The rate of death among detainees in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody who have tested positive for the coronavirus is significantly lower than the fatality rate among the general U.S. population who get sick.
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, 6,541 in ICE custody who tested positive while in its custody nationwide, of which only eight people, or 0.1%, have died, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Across the United States, more than 7.85 million people have tested positive, and 215,000, or 2.7%, have died.
ICE has been criticized by left-leaning organizations and lawmakers for poor treatment of immigrants in its care, but one immigration law expert said the low rate of death among infected immigrants was nothing to celebrate because it is a complicated statistic to understand.
American Immigration Council Policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained to the Washington Examiner that ICE’s low mortality number is “likely to be a combination” of factors.
Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy, said when comparing the two figures, it is most important to compare apples to apples by looking at the demographics of who is in ICE custody to the U.S. population. However, because the federal agency does not release that information and did not respond to a request for comment, the ages of detainees are unknown.
“We don’t know the age distribution of the ICE detainees, and that’s very important,” Schaffner said in a phone call Tuesday. “We would think that they would tend to be younger because older people are less likely to undertake the hazard of trying to cross the border, so we think that these are probably middle-aged young adults and even some children.”
Another factor is that the rate at which people are diagnosed with the virus is extremely low compared to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe it actually is. The CDC estimated in June that the U.S. had 10 times more cases than the 2.4 million confirmed cases it knew of, which would mean that the total U.S. mortality rate is lower than 2.7%.
Schaffner said the care detainees receive while in custody is also a contributing reason to how people are diagnosed and treated.
“We don’t know what their testing practices are, if they are testing very comprehensively,” said Schaffner. “Do they routinely test everyone who they detain, or are they testing when people have minimal symptoms? And both of those would be much more comprehensive testing programs than we generally have in the open population.”
ICE’s website lists a brief summary of its policy for testing and caring for detainees. All new detainees are tested upon arrival and quarantined with other new arrivals for 14 days before being released into general population holding areas.
Reichlin-Melnick, whose employer advocates for legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S., said, “There is no evidence that ICE detention centers have higher quality medical care than other carceral institutions.”
Detainees who may have been exposed to the virus and those with symptoms are moved to separate rooms. ICE’s medical office may send a patient to a hospital for special care if in-house medical staff see fit. Schaffner said it is possible that detainees who develop minimal symptoms and are “very quickly transferred to a facility where they can get first-rate care,” which may lead to lower mortality rates.
“ICE should not be applauded for a comparatively low death toll,” argued Reichlin-Melnick. “Especially as multiple federal judges around the country have determined that ICE has been deliberately indifferent to the COVID risks inside specific detention centers.”
The agency has released 900 people from custody that it deemed to be high risk medically but low risk to public safety. Fewer than 20,000 people are in custody nationwide, compared to roughly 50,000 a year ago at this time. ICE reduced its detained population to 70% capacity or less in an effort to help people stay socially distant from one another.
“ICE has the unique ability to independently release any individual in their custody, and has been forced by court order to release many people with high risk of death due to COVID,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “ICE can also deport people outside of the United States, making it nearly impossible to track what their final health outcome may be.”
