The administration*'s border policy is a staggering vista of unpleasant outcomes and unintended—or very intended—consequences. From Reuters:

In early January, a mumps outbreak at the privately run Pine Prairie U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center put Mejia and hundreds of other detainees on lockdown. “When there is just one person who is sick, everybody pays,” Mejia, 19, said in a phone interview from the Pine Prairie center describing weeks without visits and access to the library and dining hall. His attorney was not allowed in, but his immigration court case continued anyway - over a video conference line. On Feb. 12, the judge ordered Mejia deported back to Honduras. The number of people amassed in immigration detention under the Trump administration has reached record highs, raising concerns among migrant advocates about disease outbreaks and resulting quarantines that limit access to legal services.

This is just beautiful. Using a medical quarantine to double-talk a sick man out of his right to appeal for asylum. And that's not even to mention the fact that, apparently, the detention facilities are epidemics waiting to happen.

Internal emails reviewed by Reuters reveal the complications of managing outbreaks like the one at Pine Prairie, since immigrant detainees often are transferred around the country and infected people do not necessarily show symptoms of viral diseases even when they are contagious. ICE health officials have been notified of 236 confirmed or probable cases of mumps among detainees in 51 facilities in the past 12 months, compared to no cases detected between January 2016 and February 2018. Last year, 423 detainees were determined to have influenza and 461 to have chicken pox. All three diseases are largely preventable by vaccine. As of March 7, a total of 2,287 detainees were quarantined around the country, ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy told Reuters.

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These facilities, it should be noted, are run by private companies who profit from their continued operation, not that anyone in the administration* gives a damn about that.

At Pine Prairie, staff members were at times at odds with the warden about how to manage the mumps outbreak, internal emails show. The warden decided not to quarantine 40 new arrivals from Tallahatchie in February despite concerns raised by the medical staff, one email showed. The warden, Indalecio Ramos, who referred questions about the outbreak to ICE and the GEO Group, argued that quarantining the transfers would keep them from attending their court hearings, the facility’s health service administrator wrote in a Feb. 7 email.

In a Feb. 21 email, ICE requested that medical staff members at Pine Prairie clear a detainee quarantined for chicken pox and mumps for travel, calling him a “high-profile removal scheduled for deport.” In an email to staff later that day, warden Ramos wrote that medical staff had wanted to exclude the detainee from transfer but “ICE wants him to travel out of the country anyway ... Please ensure he leaves.”

Mumps in adults is serious business. (It isn't a barrel of laughs for kids, either.) Predictably, of course, the administration* is using these statistics to gin up fears of hordes of diseased furr'i'ners swamping the southern border.

On Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters that changing demographics on the southwest border, with more immigrants from Central America traveling long distances, overwhelmed border officials and raised health concerns. “We are seeing migrants arrive with illnesses and medical conditions in unprecedented numbers,” McAleenan said at a press conference.

Oh?

However, vaccination rates in the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are above 90 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ICE detainees come from countries all over the world, with varying degrees of vaccination coverage.

However this situation developed, ICE would seem to be the last agency to call on to manage even the smallest outbreak of epidemic disease. In addition to its recently developed reputation for thuggery and deceit, ICE's job is to arrest people, throw them into detention, and then ship them home. And, under this president*, ICE has been freed to do all of these things as crudely and roughly as possible in order to deter other migrants from coming here. This is an organization ill-equipped to deal with the sick. And private detention facilities are generally a nightmare as far as health-care goes. Sooner or later, however, there's going to be an outbreak of something more serious than the chicken pox. Nobody's ready for that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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