China’s Wuhan disease has spread rapidly through U.S. migrant detention centers, sickening many migrants and blocking some deportation flights to Central America.

The Associated Press reported the deportation problem on April 17:

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Forty-four Guatemalans deported on one flight from the United States this week have tested positive for COVID-19, a Guatemalan government official with knowledge of the situation said, amid rising rejection of deportees due to virus fears. Later Thursday, Guatemala Foreign Affairs Minister Pedro Brolo told The Associated Press the government had again suspended deportation flights. He did not explain why, but said the move was temporary. … The flight with the infected deportees arrived in Guatemala’s capital Monday carrying 76 Guatemalans. Three deportees displaying coronavirus symptoms were immediately taken for testing. When one of those tests came back positive others who had been quarantined at the airport were tested and 43 more resulted positive, said the official with knowledge of the situation who had not been authorized to share the information publicly and requested anonymity.

Guatemala and other Central American countries have little capacity to cope with the epidemic, which may have escaped from a Chinese government laboratory.

U.S. agency officials say they are taking steps to prevent the deportation flights from accelerating the epidemic in the migrants’ home countries:

Any [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE detainee who fails to pass screening by a flight medical provider and/or is suspected of having a health-risk condition potentially contagious to other detainees, staff and/or third parties, will be denied boarding and referred to an ICE approved facility for screening. In addition to recently issued IHSC guidance, for ICE Air charter removals, there will be a temperature screening at the flight line, prior to boarding. In accordance with IHSC guidance, any detainee with a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher will be immediately referred to a medical provider for further evaluation and observation.

The agency has reported 100 confirmed cases of “COVID-19” in ICE custody and 25 confirmed cases among ICE employees.

But the agency does little testing and does not report coronavirus cases in the many detention centers run under contract with ICE.

Immigration lawyers are sharing anecdotes about widespread infections among the roughly 33,000 detainees, nearly all of whom are from poor countries. “60 yo detained client in El Paso just called sobbing,” said a tweet from Linda Corchado, the director of legal services at Las America’s Immigrant Advocacy Center. “They took someone out of her barracks & doctors came in ‘dressed like astronauts’ and told the women someone tested positive for [China’s] covid-19. 80 – 90 women are in their barracks.”

Officials have kept the immigration agencies operating throughout the epidemic, amid furious protests from pro-migration groups led by white-collar progressive lawyers and business lobbies.

The enforcement efforts are politically popular among Americans, partly because the Central American migrants are used to nudge down blue-collar wages, drive up blue-collar housing costs, and cram schools in blue-collar neighborhoods.

The detention centers are used to hold new migrants, partly to prevent them from getting jobs to pay off their smuggling debts. The centers also hold the arrested migrants who are using the courts to avoid returning to their home countries.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is releasing some migrants when ordered by judges, or if the migrants are ill. ICE is also detaining fewer people, partly because fewer migrants are crossing the border, and fewer migrants are being arrested in cities throughout the United States.

ICE detention numbers have dropped because fewer people are being *put into* detention, not because more are *leaving* detention than normal. CBP sent just 789 people to ICE detention last week—down from 2,732 four weeks ago. Inside the US, ICE book-ins went from 2,751 to 1,315. https://t.co/YYnOQroxpX pic.twitter.com/K0yD5GFMac — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) April 15, 2020

“To combat the pandemic, ICE has released about 700 detainees so far, primarily people with known medical conditions,” the Associated Press reported April 17. “But it has resisted large-scale releases of detainees.”

The Associated Press reported one case of a migrant who was illegally working at a meatpacking plant:

When the judge asked Salomon Diego Alonzo to say his name, the guard responded that Alonzo “does not have the lung capacity,” said his lawyer, Veronica Semino, who was listening by phone. The call lasted about two hours, though Judge Mary Baumgarten eventually agreed to delay Alonzo’s final asylum hearing, the attorney said. … Alonzo said officials at Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, where he’s held, have told him that he tested positive for COVID-19. ICE would not confirm that to Semino, and spokesman Bryan Cox declined to comment. Semino says Alonzo was one of nearly 700 people arrested in ICE raids last year on chicken plants in Mississippi, the largest immigration worksite enforcement operation in at least a decade. He has been in the U.S. since 2012, living in an apartment in a small Mississippi town with his wife, teenage brother and daughter, now 8.

Pro-migrant groups are filing lawsuits to release many detained migrants into the United States, often via small-scale releases. For example, on April 15, a group of pro-migration groups filed a lawsuit against ICE. One of the plaintiffs is a 78-year-old man, according to KRGV:

“He has underlying medical conditions such as hypertension, pre-diabetes and arthritis. And, his condition is such that were he to contract COVID-19 he would be at significant risk of serious illness or death,” said Efren Olivarez, the Racial & Economic Justice Program Director at Texas Civil Rights Project. Two other clients held in Laredo immigration detention centers are also named in the lawsuit. One is a 62 year-old man with underlying health conditions and the other is a 28 year-old man with asthma.