Georgia has the fourth-largest number of immigrant detainees in the country, with more than two thousand typically held on a daily basisnearly as many as Arizona. In May, Project South, a Georgia-based nonprofit focussed on immigrant advocacy, released a report, co-authored with Penn State Laws Center for Immigrants Rights Clinic, detailing a twelve-month study of Stewart and another Georgia facility, Irwin County Detention Center. Both are run by private companies. The report declared that conditions in both are in violation not only of Immigration and Customs Enforcements own guidelines but of those established, in 2012, by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The report recommended shutting down the two centers immediately.
On the afternoon that I visited Perdomo-Vaidez, he had just seen a doctor for only the second time since entering Stewart. (This second appointment had been arranged by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Perdomo-Vaidez sustained a serious injury to his left arm prior to being detained; while we spoke, he held the arm aloft, above his heart, to prevent it from swelling and turning purple. He had begun to fear that he would lose all or part of it. Nobody tells me what might happen to my arm or hand, he told me. They just offer more pills that dont help. Heval Kelli, the Atlanta-based doctor who was allowed to voluntarily assess him that day, concluded in his medical evaluation that, without specialized orthopedic care and rigorous rehabilitation, Perdomo-Vaidez could expect further complications, including serious infection, clots and the inability to use his left arm and hand. (Bryan Cox, a spokesman for ice, denies that Perdomo-Vaidez requires orthopedic treatment, and told me that the detained man has received all appropriate necessary medical treatment while in ice custody.)
Less than two weeks after Project South released its May report, two detainees died in custody at Georgia detention centers, one of them at Stewart. A Panamanian detainee who was held in isolation for nearly three weeks committed suicide; days later, an Indian detainee died, reportedly from congestive heart failure. A hundred and seventy-seven people have died in U.S. immigration detention centers since October 1, 2003, according to the nonprofit Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement. Six of those deaths have occurred in Georgia. Subpar medical care has contributed to nearly half of the death cases we have analyzed nationally, and substandard medical care has been evident in nearly ninety per cent of the cases, Christina Fialho, the co-executive director of the group, told me.
Stories abound. Ariel Prado, who has helped provide pro-bono legal services to detainees at the South Texas Family Residential Center, the largest immigration detention center in the U.S., recalls Vicks VapoRub being used as a kind of cure-all, he told me. The liquid version was even poured into a childs ear to treat an earache. The Project South report describes a Chinese man with a broken leg who waited a month for X-rays, and a Nigerian man with lumps in his chest, who told a Project South interviewer that blood had begun discharging from my breast. When I requested medical care, sometimes no one would reply. I was not given medical care until ice later approved it. When I reached out for medical help, I was placed in solitary.
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Shahshahani, of Project South, told me, My fear is that, with the further explosion of the immigration detention system, which were definitely going to seeunless Congress really takes a stronger step in denying funding to the Trump AdministrationI think that will result in even worse conditions.
