Border hotels: Spaces of detention and quarantine

'Border hotels' have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about 'border hotels', closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of 'border hotels', this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the 'hotel geopolitics' agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Individuals' experiences in U.S. immigration detention during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic: major challenges and public health implications.

BACKGROUND: Individuals held in carceral settings were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, limited research exists of the direct experiences of individuals detained by the United States (U.S.) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This study illustrates the major challenges described by individuals held in ICE's immigration detention centers during the initial spread of COVID-19. METHODS: We interviewed 50 individuals who were released from ICE detention between March 15, 2020 until August 31, 2020. Participants were recruited through immigration attorneys. Responses to a semi-structured interview were documented. Quotes from these interviews were thematically analyzed. RESULTS: Study participants were detained in 22 different ICE detention centers, which were located across 12 states, in both county (41%) and privately-contracted facilities (59%). The major themes that emerged from interviews included inadequate protections against COVID-19, denial of physical and mental healthcare, and experiences of retaliation in response to self-advocacy. These issues perpetuated emotions of fear, distrust, and helplessness in individuals in immigration detention centers. CONCLUSIONS: This study represents the largest analysis of experiences of ICE-detained immigrants during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the rights to health and wellbeing for this population, further actions should include improving public health conditions, protecting against human rights violations, addressing barriers to healthcare access, ensuring transparency about conditions in detention centers, and moving toward decarceration.

When politics are contagious: Covid-19 and political resistance inside an immigration detention center.

During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration detainees in the United States rose up to protests their forced confinement during a global pandemic, launching collective hunger strikes across separate facilities on a national scale. In this article, I utilize primary and secondary sources to examine the strike that occurred at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego in the Spring 2020. While acts of resistance are hardly a new phenomenon in immigration detention, the 2020 protests were unusually powerful because of their range and the pace at which they spread across facilities. Their power was a direct consequence of Covid-19, not only because the pandemic triggered the strikes, but because it introduced a common condition of vulnerability among the detained population, thus encouraging collective organization. The strikes and the pandemic showed a common form of expansion, which was acknowledged by the authorities themselves, as they adopted the same strategies of lockdown and quarantine to contain both phenomena. The history of this protest, along with those that erupted across carceral sites globally during this period, constitutes an important testimony to the political effects of the pandemic, and to the possibility of political resistance in detention.

Do mobile phone bans show that immigration detention is becoming more like prison?

The mobile phone enables people to be heard through walls of confinement. During the suspension of visits to immigration detention in the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phones were a lifeline to family and friends. There is also a long history of people using phones to document and communicate their experience in Australian-run detention to the world. The Australian government's attempts to ban mobile phones in detention provide a lens, and in this paper, a case study, to explore whether immigration detention in Australia is becoming more like prison. I argue that while the official purpose for detention remains administrative not punitive, the proposed mobile phone bans reveal the changing function of detention in Australian border control. Mobile phone bans show how people in influential roles have reimagined the legal subject of detention from the "asylum seeker' to the "migrant criminal'. Proposals to ban mobile phones also convey a transformation in how immigration detention is legally conceived - from a civil space under the supervision of police and the general criminal law to a more segregated space ruled from within. Drawing on scholarship on law, crimmigration, and carcerality, this paper traces how mobile phone bans came to be regarded as the natural next step in detention law-making.

HARMFUL BY DESIGN: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF THE HEALTH IMPACTS OF IMMIGRATION DETENTION

BACKGROUND: There are over 20,000 individuals imprisoned by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) daily, with nearly half a million detained annually. Numerous reports have documented human rights abuses in immigration detention, yet little is known about its health impacts. METHODS: From July 2020 - February 2021, we conducted a qualitative study of adults who had been detained by ICE in New York and New Jersey and who were clients of local legal and community-based organizations. Eligibility included: release from immigration detention in the past two years, detained for >30 days. Two interviewers conducted anonymous, individual, semi-structured interviews in English or Spanish. Interviews explored participants' experiences trying tomeet physical and mental health needs while in detention. We continued interviews until reaching thematic saturation and conducted analysis concurrently using a modified grounded theory approach. RESULTS: Of 16 participants, 13 identified as men, 5 as LGBTQ, and 4 as Black;they were from 9 countries and had spent a median of 11 months in detention. Four themes emerged from our analysis: (1) Participants attributed new medical problems or worsening of chronic conditions to inhumane treatment and poor physical conditions: “They detected I had high blood sugar and cholesterol level, but that's due to the food they give you there.” (2) Structural barriers prevented access to needed care and led to delays in medical attention: “You could literally be dying in there and it's like they need to see you dead in order for them to get you help.” (3) A pervasive sense of injustice exacerbated emotional distress. Participants felt detention was designed to break one down: “It harms you morally, psychologically, physically, what immigration officials do to you. if you didn't commit a crime that put others at risk why do they detain you there?” (4)Worsening conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic worsened isolation and desperation;participants feared for their lives as COVID-19 spread in their facilities and they remained unprotected: “They didn't come and ask people, ?Hey, do you feel any symptoms? Are you okay, do you want to get tested?' There was no proper tools given like hand sanitizer, Clorox. no measurements being taken, masks given out or gloves given out? we barely had toilet paper and soap.” CONCLUSIONS: These interviews demonstrate how structural features of immigration detention erode health while creating barriers to accessing needed medical care. Underlying the participants' experiences of the immigration detention enterprise is a sense of arbitrariness and injustice that further contributes to its psychological toll. Clinicians caring for immigrant communities must be cognizant of these health impacts. As COVID-19 continues to disproportionately affect incarcerated individuals, community-based alternatives to immigration detention should be urgently prioritized.

