Federal immigration officials are detaining a record number of people, so to cope with overcrowding, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is in the market for “the bare minimum,” Mother Jones reports. “The Norix Stack-A-Bunk is a bed. Barely. One vendor describes it as a plastic ‘bed platform’ that is ‘resistant to blood, vinegar, urine, feces, salt solution and chlorine solution.’ It’s essentially an inverted plastic tub, eight inches high, designed so overcrowded jails can comply with court decisions that block them from making inmates sleep on the floor.”
There’s overcrowding in facilities because ICE is making it that way. The agency said that as of late October, it had a record 44,631 people in federal custody. That’s 4,000 more than Congress had budgeted for, and ICE is refusing to say where the extra cash is coming from. Now officials are looking for more than 1,200 of these “beds”—“essentially human-sized pieces of plastic”—to put in five detentions centers, instead of, oh, not overcrowding facilities by not arresting people who have nothing on their record in the first place.
There’s already some blowback to this possible plan, with Victoria Lopez of the American Civil Liberties Union tweeting that ICE has already been down this road before. “Not a great idea, ICE (among many),” she wrote. “Maybe you forgot that we sued you over atrocious conditions and overcrowding and use of these plastic ‘boats’ in [San Diego] back in 2007. Punch line: it's unconstitutional to subject ppl to overcrowding and resulting unsafe, dangerous conditions.”
And yet, ICE wants to get even more bloated, since the agency is “asking for an unprecedented 52,000 beds in its 2019 budget request, though it is highly unlikely to get that many.” Unbelievable, when ICE can barely handle the detainees it already has. During a recent surprise visit to a privately run prison in California, inspectors found nooses hanging in 15 of the 20 cells they checked. While some detainees told inspectors “the braided sheets can be easily unfurled to temporarily create privacy within the cell,” they constitute a suicide risk nonetheless. Nope, nope, nope. ICE needs a check all right, and not the money kind, but the oversight kind.