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Lawyers Demand Immigrant Detainees Be Released Amidst Fears Of Coronavirus Spread

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U.S. immigration authorities are terrified immigrants that are currently being detained are at risk of contracting the potentially lethal coronavirus and spread it throughout the densely populated detention facilities that are housing them.

Among those lawyers are looking to release is a Cuban asylum seeker who has breast cancer, a disease that severely compromises the immune system and could make her more vulnerable to complications from the coronavirus.

Here’s more on this story from Yahoo News:

In her four months in immigration detention, the 39-year-old woman has contracted flu and numerous infections and was recently transferred to a detention facility in rural Louisiana, her attorney wrote in a request to federal immigration authorities for what is known as humanitarian parole.

Attorneys are scrambling to file petitions like hers around the country asking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and courts to grant discretionary release and reconsideration of bond denials based on an elevated risk to the detained immigrants of contracting COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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The immigrants are seeking to be released in the United States while they pursue asylum and other claims to avoid being returned to their home countries.

“The effect of her exposure to this virus could be deadly given what little information we have about how to treat and control this outbreak,” Linda Corchado, the Cuban asylum seeker’s lawyer, wrote in her parole request.

This whole coronavirus situation has raised a lot of ethical questions and concerns, this definitely being one of the top that we need to discuss as a nation. Do we forego the law and allow this individual to just walk free? Or do we find a different solution, like perhaps quarantining her at a hospital so she doesn’t contract the virus and possibly succumb to complications?

Las Americas, Corchado’s organization based in El Paso, Texas, is working with other non-profit groups to file some 60 parole requests, Corchado said, including for a pregnant woman, a man in his late 30s with diabetes and a 55-year-old woman with unspecified underlying health issues.

Other organizations and individual lawyers around the country told Reuters they are pursuing similar bids to free detained immigrants. For example, an attorney at the Brooklyn Defenders legal aid group in New York said it was filing dozens of petitions for release based on the risk of coronavirus.

The balance between upholding the law and being a nation that is equal under the law, while also preserving our belief that all human life is precious and has value is a difficult one to strike.

However, we also have to be aware that the left is notorious for using crisis situations to their advantage when it comes to pushing a particular agenda, therefore, caution in these matters must be exercised.

More than 2,000 immigration detainees were quarantined after mumps and other infectious diseases spread to nearly 900 people in 57 detention centers in 19 states between September 2018 and August 2019. A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that 84% of those people were infected within government facilities.

The adequacy of medical quarantine in these facilities came under scrutiny even before the emergence of the coronavirus. Reuters reported this month that federal inspectors found quarantine measures at a detention center in rural New Mexico that experienced a mumps outbreak were inadequate, among other deficiencies in healthcare there.

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Measures must be taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus, even among prisoners and those being detained for immigration purposes. If we do not, and these folks just get let loose in the open, either in their home countries or in our own, this could blow back on us and cause yet another epidemic or worse, pandemic.

What that looks like, honestly, is anyone’s guess.

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