HeadlineDec 23, 2020
In Tacoma, Washington, the immigration advocacy group La Resistencia is reporting guards at the Northwest Detention Center have threatened a hunger striker with forced feeding. Victor Fonseca, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, has been on hunger strike for over a month, protesting the ICE jail’s dangerous conditions during the pandemic and demanding prisoners with underlying medical conditions be released. Fonseca is currently awaiting deportation. Here he is speaking from prison at the start of his hunger strike.
Victor Fonseca: “What do I have to lose? I have already lost everything. I lost my freedom. I lost my family, my children. Enough is enough. … I need to do this because, otherwise, I will die here.”
COVID Cases in Prisons and ICE Immigration Jails Surpass 250,000
With a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak infecting about a third of all people incarcerated, medical tents are newly placed in a baseball field at San Quentin Prison during the COVID-19 pandemic in San Quentin, California, on July 9, 2020.
Melina Mara / The Washington Post via Getty Images
By
The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate and largest systems for locking people up. As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic began, experts and advocates warned the virus would be amplified by prisons and jails, where social distancing is impossible, ventilation is often poor and people are more likely to have underserved medical needs.