The impact of immigration detention on the health of asylum seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minority groups as well as people in jails and immigration detention centers in the United States. Between April and August of 2020, the mean monthly COVID-19 case ratio for ICE detainees was 13.4 times that of the general U.S. population. This study aims to understand the experiences of detained asylum seekers during the pandemic and to provide insight into COVID-19's impact on this population's health. This qualitative study employed first-person, in-depth narratives obtained from 12 asylum seekers, all of whom were detained in immigration detention centers or prisons during the initial surge of the COVID-19 pandemic and were subsequently released. Detained asylum seekers reported inadequate medical care, obstacles to receiving care, an inability to social distance, poor hygiene, restricted movement, and a lack of infection control-- all which increased their risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19 and exacerbated health inequalities brought to the forefront by the pandemic. Advocating for improved disease prevention and screening, prompt access to health care and treatment, cohorting of infectious cases, and community alternatives to detention to decrease the detained immigrant population sizes are crucial to halt communicability of the virus and its subsequent morbidity and mortality in this vulnerable population.

Clinicians' perceptions of the health status of formerly detained immigrants.

BACKGROUND: In the past decade, the U.S. immigration detention system regularly detained more than 30,000 people per day; in 2019 prior to the pandemic, the daily detention population exceeded 52,000 people. Inhumane detention conditions have been documented by internal government watchdogs, and news media and human rights groups who have observed over-crowding, poor hygiene and sanitation and poor and delayed medical care, as well as verbal, physical and sexual abuse. METHODS: This study surveyed health professionals across the United States who had provided care for immigrants who were recently released from immigration detention to assess clinician perceptions about the adverse health impact of immigration detention on migrant populations based on real-life clinical encounters. There were 150 survey responses, of which 85 clinicians observed medical conditions attributed to detention. RESULTS: These 85 clinicians reported seeing a combined estimate of 1300 patients with a medical issue related to their time in detention, including patients with delayed access to medical care or medicine in detention, patients with new or acute health conditions such as infection and injury attributed to detention, and patients with worsened chronic or special needs conditions. Clinicians also provided details regarding sentinel cases, categorized into the following themes: Pregnant women, Children, Mentally Ill, COVID-19, and Other serious health issue. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first survey, to our knowledge, of health care professionals treating individuals upon release from detention. Due to the lack of transparency by federal entities and limited access to detainees, this survey serves as a source of credible information about conditions experienced within immigration detention facilities and is a means of corroborating immigrant testimonials and media reports. These findings can help inform policy discussions regarding systematic changes to the delivery of healthcare in detention, quality assurance and transparent reporting.

Global Health, Human Rights, and Neoliberalism: The Need for Structural Frameworks When Addressing Mental Health Disparities

In this paper we argue that the field of psychology-and the psy-disciplines generally-need to embrace an interdisciplinary approach if they are to be relevant and contribute to global social justice initiatives. We focus on two such initiatives: The Global Mental Health movement and calls for increasing access to mental health services for immigrants. We suggest that a stronger focus on the upstream causes of ill-health, a deeper appreciation for the ways in which neoliberalism deflects attention away from these upstream determinants, and a greater engagement with the field of human rights and other disciplines will lead to more substantive gains in population mental health. Public Significance Statement This paper discusses the ways in which neoliberal ideology advances the medicalization of distress, by emphasizing individual responsibility. For immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, increasing the provision of psychological services and/or psychotropic drugs in response to structural violence is an insufficient response by the psy-disciplines. Committing to an interdisciplinary and human rights approach to Global Mental Health and to immigrant and refugee health issues will allow us to advance psychology's social justice initiatives.

A rapid review of early guidance to prevent and control COVID-19 in custodial settings.

BACKGROUND: With over 11 million people incarcerated globally, prevention and control of COVID-19 in custodial settings is a critical component of the public health response. Given the risk of rapid transmission in these settings, it is important to know what guidance existed for responding to COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. We sought to identify, collate, and summarise guidance for the prevention and control of COVID-19 in custodial settings in the first six months of 2020. We conducted a systematic search of peer-reviewed and grey literature, and manually searched relevant websites to identify publications up to 30 June 2020 outlining recommendations to prevent and/or control COVID-19 in custodial settings. We inductively developed a coding framework and assessed recommendations using conventional content analysis. RESULTS: We identified 201 eligible publications containing 374 unique recommendations across 19 domains including: preparedness; physical environments; case identification, screening, and management; communication; external access and visitation; psychological and emotional support; recreation, legal, and health service adaptation; decarceration; release and community reintegration; workforce logistics; surveillance and information sharing; independent monitoring; compensatory measures; lifting control measures; evaluation; and key populations/settings. We identified few conflicting recommendations. CONCLUSIONS: The breadth of recommendations identified in this review reflects the complexity of COVID-19 response in custodial settings. Despite the availability of comprehensive guidance early in the pandemic, important gaps remain in the implementation of recommended prevention and control measures globally, and in the availability of evidence assessing their effectiveness on reducing COVID-19 disease, impact on people in custody and staff, and implementation.

Management of the COVID-19 epidemic in a French immigration detention center.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of management of the COVID-19 epidemic in a French immigration detention center. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: During containment in France because of COVID-19, the judicial authorities had to deal with the risk of contamination within immigration detention centers (IDC). In the Paris IDC, which can usually receive up to 240 individuals, measures have been taken to limit the risk of contamination by releasing individuals without prior judicial conviction and testing the others by a nasal swab. FINDINGS: The test was done for all the present individuals (48), except two who refused. Eight tests (17.4%) were positive and only one was symptomatic. Individuals testing positive for COVID-19 were transferred into COVID-centers specially created during this health crisis. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Management of the COVID-19 epidemic in this French IDC illustrates the necessity of good cooperation between judicial authorities and medical teams in charge of those centers and the difficulty of balancing public health actions with state security.