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Officials said they had quarantined 5,200 migrants in 39 detention centers across the country, most of them after exposure to mumps.
An outbreak of mumps virus in the US government's immigration detention centers adds new pressure on a system that the Homeland Security Secretary warned a few months ago had reached its "breaking point".
Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the internal security agency responsible for the long-term detention and deportation of people illegally in the country, said Friday they have put in place quarantine 5,200 migrants in 39 detention centers across the country, most of them exposed to mumps. .
The agency said it has confirmed 334 cases of mumps since September. Mumps is considered a highly contagious but nonlife-threatening disease.
The quarantines, reported for the first time by CNN, come as the Trump administration struggles to manage a steady influx of migrants to the US-Mexico border, where immigration authorities have apprehended nearly 600 000 people since October. According to official government statistics, CIE operatives have apprehended 34,500 more people inside the United States. The agency says it currently holds about 52,560 people in detention centers across the country, up from 5,000 in its 2019 budget.
Nathalie Asher, Associate Director of Law Enforcement Operations and Disposal of ICE, said the need to quarantine to prevent the spread of infection would result in delays detention and a significant backlog in the system.
Asher blamed the influx of migrants – most of whom are families and children – on the southwestern border, the "significant" factor of the mumps outbreak.
"With 75% of our current prison population coming directly from the border, the fact that we see mumps in nearly 40 facilities across the country, and recent mumps outbreaks in Central America, the preponderance of evidence points to our southwestern border being, at a minimum, an important factor contributing to these events, "said Asher in a statement.
Another ICE official said that information that mumps outbreaks in Honduras would have started by the end of 2018 and the presence of mumps in dozens of ICE facilities also supported this Evaluation.
No confirmed cases of mumps have been reported among ICE inmates until 2018, said the official.
Mumps outbreaks in the United States are rare. The virus is largely preventable by the same widely used vaccine that protects against measles and rubella. However, health officials have warned in recent months that declining vaccination rates in the United States has caused measles outbreaks in several cities across the country, including New York and Portland, Oregon.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also reported an outbreak of mumps, infecting thousands of people from January 2016 to June 2017. The largest epidemic has made nearly 3,000 people sick in a close-knit community. from Arkansas.
So far this year, the CDC has documented more than 1,000 cases of mumps, including hundreds in Texas and Pennsylvania alone.
The government has not yet provided an badessment of the vaccination rates of migrants in detention, mostly from Central American countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
According to figures released by the CDC, these three countries have high vaccination rates, generally equivalent to those in the United States. However, access to medical care is extremely limited in rural areas.
In the United States, the most-at-risk population, like other communicable diseases, are unvaccinated persons and those living in close or unhygienic neighborhoods, such as prisons, according to the United States. health experts.
ICE says all detainees in its custody undergo medical screening within the first 12 hours and that the agency offers the MMR vaccine – against measles, mumps and rubella – to those who do not have symptoms. Officials say they work quickly to quarantine those with symptoms.
Auditors and human rights groups have criticized the Department of Homeland Security for its lack of hygiene and limited access to medical care at its facilities, which range from government-run detention centers. isolated private prisons. Several inmates have died of communicable diseases in recent years. month.
An internal report released last week by the Inspector General of the Ministry, entitled "Concerns Concerning the Treatment and Treatment of ICE Detainees in Four Detention Centers", documented a litany of ICE violations, including poor hygiene, stale food, moldy bathrooms, inadequate medical care and inmate cells – among other issues – in the ICE facilities examined in California, New Jersey, Louisiana and Colorado.
Immigration advocates have also criticized the Trump government for its aggressive efforts to detain thousands of migrants, including those who do not appear to pose a threat to public safety.
ICE said earlier this week that more than two-thirds of the 140 people arrested during a recent five-day operation in the Midwest had no criminal background.
On Thursday, Sheriff's deputies from Arizona found the body of a 7-year-old girl in a remote desert region. Officials said the girl was from a group of five Indian nationals who had been smuggled across the border into the desert, where the temperature had recently reached 108 degrees, the official said. US Department of Customs and Border Protection in a statement.
Border patrol officers seized the other members of the group separately: two adult women, then a mother and her 8-year-old child with dehydration.
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