The Hotspots in Hiding: COVID-19 and Immigrant Detention

David Hernández (Mount Holyoke College), Beatriz Marquez Aldana (Texas State University), Isabel Anadon (University of Wisconsin), and John Eason (University of Wisconsin) on Medium write that

"The combination of immigrant detention and COVID-19 is a travesty happening in real time, expanding rapidly, and resembling the situation in prisons and jails nationwide as well as in African American and Latina/o/x communities. The first detainee death attributed to the coronavirus occurred Wednesday, May 6 at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and there are 965 positive cases amid migrant detainees nationwide as of May 15.

Migrant detention is an area of policy where extreme power rests in the executive branch and where the rights of migrants are at their nadir. Immigration has been gravely impacted by the global pandemic — first by the virus itself and second by the callousness and wastefulness of the current administration.

The catastrophic, deadly, and largely predictable racial inequities in survival as a result of the pandemic have only recently become part of the national discussion. African American and Latina/o/x people are adversely affected at far higher rates than others in the United States."

KJ