I’m originally from the Dominican Republic, but I’ve been in New York since 1993. I’m 30 years old, with a wife and two stepdaughters, and I’ve been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Hudson County Correctional Center since March 2019—so about a year and a week already.



We heard about the coronavirus while we were in the dorms, which is where we’re able to move around and interact with other inmates. It was on the news, and in a matter of a week or two our contact visits—where we are able to touch and hug visitors—were canceled, so then all visits were done through phones or glass. But the thing that I don’t understand is that you have these correction officers who go back home to their loved ones, to their families, not knowing if they have this virus or not, and end up coming back to us. So they get to go home, but we cannot interact with our own family.

That’s the first thing. Everybody was getting pretty frustrated because of that. And today, out of nowhere, they actually got everybody from the dorms and put them back in cells, where we’re locked in a small space with another person. They said we had to leave the dorms so they could fix the bathrooms. I guess they knew that if they had told us the truth, that they were moving us back to cells, it would have caused chaos, and that’s exactly what it did as soon as we got here. Supposedly it’s statewide and applies to everyone. But just this morning, on Monday, they were holding us in dorms all together.

Now, the big scenario here is it’s two tiers in the cells. You have the third floor and the fourth floor, and we rotate. The third floor is allowed to come out while the fourth floor is locked up for three hours. When the fourth floor comes out, the third floor goes back in and stays locked in for the rest of the day. They said they put us here to stop the spread of the coronavirus, so if somebody on the third floor has the coronavirus, the people on the fourth floor are less likely to get it. Pretty much we’re locked in for, I’d say, 17 to 18 hours a day now. We only have three hours to take a shower, cook, and call our loved ones. It’s still a little chaotic in here. It’s at a point where we are about to have a riot in here right now.

Everybody wanted to go on a hunger strike once they realized we were going to be locked in our cells for so long. And I had to talk to everybody and tell everybody we’re going to end up losing regardless, it’s not worth getting maced and getting put in solitary confinement because of the way they’re running things. There are certain ways for us to handle it. I told everybody to call their loved ones, to call the sanctuaries, to call their lawyers and let them know what’s going on.