For the safety of tens of thousands of people stowed away in mismanaged, dangerous and sometimes deadly private immigration warehouses, real change could be coming.
Aurora Congressperson Jason Crow, a Democrat, and Florida Rep. John Rutherford, a Republican, are jointly sponsoring legislation that seeks to vastly improve transparency and accountability at the privately-run immigration prison in Aurora, and those like it across the nation.
It’s a measure long overdue and badly needed, especially as the incoming Trump administration is threatening mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a program Trump has dubbed “Operation Aurora.” Aurora has been the focus of anti-immigrant controversy after national attention was drawn to a chaos surrounding Venezuelan immigrants and reported gang activity in local apartment complexes.
For years, the Aurora GEO ICE detention center has been accused of mistreating people incarcerated there and refusing to allow for badly needed independent review.
The deaths of two inmates in the prison, numerous other injuries and complaints of gross mistreatment, prompted Crow, since he was elected in 2018, to push for congressional inspections of the warehouses, transparency about the health and treatment of inmates and accountability for what are clearly critical and sometimes lethal mistakes.
In congresses run by both Democrats and Republicans, he’s had marginal success at forcing these private immigrant warehouses to improve conditions and proof of competency in running the facilities.
On repeated occasions, the for-profit, Florida-based GEO Group, which operates the Aurora detention center for the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division, has been successful at thwarting the release of information about a growing list of scandals hovering over the Aurora detention warehouse.
For years, the warehouse has been plagued by inmate stories about mistreatment, including being virtually enslaved to act as janitors for the facility for token pay. These are not prisons, and in many cases, people being held have not been convicted of anything.
A young Nicaraguan asylum seeker died in Aurora’s GEO immigration detention center in 2022 of a pulmonary embolism after sustaining a series of injuries to his right leg while in the facility, according to records obtained by the Sentinel.
The documents raise questions about the medical treatment of people in immigration detention centers, and whether his death was preventable.
The Nicaraguan man did not have any identified chronic health problems, the report said, but he had injured his toe and leg while playing football.
Despite a long and steady stream of questions, the GEO ICE facility has offered no satisfactory answers.
For years, the Aurora facility has been accused of improperly handling inmate health. The facility has undergone scourges of communicable diseases, such as mumps and measles. To date, there is no clear picture of how the Aurora GEO ICE warehouse does or doesn’t now protect inmates and the public from these disease outbreaks.
Two years ago, three detainees escaped from the Aurora facility, and little meaningful information was provided to the public as to how it happened.
A mysterious 2017 death of a detainee has prompted a lawsuit. The death of inmate Kamyar Samimi happened after Samimi was incarcerated after having lived in the United States for decades. He was arrested in 2017 and died 15 days later in ICE custody at the Aurora GEO warehouse.
Despite trying to glean information by using federal open records laws, the ACLU has come up empty-handed.
“Immigration detention facilities, like the one operated by GEO Group in Aurora, are all too often cloaked in secrecy, offering little to no transparency into the way detainees are treated within their walls,” said ACLU of Colorado Legal Director Mark Silverstein last year.
At least with government-operated facilities, the public has some chance of extracting information and details from these prisons by leveraging federal records laws in the courts.
That hasn’t been the case where these private-run prisons find ways to skirt accountability the government ultimately cannot.
Crow and Rutherford’s Public Oversight of Detention Centers bill would require these facilities to permit immediate inspections by members of Congress.
But the real remedy for years of concealing how people in these privately run immigrant warehouses are treated, and mistreated, will come from the federal government banning private prison companies.
There has repeatedly been ample evidence to show that taxpayers see no net savings in having private companies run any kind of prison or detention center. All that private-company-run prisons can do is clip employee pay and cut corners to funnel taxpayer dollars into company profits.
The safety of the public and the people imprisoned in these warehouses is paramount, and without effective transparency and accountability, neither can be ensured.
The PODS bill by Crow and Rutherford is a good start.
