A court-appointed monitor has found that California’s largest immigration detention facility did not provide adequate medical care to detainees and violated an earlier court order to do so, according to a filing. The report was based on a three-day site inspection, interviews with over a dozen staff and 40 patients, and reviews of 141 patient medical records and thousands of pages of documents produced by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CoreCivic, the private prison company operating the facility.
Findings of the Report
The monitor, Dr Muthusamy Anandkumar, said about the California City detention facility: “Based on the review, the facility lacks a reliable system to consistently provide adequate health care, placing individuals at serious risk of both immediate and long-term harm.” The detention facility was out of compliance with all eight components of a functional healthcare system, including adequate healthcare staffing, timely and responsive emergency services, and timely access to prescribed medications.
The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, said after the report that no ICE detainees are denied access to medical care and that ICE “is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that all ICE facilities comply with performance-based national detention standards.” The DHS said ICE provided medical care, including access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.
A CoreCivic spokesperson said the company was reviewing the monitor’s report and that “nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health, safety and well-being of the people in our care.” The spokesperson also said that an on-site ICE officer was responsible for “monitoring compliance with applicable ICE detention standards and policies.”
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
