Report Alleges Degrading Treatment and Medical Neglect at South Florida ICE Detention Centers
Detainees at three federal immigration detention centers in South Florida are regularly subjected to medical neglect, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and mental and physical abuse, according to a new report by three human rights and legal aid groups.
In one incident, officers allegedly made men wait hours for lunch and then forced them to eat with their hands shackled behind their backs.
“We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,” Harpinder Chauhan, a British entrepreneur who was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this spring and eventually deported, told the report’s researchers.
The report, released Monday by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South, compiled interviews with 11 current and recent detainees at the Krome Detention Center, Federal Detention Center (FDC) Miami, and the Broward Transition Center (BTC), as well as family members of detainees and immigration attorneys.
The report found that staff at the three facilities “subjected detained individuals to dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support.”Â
Numerous interviewees in the report described being put in frigid holding cells without proper bedding or clothes for days at a time, being given inadequate food and water, and facing retaliation for seeking medical treatment.
“People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human,” Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, said in a press release. “These are not isolated incidents, but rather the result of a fundamentally broken detention system that is rife with serious abuses.”
The report’s findings echo media investigations and
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