Why Are Immigration Detention Facilities So Cold?

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David Corn ?@DavidCornDC 9m
Why are immigration detention facilities so cold? http://mojo.ly/1l2Jh77



There's a reason Spanish-speaking detainees call them "hieleras."


In early 2013, three undocumented immigrants sued US Customs and Border Protection for abuse they suffered while spending days in custody. The three women claimed that CBP agents refused to give them soap or toothbrushes; sometimes, agents refused to feed them more than once a day. But the women's biggest grievance was the unrelenting cold. "Her lips eventually chapped and split," read one woman's lawsuit. "The lips and fingers of her two sisters and her sister's child also turned blue. Because of the cold, she and her sisters and her sister's child would huddle together on the floor for warmth…There were no mattresses or blankets."

If you've been following the immigration crisis at the Mexican border, you've probably heard about these freezing temperatures that migrants endure at border detention facilities. Migrants—especially unaccompanied kids—allege suffering a lot of harm at the hands of CBP agents: sexual assault, beatings, a lack of basic toiletries. But few forms of abuse are more pervasive than the hielera—the Spanish word for "icebox" that detainees and guards alike use to describe CBP's frigid holding cells . . .

"We have heard those reports before, and you have to understand, when these folks come in from the desert, they're hot," a spokesman with CBP's Rio Grande Valley sector told me. "They're sweating…We're not going to adjust the temperature for a each new group. It would work the system too hard." He added that keeping the facility at 70 degrees helps control the spread of bacteria.

Migrants themselves have yet another theory: The cold is part punishment, part deterrent . . .

"The temperature makes a huge difference to their treatment," Podkul says. "I've talked to children who took the toilet paper they got and laid it on the floor and laid down on that, because it's one barrier between them and the cement floor." In 2011, an advocacy group called No More Deaths took an anonymous survey of almost 13,000 former CBP detainees and found that 3,000 respondents had weathered extreme cold.

Like the three anonymous women who sued CBP last year, more and more former detainees are taking their claims to court. In June, Alba Quiñones Flores sued the agency after agents failed to treat her broken ankle and threw away her diabetes medication. CBP guards, she claims, made Quiñones and her cellmates beg for more toilet paper when they ran out. All of this happened, she says, in a holding facility kept freezing cold. Her description may sound familiar: "The cell was so cold," her lawsuit says, "that Ms. Quiñones Flores' fingers turned blue, and her lips split."


read: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/why-are-immigration-ice-detention-facilities-so-cold

related:

ACLU: Refugee Children Report Serious Abuse During Detention Including Squalid Conditions