( Julio Cortez / AP Photo )
Matt Katz, WNYC reporter, talks about his recent reporting on immigration detention centers in New Jersey: a COVID outbreak at the Elizabeth Detention Center, ICE detainees on hunger strike in Hackensack, and why Hudson County Democrats are reversing their stance to continue jailing NYC immigrants.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. WNYC's Matt Katz who's been sub-hosting all of it this week for Alison Stewart is also out there as a reporter on a very important story in our area that some of you know about, and some of you don't. It's a hunger strike, and other developments at immigration detention facilities in our area, in New Jersey, in particular, the hunger strike and protests are in Bergen County.
There's a COVID outbreak at a facility in Elizabeth and there's a key vote by freeholders in Hudson County to maintain a contract with ICE that they had announced would be ending. Matt Katz joins us and we'll also be joined in a couple of minutes by a man recently released from the Bergen County facility. Hi, Matt, how you doing?
Matt Katz: Hi there, Brian. Good morning. It's been a dramatic couple of weeks in ICE detention in our area.
Brian: Tell us about that hunger strike first, who striking and for what?
Matt: This has now been going on for 19 days, so two and a half weeks. We now know there are eight people involved, there were more, and these detainees they're immigration detainees so they're waiting on their hearings on their immigration cases. Some have legal documents to stay in the country but they were convicted of crimes, served their sentences, and are now deportable, so while they await hearings on that, they're held in jail instead of being released to await their court dates. Others are asylum seekers who don't have papers at all, so they're awaiting court dates and they want out.
Many have been in there for more than a year, sometimes two years and they complain about conditions. Several of them have complicated medical issues that they say the doctors at the facility in Bergen County, which is run by the Bergen County Sheriff's Office, can't help them with and they're feeling now that this is their only way out. One of them told me he wants to be deported but his country isn't accepting him back right now. He's in this kind of purgatory.
This is the second different hunger strike this month at the Bergen County Jail and the detainees were telling me they're increasingly sick, obviously, that they're not eating. They are drinking water; there are these sinks that are attached to the toilet in their cells, so they're drinking water from there. As you mentioned, there have been now protests outside the facility, it began with a group of Rabbis last Friday, I believe, and every couple of days more protesters show up outside the jail.
As a result, we saw yesterday in footage of a protest that the jail actually blocked the windows so the detainees on hunger strike inside presumably can't see out, which also means they can't see the protesters but maybe also can't see sunlight. The Bergen County Sheriff's Office has stopped responding to my questions about this. There have been several questions I've heard. I've also heard that heat has been cut off but we have not been able to get any verification on that because the sheriff's office is not talking any longer, all I'm getting is confirmation from ICE that the hunger strike is continuing.
Brian: Who is the hunger strike and the protest aimed at? It's an unusual time for this in a certain respect since this is a detention facility that has to do with federal policy because the Trump administration which obviously has been so tough on undocumented immigrants is on its way out of office. The Biden administration doesn't have any power yet but they will be on their way in and might have a different policy or not, but is it aimed at either of them or is it aimed more at local officials?
Matt: I've asked that very question because the detainees will complain about the conditions at the jail which is run by local officials. Bergen County is a Democratic county and that the sheriff's office, the elected Democratic sheriff there runs the jail, and they complain about rats and mice and lack of outside recreation time and the amount of time they're locked in their cells and semi-solitary confinement and the poor food and medical conditions. They complain about that but they say their real gripe and the reason for the strike is actually aimed at ICE.
There was a federal injunction earlier during the quarantine that mandated that ICE identify medically vulnerable detainees who can be released due to COVID and they weren't released under that and they say ICE is not taking their claim seriously, that they don't have proper protections, they cannot social distance in jail and that they have medical issues and they are susceptible to COVID-19. The first ICE detainee in the country to test positive for coronavirus was at the Bergen County Jail. They're fearful of COVID and they want ICE to review their files and release them based on that, and that's who this is aimed at primarily.
Brian: Also, joining us for a few minutes with WNYC's Matt Katz is Marcial Morales, who was recently released from the Bergen County facility. Marcial, thanks for coming on WNYC for a few minutes. Hi.
Marcial Morales: Hi, thanks for having me.
Brian: I see you participated in a hunger strike before your release. What were you striking for?
Marcial: Well, it's a law so the immigrants won against ICE, anybody has big medical issues should be identified and released. I filed my Freiheit but I was denied, and I did it for several time and was denied so I had to push a little bit hard. I went to hunger strike, and then eventually, they granted.
Brian: You think your release was connected to you going on a hunger strike?
Marcial: Yes.
