All articles filed in U.S./Mexico Border

An update posted by Global Response Management on Thursday showed river water cresting the bank, beginning to flood lower areas of the levee. “We are likely to see water incursion in the next 24-48 hours,” the organization wrote. A downstream river gauge being monitored by both camp residents and volunteers with Resource Center Matamoros showed a 21.8 foot water elevation, prompting the formal implementation of the UNHCR-backed evacuation plan.

A spokesperson for Ahtna, Inc, an Alaska Native Regional Corporation that contracts detention facility workers at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, confirmed on Saturday that one of their employees contracted at PIDC passed away on Thursday, June 25.

Josue, an asylum seeker who has been living in a camp in Matamoros with his family since last summer, sent photos and videos over the weekend he wants people living in the United States to see.

Advocates in touch with detained immigrants inside the facility, many of whom are asylum seekers and have never committed a crime, began reporting wholly inadequate protections against COVID-19 at PIDC in March. ICE has since reported a total of four positive cases inside the facility. Three of those cases listed on ICE’s website are currently under isolation or monitoring. The ongoing transfer of detainees between detention centers, the admittance of new detainees into the facility, and a lack of testing available to potential asymptomatic carriers means that more likely than not, there is already an outbreak happening inside the facility.

U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement (ICE) is refusing to release a diabetic asylum seeker who has been detained inside the Port Isabel Detention Center for a year and a half.

A Saturday morning downpour sent the camp of asylum seekers along a levee in Matamoros, Tamaulipas into disarray. Heavy winds brought down trees and destroyed tent dwellings secured to trees with ropes. Rain soaked belongings and documents. Clay pathways along the river stretching two recreational soccer fields turned to thick, slippery mud and pools of water collected on uneven ground, overwhelming trenches dug by residents to channel rainwater into the Rio Grande.

A report published by organizers with Witness at the Border details the number of ICE Air flights that left the Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport during the first several months of the year in an effort to document who was being deported and to where – both before and after the spread of COVID-19.

Matamoros-based medical NGO Global Response Management will complete construction on a field hospital near the Gateway International Bridge after the organization obtained clearance to cross $400,000 of medical equipment stuck in a trailer in Brownsville for six weeks.

The suit alleges inadequate treatment for the man’s worsening diabetes over the course of his 16-month detention at the Port Isabel Detention Center. Allegations in the document detail concerns raised by local advocates and attorneys over an alleged lack of access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and hand soap inside the facility, as well as an inability to socially distance in crowded dormitories.

In the Rio Grande Valley, local volunteers who have made welfare visits with detained asylum seekers in the Port Isabel Detention Center for over a year have spoken with multiple detainees who have allegedly coordinated a hunger strike with an estimated 70 to 90 participants in protest of a lack of precautionary measures taken against COVID-19. ICE said no detainees had threatened to hunger strike.