported CBS News.

Dr. Allen and Rich are urging DHS to provide booster shots to detainees. In their inspections of ICE facilities, the doctors found that DHS has offered the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was appropriate at the time. However, DHS has not modified their vaccine dosage as new variants of the virus emerge.

“The threat of Omicron in a congregate setting with populations who are either unvaccinated or only vaccinated with a single dose of J&J vaccine poses an immediate threat to the lives of immigrants, staff and communities surrounding the detention centers with staff and detainees entering and exiting facilities and must be addressed with booster vaccinations,” the doctors said.

“Booster vaccinations are now the standard and are a top priority of the federal government’s response to present and future COVID threats,” said Dana Gold, Senior Counsel of the Government Accountability Project, in a subsequent letter. “DHS does not appear to have adopted this approach even in the face of the high, well-documented risks associated with detention settings.”