Brian: Can you talk about the conditions at the facility in Bergen County that you experienced or witnessed?
Marcial: Yes, Bergen County jail is a very terrible place to be. There is no clean water to drink, rats everywhere, the place is filthy and a lot of leaks everywhere and all the staff there, they abuse their power, they treat everybody like criminals. We are detainees, not criminals. It's a very bad place to be.
Brian: What's your immigration status now and what's next for you?
Marcial: For me right now I am appealing my case and the BIA. Now I have to wait, see what happened710.
Brian: Marcial Morales, thank you very much for joining us for a few minutes, and good luck to you.
Marcial: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Brian: Matt Katz, do you want to put his story in context for us?
Matt: Yes, sure.
Brian: When he talks about being a detainee, not a prisoner, and you mentioned that distinction too, I think a lot of people don't understand that. Why are they behind bars if they're not criminals in the first place, not accused criminals even?
Matt: It's simply to make sure that they show up to their court dates, their immigration court dates, they are not being punished for anything. Some of them have crimes and have convictions for crimes, but they've already served time in state prison, for example, for those crimes, but once they committed the crimes that made them deportable under immigration law, but they have to go through a process to see if they will indeed be deported because they have a right to the fight that. To make sure that they show up to immigration court, ICE locks them up.
This is a relatively new phenomenon in the US. We've only been doing this for about 20, 25 years, and it's really ramped up obviously over the last several years. That's why they make a distinction. Unlike other people in the same jail, they're not there based on a crime, they're there based on this violation, this immigration violation, alleged immigration violation. Marcial is out on an ankle monitor and that's what is making sure that he shows up to court. His ankle monitor monitors his movements, and that's why ICE knows where he is, and he has to check in with them and that's what these other guys want.
Marcial has become something of an inspiration to the other hunger strikers because he did go on hunger strike and then was released and that might be why ICE is not necessarily going to release the guys currently on hunger strike, because it could have an effect on the rest of the population. The one other option that ICE has, a couple years ago I did a story about a guy held at the Bergen County Jail who went on hunger strike and he was transferred to El Paso where ICE was able to get a judge there to order force-feeding and he was held down for several days and food was put through his nose by tubes while he was held down by nurses and officers.
That is something that possibly awaits the hunger strikers. I'll add one more piece of context when Marcial was saying he was complaining about the conditions there, and I will say that the sheriff's office has said that they do clean the facility, it is very clean, and that the sheriff told me that he never knew about a rat problem there. I've heard this many times that there's rats but the sheriff's office denies it for whatever that's worth.
Brian: You're reporting on these immigration detention facilities in three counties, Bergen and Union and Hudson, we've been talking primarily so far about the one in Bergen County that Marcial was held out. At the one in union County and Elizabeth, COVID-19 is evidently a big problem. What are you reporting from there?
Matt: Yes, I've been hearing from guys inside of there. That's a privately-run facility run by the company CoreCivics, so far 10 detainees are positive, a medical staffer there has died and this is only just over the last few weeks. The people there describe that the whole place is now in quarantine that sanitation has been an issue. They use the thumb monitors to check their oxygen levels, but they don't sanitize between usages. There's not a regular change of out of the mask that they use.
There's issues in terms of sanitizing and social distancing and now the disease has really spread there. This would be considered an outbreak. 10 so far at Elizabeth, the privately-run detention center, but most of the detainees from our area, from New York and New Jersey, are held in county jails in New Jersey. That's Bergen, which we've talked about. Essex County in Newark, they have a few hundred ICE detainees. Then the last one is Hudson and then you mentioned this in your introduction there, Brian, they were supposed to pull out of their ICE contract.
They announced in 2018 that by this month, that by the end of 2020, they would end their ICE contract and that's because Hudson is almost 50% foreign-born. It's very Democratic, the entire county board there, they're the freeholders, which will soon become the county commissioners. They're all Democrats and they announced under pressure two years ago that they were ending their ICE contract and that's because of all the stuff we've heard this morning, like complaints about conditions, ICE, et cetera. They changed their mind last week and they have now approved a new 10-year contract with ICE.
Brian: What, why?
Matt: It's a good question. I listened in on the meeting, it was a Zoom meeting of the freeholder board last week. It was 12 hours long, the longest New Jersey government meeting I've ever attended and, Brian, I've been to a lot of New Jersey government meetings and not a single resident, not a single person who called in to speak to the board, spoke in favor of the contract. There were more than 150 people who spoke and everybody was against it in very passionate tones.
