LAWSUIT ALLEGES MISTREATMENT OF DETAINEES AT BORDER PATROL FACILITIES

By Miriam Raftery

June 8, 2014 (San Diego) – Alba Quiñones  fled domestic abuse in El Salvador, hoping to seek asylum in the United States.  But after enduring abusive conditions in a U.S. Border Patrol detention facility, she has now filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government—the latest in a string of such lawsuits, Mother Jones magazine reports.

Border Patrol facilities are intended to only be temporary holding cells until people picked up crossing the border can be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.  But due to overcrowding at ICE facilities, the Border Patrol has wound up holding people for long periods of time –under sometimes inhumane conditions, the lawsuits allege.

Quiñones alleges that a Border Patrol agent threw away medications she needs, including insulin for diabetes and other pills for high blood pressure, migraines and convulsions.   Her suit also alleges that facilities ran out of toilet paper and that women were not provided enough sanitary pads or tampons; she was forced to use the same pad for her entire period, winding up with her clothes soaked in blood. 

Multiple immigrants say that they were placed in a frigid room that guards called a hielera, which is Spanish for ice box.  Prisoners fingers turned blue from the cold.  They were not provided any mattresses or blankets, forced to lie on the cold concrete or stand up until they collapsed from exhaustion.

Half of the prisoners in one such facility in Texas are children,  immigrant lawyers report. 

One prisoner says no treatment was provided for a broken bone.  Another says she went an entire day without being provided any food.

Border Patrol’s internal policies should prevent such abuses. But the guidelines are not being followed, and since they are not federal law, advocates representing immigrants can’t ask the courts to stop these practices, one attorney said.

Now California Senator Barbara Boxer and another member of Congress, Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, both California Democrats, have introduced two separate bills that would set federal standards for humane treatment of prisoners in both ICE and Border Patrol facilities.  But the bills face an uphill battle in Congress, where Republicans want the focus on beefing up border security and have shown little interest in how detainees are treated once in custody.

But even if new laws are passed, there’s the issue of whether they would be enforced.  To date, even though the Border Patrol is out of compliance with its own internal policies, the agency has not yet set up an oversight process to assure that the current guidelines are being followed.