Health officials in Adams County, Colorado, have said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not provided “sufficient records” to determine the scope of a tuberculosis outbreak in a detention facility in the area, reported Kyle Clark of local news station 9 News.
This follows reporting that at least 12 people have been sickened in the outbreak of the deadly bacterial lung disease.
According to The Guardian, detainees who have tested positive are “being made to endure their isolation without air conditioning, one detainee who has been at the facility in Aurora since December told the Guardian, through his partner, in a telephone call on Monday afternoon.” This detainee “gave a detailed account of developments inside the troubled center over the past few days, which have included the mass testing of everyone within one of the center’s so-called pods.”
DHS and ICE have declined to comment as of press time, as well as GEO Group, the private for-profit prison management company that runs the facility.
The detainee did say he saw some of his fellows receiving medications for their illness. But his partner told The Guardian, “I don’t know if they understand the severity of what TB is. Obviously, it’s not a good thing, and he has some other underlying health conditions which are a concern for us. The first day he was very scared, very worried.”
This comes amid reports from all around the country of substandard conditions in immigration lockups, including admissions from ICE itself that a facility in Manhattan was barely fit for habitation and a breeding ground for disease.
It also comes amid higher-profile cases of detainees who have died in facilities after brutal treatment, including Cuban national Geraldo Lunas Campos during an incident at Camp East Montana in Texas.