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While she waited for her insulin and pills last Tuesday morning, about eight guards wearing surgical masks chatted nearby. Dawson and the other detainees lined up on a bench in the hallway lacked even such modest protective gear. But she had seen the guidelines on CNN in the unit where she sleeps: Maintain distance from people around you. So she stood up to wait over by the wall. “You guys came in from the outside,” she told the guards. “We don’t know where you have been.”

“You are safer in here than you are out there,” a guard replied. Another joked that Dawson was just “stirring the pot.”

Besides, the first guard said, “you don’t have to stay here.” She could drop her case to stay in the United States and agree to deportation instead.

In Dawson’s unit, detainees sleep in rows of metal bunk beds surrounding a common area with white walls, steel tables, a microwave, and a few TVs. Lockups like the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, or NWDC, are effective incubators for the coronavirus, a coalition of doctors and human-rights groups warned last week. They called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release as many detainees as possible before the pandemic takes hold in its facilities. They argue that the close quarters endanger detainees, staff, and, by extension, the broader communities to which they belong. Following similar logic, New Jersey courts issued an order on Sunday to release as many as 1,000 low-level inmates from the state’s jails.

Dawson has joined a lawsuit, filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, asking federal officials to release medically frail detainees like her. Other NWDC detainees who joined as plaintiffs include a 65-year-old Mexican woman with heart disease, a Cuban woman with kidney disease and epilepsy, and a 57-year-old diabetic man from Zimbabwe, according to the complaint. (In response to questions about whether ICE will release those who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, an agency representative emailed that “custody determinations are made on a case-by-case basis and do take into consideration chronic health conditions.”)

The number of people in ICE custody across the country—now more than 37,000—has risen to unprecedented highs since Donald Trump took office and mandated that the agency arrest more nonviolent, noncriminal immigrants than it had in the past. The growing detainee population has strained an agency whose health-care record is already pockmarked with outbreaks of infectious disease and deaths from preventable illnesses and suicide. Over the past two years, ICE has reported 21 detainee deaths, and last year it quarantined up to 6,000 people nationwide during outbreaks of mumps, the flu, and other communicable diseases. In response to questions about ICE’s preparedness for the current pandemic, the agency representative cited those past outbreaks as “extensive experience with regard to keeping [detainees] isolated so that it doesn't spread.”