Chris Carlson/AP Photo
A detainee waiting to be processed at the privately operated Adelanto Detention Center in Adelanto, California, August 28, 2019
Elvira gave birth in 2017 in the middle of a war zone in Cameroon. Eight months later, she was forced to flee, leaving her baby and another small child with her mother in the war-torn English-speaking region of Kumba. She escaped to Nigeria alone, then flew to Ecuador (a country that allows most African nationals to enter without a visa) and traveled through eight countries and the Panama jungle, before reaching the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. At the border, she asked for asylum and was detained. Elvira still does not know her husband’s whereabouts. Since 2017, she has been in three detention centers—Eloy, Arizona; Orange County, California; and now Adelanto in California—but she has never been released. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) views Elvira as a flight risk.
In Adelanto Detention Center, a privately owned facility operated by GEO Group in Los Angeles, Elvira has told her sisters that the conditions are woefully inadequate to protect against the spread of the coronavirus. She has not received a flu shot, so how, she wonders, will such a facility take precautions against a far more contagious disease? Although only 26, Elvira has conditions that make her more vulnerable should she contract COVID-19. She has suffered complications since giving birth, she’s asthmatic, she has high blood pressure, and she developed hepatitis A from drinking the water in a detention center. When she was diagnosed, she was told to buy water from the commissary at inflated prices. And she still experiences terrible back pain from when government forces in Cameroon beat her with the heel of a gun.
Elvira has a bond hearing scheduled for tomorrow, March 24. Despite several bond hearings, she has been denied release each time. Sylvie Bello, the founder and CEO of the Cameroon American Council, is helping handle Elvira’s case, but she said her organization is struggling to come up with the funds for legal representation. Elvira’s sister Carine says that the immigration judge on Elvira’s asylum case refused to grant her asylum because she had inconsistencies in her story, a common issue for asylum seekers that could simply come down to mistranslation or the wrong answer on a form.
Pryde Ndingwan, a Cameroonian lawyer who works with the Cameroon American Council and has met with Elvira, agreed that Elvira was particularly vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, should it begin to spread in Adelanto. He thinks her case has been mishandled previously, which may explain why she has been detained for over two years. But it may also be because of the complications of the conflict in Cameroon—and the arduous journey to get to the U.S.
A majority of Ndingwan’s clients are robbed or attacked by gangs on their way to the southern border. They arrive with little or no identification paperwork, making it harder to process their claims. Asylum seekers are often denied parole, with ICE arguing that asylum seekers are a flight risk. “Even in my situation I was refused my parole,” said Daniel, another Cameroonian asylum seeker who was previously detained. “ICE always says [flight risk]. Where else are we going to run to? There’s no other place.”
Ndingwan said that when he visited Adelanto to see Elvira and several others, he noticed changes for visitors: caution tape in the reception area to enforce social distancing, regular wipe-downs of the reception area, and a face mask for him in his meetings with clients.
Despite the increased measures Adelanto is taking for outside visits, inside the facility, Elvira told her sisters that conditions are inadequate. The men’s side of the facility appears to be quarantined, Bello says. All hearings for male asylum seekers have been canceled or postponed last week and this week. But the women’s side so far seems unchanged, and cleanliness remains an issue. There is not enough soap, and hand sanitizer is a controlled substance in these facilities.
Around the country, advocates have called for releasing those held in jails and immigration detention centers, arguing that these populations are severely at risk of COVID-19 infection.
Around the country, advocates have called for releasing those held in jails and immigration detention centers, arguing that these populations are severely at risk of COVID-19 infection. On Rikers Island, confirmed COVID-19 cases jumped from 8 to 60 in three days. Never Again Action, a grassroots group that has protested the Trump administration’s immigration policy, has asked their supporters to urge states to immediately release detained immigrants. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the court is planning to release hundreds of inmates from the county jail out of fear of the virus spreading through the jail. And an open letter to ICE last week, signed by over 3,000 medical professionals, demanded the immediate release of all detainees in ICE detention facilities.
ELVIRA HAS TWO sisters in the U.S. Carine arrived eight years ago, and spent the first two years in Ohio before moving to Washington state with her husband. Elvira’s sister Mercy is married to a pastor at Glen Echo Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Ohio, where the two have lived with their three children for nine years. Mercy, a U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t seen her “baby sister” Elvira since 2010. Should Elvira be released, she plans to join her sister Mercy in Columbus. If “shelter in place” orders inhibit travel, Bello says the Los Angeles Cameroonian community is prepared to step in.
“With the NBA season cut short due to coronavirus, I have spent more and more time seeking ways to understand and support Cameroon women in Los Angeles area detention centers in Otay Mesa and Adelanto … I heard about [Elvira’s] medical struggles in detention and I immediately signed up to do a community support letter to ask the judge for her immediate release on humanitarian grounds,” says Alfred Aboya, a Cameroonian community leader in Los Angeles and former UCLA basketball star.
Bello explained that Cameroonian women in American immigrant detention centers face layers of discrimination and hardship. Not only is the journey particularly hard for women, but Cameroonian women face anti-black racism along the journey and in the U.S. Once in detention, Bello says, they are seen as troublemakers and ICE takes especially cruel steps toward them. Bello even alleges that ICE is working with the Cameroonian government to deport southern Cameroonian asylum seekers, and treating these asylum seekers more harshly as a result.
