Lawsuit alleges Miramar ICE facility is acting as a defacto civil detention center

A federal class action was filed in Miami Friday against the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and top executives at the agencies, alleging they’re using a Miramar field office as a de facto civil detention center.

The lawsuit says the agencies are holding people illegally for days, denying them medicine and medical care, coercing them into signing documents, and restricting access to legal counsel.

Attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Americans for Immigrant Justice (AI Justice) filed the 42-page challenge on behalf of two noncitizens being detained at the facility as the suit was filed: Orlando Rosales Salmeron and another detainee under the pseudonym John Doe.

The suit alleges Salmeron and Doe are being detained in the Miramar facility with as many as 150 people even though the maximum occupancy is 56. 

“Mr. Salmeron has not been provided with a bed, cot, mattress, or adequate bedding. He has attempted to sleep on the floor in the same crowded space where people spend their waking hours. These conditions interfere with his ability to sleep and cause physical discomfort and fatigue,” the suit notes.

“Mr. Salmeron receives inadequate food and drinking water. He also lacks access to showers, clean clothing, and basic hygiene supplies. The crowded and unsanitary conditions make it difficult to maintain personal hygiene.”

Salmeron is represented by an immigration attorney but the suit alleges the agencies “restrict his ability to communicate with that attorney, confidentially or otherwise. “

The allegations also stem from observations by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who made an unannounced visit to the facility July 2 as well as accounts from families, advocates, and the Sept. 21 release of a whistleblower report, which prompted the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to launch an investigation.

“Whistleblowers also reported prolonged shackling, including shackling elderly people with serious health issues and limited mobility for 16 hours a day. Whistleblowers also detailed an abject lack of proper medical care at the Miramar facility and provided examples of individuals who did not receive needed medical treatment, including a woman who was seven months pregnant detained for three weeks without medical care, a person with hypertension detained for 17 days, and a person in their 60s with HIV/AIDS detained for more than 14 days,” the suit alleges.

“The application of due process does not depend on convenience. Due process is an obligation the U.S. Constitution has with every single human being,” said Sui Chung, executive director of AI Justice.

“Holding someone in the inhuman conditions detailed in this complaint means what people are facing inside Miramar is not a matter of limited resources. It is about being. Whether fundamental human decency is followed should not depend on which building a person happens to be held in.”  

Demands

The attorneys are asking the judge to declare that the facility is an ICE sub-office or field office and as such must be “emptied at the conclusion of daily operations,” meaning it cannot hold people overnight.

Attorneys also are asking the judge to enjoin the government from using “threat, coercion, abuse, deprivation or threatened deprivation of necessities, material misrepresentation, or other pressure” to obtain signatures from detainees for any forms.

Moreover, they are asking the judge to require the government to:

• Provide people in holding rooms access to potable water at all times and a meal at least every six hours.
• Permit detained people to retain personal inhaled medication and access other prescribed medication as necessary. 
• Allow detained people to perform bodily functions and change clothing without being viewed by staff of another gender except in the limited circumstances.
• Permit confidential in-person legal visitation seven days per week, for at least eight hours per day on regular business days and four hours per day on weekends and holidays. 
• Provide a reasonable opportunity for a confidential legal call during each subsequent twelve-hour period of confinement.

“While due process is supposed to extend to every person in this country, ICE has chosen to ignore the Fifth Amendment and instead detain people for days on end in degrading and dangerous conditions at the Miramar field office,” SPLC legal director for Immigrant Justice A.J. Hernandez Anderson said in a prepared statement. “We’re asking the court to force ICE to stop using Miramar as the detention facility it was never built to be.”