A court-appointed monitor has found that California's largest immigration detention facility did not provide adequate medical care to detainees and violated an earlier court order to do so, according to a filing.
"Based on the review, the facility lacks a reliable system to consistently provide adequate health care, placing individuals at serious risk of both immediate and long-term harm," the monitor, Dr Muthusamy Anandkumar, said about the California City detention facility.
The report was based on a three-day site inspection, interviews with over a dozen staff and 40 patients, and reviews of 141 patient medical records and thousands of pages of documents produced by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CoreCivic (CXW.N), the private prison company operating the facility.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the report marked the first time a court-appointed neutral party has investigated the full scope of the delivery of medical care at an ICE detention center.
A federal judge ordered the inquiry earlier this year and set out eight components of a functional healthcare system including adequate healthcare staffing, timely and responsive emergency services and timely access to prescribed medications.
The detention facility was out of compliance with all eight of those areas, the report from Anandkumar said.
The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, said after the report that no ICE detainees are denied access to medical care and that ICE "is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that all ICE facilities comply with performance-based national detention standards."
The DHS said ICE provided medical care, including access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.
In a statement cited by media, a CoreCivic spokesperson said the company was reviewing the monitor's report and that "nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health, safety and well-being of the people in our care." The spokesperson also said that an on-site ICE officer was responsible for "monitoring compliance with applicable ICE detention standards and policies."
ICE has been the face of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which human rights advocates say has violated free-speech and due-process rights and has created an unsafe environment, especially for ethnic minorities, who have raised concerns about racial profiling.
Trump says his actions are aimed at improving domestic security.
About 50 people have died in ICE custody around the country since Trump took office in January last year.