There were former detainees complaining of being raped and abused inside the jail. There were immigrants who likened ICE detention to the Holocaust. It was extremely dramatic, but there was very little comments from the freeholder board, the one who eventually approved the contract, despite the opposition. What they did say is that they would rather have the immigrants-- the immigrants who are detained there would rather be near their lawyers who were in New York, in New Jersey and near their family in New York and New Jersey, rather than being shipped off to another detention center around the country if the Hudson facility were to close.
The other reason and I know this because I spoke to the spokesman for Hudson County, Executive Tom DeGise, who was not at the meeting, but he was the one driving this, he's also a Democrat. The other reason is that they need the money and they get $120 a day per immigrant who's detained there. They say that they need that to help balance the budget during a time of COVID. Taxes are going to go up anyway and this will help to prevent a bigger tax increase so that then became something that the people against the ICE contract found quite problematic that we shouldn't be Democrats, particularly in the end of the Trump era should not be making money off the ICE deportation machine.
That's exactly what they're doing. The way it works in New Jersey, there's a democratic machine and I've asked for comment from the very anti-Trump Democrats in New Jersey about what they think about Democrats in New Jersey, having these ICE contracts and I got no comment back from Governor Murphy's office, nothing from Senator Menendez, nothing from Senator Booker.
I couldn't get an interview with the Hudson County Executive, Tom DeGise. They have a hold on these things and they're hoping they're able to push off any anti-ICE progressive Democrats who might have a problem with that and they think the ICE contract, in general, will be less controversial in a Biden era because Joe Biden presumably will run an ICE agency that is kinder and gentler.
Brian: Your story on this disturbingly pointed out that not all the freeholders who took this vote seem to even understand who ICE is detaining. What can you tell us about that?
Matt: Yes, there was actually a protest last night, Anthony Romano, who's one of the Democratic freeholders, he was having a fundraiser so a lot of anti-ICE protestors showed up and he was interviewed outside the fundraiser by Hudson County TV station.
He said everybody inside is serving time for serious crimes, or they've been convicted of serious crimes and it's simply not the case.
Some just don't have immigration papers but have no other criminal charges and immigration violations are considered something along the lines of a misdemeanor. It's not a serious crime and others who have committed serious crimes, and there are people who have committed serious crimes in ICE detention, violent crimes, they've already served time for that.
They've already been in prison for several years for that.
In many cases, people have ended up in ICE detention because it takes so long. The system is so clogged up. They've been in ICE detention far longer than they were in prison for the crime that they actually committed. It's clear that the freeholders time and again during the meeting and then in comments afterwards don't really completely understand the role of ICE detention, which is simply to make sure people show up to their immigration court dates.
Brian: Before we run out of time, can I go back to the detention center in Elizabeth where you said there was a COVID 19 outbreak. Were any detainees released for their safety?
Matt: Not that we know of. We do know that earlier during the quarantine, there were a bunch of detainees released based on these court mandates that ICE review their files and there were humanitarian releases, but since then that has seemed to have stopped happening in our area. In fact, I reported on a guy who was released. He's elderly, he's got medical issues, he's been in the country for 30 years, but he had committed some drug crimes so they're trying to deport him.
He was actually released in the beginning of the quarantine, at the beginning of the COVID outbreak on humanitarian purposes and then he was suddenly just rearrested. He hadn't committed any other crime. He was just rearrested a few weeks ago, picked up again, and sent back to detention even though obviously we're experiencing this second wave and COVID outbreak is still a major concern in any jail, let alone ICE detention.
Brian: Last question, have you gotten to put a question yet to anybody from the Biden transition about whether they will treat detainees at these New Jersey ICE facilities differently than they're being treated under Trump?
Matt: I have not, but we do know that Biden has said he's going to put a halt on deportations, that they won't be doing the same arrests that ICE under Trump did. ICE under Trump arrest not just people with criminal charges, but anybody they might encounter who doesn't have documents. Those collateral arrests as ICE calls them, that is supposedly going to stop under Biden.
Presumably, there will be fewer people coming into ICE detention in a Biden administration, but I can't see how that has any immediate effect for people already in the system. These contracts are signed and sealed with ICE for another 10 years. One of the freeholders who voted against the ICE contract in Hudson said if we close our facility, then ICE will pressure the Biden administration to make fewer arrests and that'll contribute to the shrinking of the criminalization of immigration but the system and the bureaucracy is now so entrenched that it's hard to imagine that ICE detention doesn't continue in much of the same way, at least in the near future, even under Biden.
Brian: Matt Katz covers immigration and hate crimes for WNYC and Gothamist and is the author of the book, American Governor, Chris Christie's Bridge to Redemption. Matt, thanks a lot.
Matt: I appreciate the time Brian.
Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, much more to come.
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