Weeks after writing an op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune about his experience in immigration detention, Erik Mercado, an inmate at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, was suddenly transferred to another facility in the middle of the night, he said.
He and a few dozen detainees were sent to Nevada on a bus with handcuffs around their waists and legs, Mercado said. He said they couldn’t go to the toilet the whole trip.
Along the way, all he could think was that now he wouldn’t be able to get the medical treatment he should for a newly diagnosed liver condition, he said.
His thoughts turned to the possibility of dying in custody. “I thought of the worst,” he said in a telephone conversation with the Union-Tribune.
A collective of seven immigrant rights organizations helped Mercado and four other men file a complaint last week with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, alleging their transfers were in retaliation for their activism while in immigration detention. The sudden relocation of these five detainees appears to be part of a larger pattern of retaliatory transfers that seek to silence people in immigration detention and raise awareness of conditions, according to the Freedom for Immigrants organization, which works to ending immigration detention.
Mercado, in particular, has long advocated better medical care in detention, including access to the treatment he needed.
In a report The Freedom for Immigrants group, published in mid-February, found that immigration and customs enforcement regularly transfer people who participated in complaints, spoke to the media, or organized hunger strikes about conditions in the facilities.
The report found that many of these detainees have experienced “circular” transfers, or multiple transfers between the same facilities. It also found that the conditions during these transfers amounted to torture.
A similar one complaint was made about the facility in August 2021 when several organizations claimed that immigration detainees faced various types of retaliation at five detention sites, including the San Diego facility, after protesting the conditions.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment. In agency documentation transfer procedures state that transfers may occur “for a variety of reasons” and “will not be retaliatory”.
The Otay Mesa Detention Center is run by Core Civic, a private prison company.
(KC Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
CoreCivic, the private prison company that owns and operates the Otay Mesa Detention Center, denied the allegations and allegations regarding the facility made in the complaint.
“The dedicated professionals at our Otay Mesa Detention Center work to provide inmates with immigration policies with a variety of services, from comprehensive medical and mental health care to faith-based support and access to legal resources, as they prepare for the next steps in their immigration process,” said CoreCovic public affairs manager Brian Todd. “The reality is that we provide a safe, humane and appropriate environment for those entrusted to us in this facility and we continually strive to provide an even better standard of care.”
Todd added that CoreCivic has no say in transfers, that the decision is entirely up to ICE. He also noted that for privacy reasons, the company cannot comment on any particular individual’s medical treatment.
After the November transfer, Mercado was in a county jail in Pahrump, Nevada, even though he is not in custody. Immigration is considered a civil matter, not a criminal one, but ICE often pays county jails to hold some of its inmates.
Captain David Boruchowitz of the Nye County Sheriff’s Office, which manages the facility where Mercado is being held, said the office is investigating allegations about the jail that are also made in the complaint. There were 55 ICE detainees held there on Wednesday morning, he said.
Mercado believes there are two reasons why he was moved abruptly. First, he has long been outspoken about conditions at the Otay Mesa Detention Center.
Mercado, in particular, has spoken to the Union-Tribune several times, including when he was a fellow Otay Mesa inmate Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia became the first person in immigration custody to die of COVID-19 in 2020. Mercado again spoke to the Union-Tribune about allegations of sexual misconduct to a security guard at the facility, and he took part in one complaint reported by the Union-Tribune on allegations of medical malpractice against a psychologist in the facility’s medical division. He even co-authored one opinion piece to the Union-Tribune discussing alleged retaliation for ruling on terms.
Mercado also believes he was moved so that ICE and CoreCivic could avoid paying for treatment for his worsening liver condition, which was caused by his hepatitis C that he says the facility’s medical staff had told him to keep under control for years.
“I believe there were several (of the men transferred) who were in urgent need of medical treatment,” said Mercado. “I was one of them.”
He said he had to start over with his requests for medical attention each time he was transferred, reliving the lengthy and slow referral process to get the same tests he had already undergone.
Even before he left Otay Mesa on the day of the transfer, he said, he stressed to officials that he needed urgent medical treatment. But according to the complaint, his medical records were not transferred with him, nor were the records of any of the detainees. He pushed for the facility to request his records from Otay Mesa, but even after they arrived, he said he couldn’t get the care he needed.
He said after arriving at the Nye County Detention Center, west of Las Vegas, he was told the hospitals there would not treat him.
“I asked (the ICE officer), ‘Well, then why did you transfer me?’ and he said, ‘I don’t have an answer to that, but you’re not being treated in this state,'” Mercado said. “That’s one of the things that’s very stressful and painful for me to deal with, psychologically and naturally physically.”
He said that after his latest complaint of retaliation was recently made public, facility officials told him he would soon be taken to a hospital in Las Vegas for treatment.
Conditions in Nye County were shocking to him, even as someone who has seen several immigrant detention centers, according to the indictment. The complaint says that when he first arrived there were not enough beds so he had to sleep on the floor by the urinal.
He was also verbally assaulted by a security guard who discriminated against him because of his religious beliefs as a Jewish person, he said. An official from the Immigration Detention Ombudsman’s Office happened to be present at the time, and the guard no longer works at the facility, Mercado said.
He said he feels exhausted by the system and the way it has treated him. He has been in immigration detention for more than three years.
“I feel like not everyone wants to listen to me or take care of me,” he said just before the prison phone system abruptly ended the conversation with the Union-Tribune.
