“Essentially cages”: ICE is using courthouse cells for lengthy detentions | Detainees report not having access to private toilets, showers, hygiene products, and lifesaving HIV and diabetes medication

> On the sixth floor of the federal courthouse building in downtown Baltimore, sealed off from the public, there are holding rooms containing little besides a single toilet. Generally, these processing cells accommodate just a few immigrants for up to 12 hours. But in the last few months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has an office in the building, has been packing them full of people for days at a stretch, lawyers in the area say, seemingly violating the agency’s own rules. While immigrants are held there, they have no access to beds, showers, hygiene products, or lifesaving medication.

> Typically, agents in the Baltimore field office use these cells to confine people they have arrested before transferring them to longer-term detention centers—or to hold them briefly when they come back for their immigration hearings on the fourth floor of the same building. According to ICE’s detention standards, such holding cells tend to have doors fitted with glass or barred windows for “convenient security checks.” They come with toilets, but movable furniture and cots are not allowed in them. ICE’s policy stipulates that, “absent exceptional circumstances,” no one should be held in these cells for longer than 12 hours.

> Between November and March, detentions have lasted for much longer, often from 48 hours to nine days, lawyers said. They believe more than 50 people were held at the Baltimore courthouse over the March 8 weekend. Several lawyers said their clients shared the small rooms in the office building with 10 to 20 people. Some only learned about these conditions after their clients were transferred to a different facility.

> According to an email from an American Immigration Lawyers Association liaison, Baltimore ICE Director Matthew Elliston has told local attorneys the field office received a waiver for the 12 hour rule when detention centers in Virginia and Pennsylvania are full.

> Some Baltimore courthouse detainees were arrested by ICE during field operations or arrested after they were ordered deported by a judge in the immigration court within the building, without being given a chance to file an appeal with the board that reviews immigration court decisions, Lukens said. This pattern of arresting people at the courthouse before their appeal process can begin is also unprecedented, he said.

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