An immigration detainee originally from Peru and recently held at the Anchorage jail was later hospitalized in Washington state with tuberculosis, his attorney said.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, detainees held in Anchorage in the care of the state Department of Corrections were told by federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials that they were exposed to tuberculosis, a contagious bacterial infection of the lungs that, if left untreated, can be fatal.
State Corrections officials said claims that ICE detainees were exposed to TB at the Anchorage jail are false.
The Peruvian man, who was seeking asylum in the United States, was among 35 immigration detainees transferred from the Anchorage Correctional Complex to Tacoma, Washington on June 30, according to the man’s Washington D.C.-based lawyer, Sean Quirk. The detainees were part of a group of 40 men that had been transferred to Anchorage from Tacoma on June 8.
The man missed two scheduled calls after he was transferred back to Tacoma, Quirk said. An official with the GEO Group, which operates the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, told Quirk his client was at a hospital, but they wouldn’t tell him which one, he said.
“We ended up cold-calling hospitals in which I found him at Tacoma General Hospital in the ER, and he had tested positive for tuberculosis,” Quirk said. “However, I was not able to speak with him because the GEO officer, who operates at the behest of ICE, refused access to my client.”
Quirk said he doesn’t know where his client contracted TB or how severe his client’s case was. He said his client was discharged from the hospital Wednesday afternoon.
In response to a written statement the ACLU sent reporters Wednesday, Betsy Holley, a spokesperson for the state Department of Corrections, said no one there were no documented cases of TB among the men in custody in Anchorage.
In her statement, Holley called the ACLU’s claims “categorically false and dangerously misleading.”
“All ICE detainees were thoroughly screened for tuberculosis upon admission into our care, not by ICE, but by our own qualified medical staff,” Holley wrote. “Out of an abundance of caution, one individual underwent additional testing due to symptoms; all subsequent tests for active TB came back negative.”
Holley added that latent TB is not contagious, and that active TB is typically transmitted over a longer period of time than the 23 days the detainees were held in Anchorage.
“It requires prolonged, close contact, typically months, not mere days,” Holley wrote.
But Meghan Barker, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, said when the detainees got to Tacoma they were told by ICE that they had been exposed to TB back in Anchorage.
The ACLU had been assisting ICE detainees held in Anchorage. Detainees told them there wasn’t a consistent medical check when they arrived in Anchorage, Barker said. Two men had tested positive for a latent form of TB, she said.
“Some folks who are detained told us that they just had a casual conversation with a nurse when they were, you know, brought in and transferred to (the Anchorage jail),” Barker said. “But then some, like the two that reported that they were tested for tuberculosis, they obviously had a different level of testing than what others got.”
Barker said the ACLU is concerned that ICE detainees, as well as correctional officers and staff at the Anchorage jail, might not have been properly screened for TB. They also questioned whether TB cases were reported to the state Department of Health.
After his client’s release from the hospital Wednesday, Quirk said he remained concerned that ICE officials are not allowing him and other attorneys to communicate with their clients, which he said violates the U.S. Constitution.
A spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to questions over whether officials at the Tacoma facility told the transferred detainees that they were exposed to TB in Anchorage, or whether ICE was barring detainees from communicating with their lawyers.