Cameroonian women in American immigrant detention centers face layers of discrimination and hardship, including anti-black racism along the journey and in the U.S.
In Louisiana, Cameroonian asylum seekers began protesting the treatment of their cases in the American immigration system with a hunger strike on March 3. They allege that evidence for their cases has been mishandled and lost, that they are refused meetings with their personal deportation officers, that the judge tells them to “shut up” and switches off audio during hearings, and that asylum seekers are forced to “sign a voluntary deportation [order] even without hearing your case.” The letter from 43 detained Cameroonians explained the deteriorating conditions in southern Cameroon and their fears of returning home. They argue that they are all eligible for parole, and two eligible for bond, but that ICE is refusing to release them because the agency still has hopes of deporting them. “The judge is bent [on] sending us all back to be killed by our government,” the letter reads.
Even before detention centers were threatened with the novel coronavirus, seven asylum seekers died in ICE custody since October. A Cameroonian, 37-year-old Nebane Abienwi, died on October 1 from a stroke caused by extremely high blood pressure. Abienwi, who left a wife and children in Cameroon, took a journey similar to Elvira’s, first to Ecuador and then a grueling trip overland to the U.S. southern border. In Mexico, he was hospitalized for hypertension. When he arrived at U.S. detention center Otay Mesa, an ICE facility operated by the for-profit firm CoreCivic, he was treated as if he had no preexisting medical conditions. Two medical professionals told The Nation’s Joe Penny that Abienwi’s case showed that “he was a victim of medical negligence.”
The New York Times’ Caitlin Dickerson reported that detainees feel like “sitting ducks,” waiting for the extremely contagious virus to infiltrate facilities, where it would be sure to spread quickly. Elvira’s family worries for her and the fate of other asylum seekers and migrants languishing in American detention facilities.
Daniel, the Cameroonian asylum seeker and former detainee, has been in quarantine for the last two weeks because he was exposed to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer in Seattle who later tested positive for coronavirus.
Adding to the concern about detention facilities’ preparedness, Daniel said that depending on the facility, some even require detainees to buy their own soap from the commissary at inflated prices. Asylum seekers in Louisiana told Daniel they were forced to buy shampoo, lotion, and soap.
THE ONGOING civil war in Cameroon, as some have called it, has its roots in the country’s earlier formation under a League of Nations mandate, where Cameroon was divided into two parts—a northern region administered by the French and a southern region administered by the British. With independence in the 1960s, Cameroon formed a federation government between the English-speaking and French-speaking regions.
The English-speaking regions always got the short end of the stick and little economic investment from the government. In 2016, Paul Biya, who has served as president of Cameroon since 1982, began to take measures to “assimilate the English-speaking people with the French-speaking culture,” as Ndingwan explained. This led first to peaceful demonstrations, but soon escalated when Cameroonian government forces violently repressed the protests. Separatists in southern Cameroon now wish to form their own independent nation, Ambazonia. Government forces, known as the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), have conducted gruesome human rights abuses that only seem to be climbing.
“The medical care in Adelanto is a mess. They don’t take care of those detainees. I don’t think they care.”
“It is worsening every day as French Cameroon government is constantly killing all the English speakers,” Daniel said. On Valentine’s Day this year, the BIR massacred dozens, including women and children, a report verified by Human Rights Watch.
Since 2016, more than 10,000 Cameroonians have attempted to seek asylum or other entry into the United States. Every Cameroonian asylum seeker Daniel has met during his visits to detention centers are minority English-speakers from southern Cameroon, fleeing the violence. Elvira’s two children and her mother remain in the Kumba district, where in February 2019 a hospital was destroyed in the war. Cameroon’s government blamed the attack on separatists, according to Voice of America. Separatists contended on social media that Cameroon’s own military felled the hospital in order to discredit separatists.
As of March 19, Bello told me, Cameroon has shut down its borders, making it now virtually impossible for the U.S. to deport Cameroonian nationals back to their home country. That has not stopped ICE from detaining Cameroonian nationals it plans to deport in the future. In fact, that is likely the reason ICE is detaining so many Cameroonians. The Trump administration maintains a list of “recalcitrant countries,” meaning countries that refuse to accept their own nationals. The list also included countries “at risk of non-compliance,” such as Cameroon. In some cases, the administration has used so-called visa sanctions to pressure countries to accept their own nationals.
But Cameroonian advocates say that southern Cameroonians deported back to their home country would be in grave danger from their own government. “Anybody who is deported to Cameroon,” Cameroonian asylum seeker Daniel explained, “there is not an iota of doubt in my mind that they might be killed or imprisoned for life [when they return].”
Cameroonian asylum seekers deported back to Cameroon are viewed by the government not just as separatist but “as a threat to the existential essence of a 37-year-old dictatorship,” Bello added.
Elvira’s case hangs in the balance—and her safety on the hope that coronavirus doesn’t find its way into Adelanto. She will face a judge once more on Tuesday in the hope that she will be released to live with her sister Mercy in Columbus. Both sisters, Mercy and Carine, video chat with Elvira every day. They say her health is deteriorating. “The medical care in Adelanto is a mess. They don’t take care of those detainees. I don’t think they care,” Carine said. “How can they ask a detainee to be buying water from the detention center when she tested positive for hepatitis that she got from their nasty water?”
Carine said she is anxious for Elvira’s hearing tomorrow, as is Elvira. “I can tell her soul is almost leaving her body!”
