The Trump Administration chartered jets to transfer a few dozen immigrant detainees to a Virginia detention facility so it could justify filling the rest of the plane with ICE special response team members to circumvent rules on chartering planes exclusively for employee travel and get them to DC to respond to summer demonstrations against police abuse, reports the Washington Post.
Dozens of those detainees, who had previously been in facilities in Arizona and Florida, tested positive for the coronavirus, sparking an outbreak at the Farmville, Virginia detention center that ended with at least 300 infections and one fatality.
The Trump Administration wanted to get special response teams (SRTs) from ICE, Bureau of Prisons, US Marshals and Border Patrol units from around the country rapidly to quell protests in Washington, DC, but federal rules prohibit chartering flights to transport federal employees.
The members of the SRTs were not responsible for guarding the detainees on the flights; that job fell to other ICE agents and to private contractors. The SRT members were simply passengers on the charter flights, that have been dubbed “ICE Air.”
Under the guise of easing overcrowding at federal detention centers, ICE quickly chartered flights for June 2nd, using this as cover to fill the plans with federal law enforcement agents. Two of the detention facilities from which the detainees were transferred were at 70% and 35% capacity; Farmville was at 55% capacity.
“This transfer that took place on June 2 was ordered by ICE headquarters,” Jeffrey Crawford, the director of Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the company that operates the Farmville detention center, told Farmville’s town council on August 12. “I do know that the local field office pushed back and attempted to refuse the transfer, and they were overridden by officials in Washington.”
The town council was inquiring into the potential for a coronavirus outbreak at the detention facility and how it might impact their community.
The information was disclosed in a lawsuit filed by four detainees who were at the Farmville facilities prior to the transfers, three of whom contracted the coronavirus from the detainees transferred in. They sued ICE for gross negligence leading to their exposure.