The photos were taken from Border Patrol video cameras. The images, unsealed in a lawsuit brought by the American Immigration Council, The National Immigration Law Center, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, show concrete rooms with no mats or beds, cramped, often with the migrants wrapped in survival blankets that look like sheets of tinfoil, huddled side-by-side as if for warmth.
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The photos are part of a lawsuit that claims the Border Patrol conditions are deplorable, inhumane and unsafe.
They were filed Wednesday night for the lawsuit alleging immigrants caught in Arizona are routinely held in cold, filthy conditions.
Government lawyers representing the Border Patrol argued for the photos and other documents to be kept from public view, saying their release would violate privacy rights of migrants and Border Patrol and could raise security concerns. But this week, for the first time, CBP released still images taken from video monitors in the cells. Pictures made public in June showed rusty toilets, dirty toilet paper on the floor and a malfunctioning water fountain in the detention areas. Another shows a mother changing a child’s diaper on top of one of the blankets lying on the floor.
The photos show a child crawling on the concrete floors of the holding cells while a parent squats nearby.
The National Immigration Law Center, American Immigration Council, the ACLU of Arizona, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Morrison & Foerster LLP brought the lawsuit a year ago on behalf of migrants held in the facilities.
Border Patrol declined to directly respond to the images but said it is “committed to the safety, security and welfare of those in our custody, especially those who are most vulnerable”.
“CBP works to ensure proper conditions and treatment of detainees in all of our holding facilities and is subject to unannounced inspections by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General of these facilities”, a CBP official said in the statement.
The agency says showers are offered to detainees who are in the facility longer than 72 hours, and “provides a number of personal hygiene items for detainees to use”.
Processing centers are not the major detention facilities like in Artesia, N.M., or Eloy, Ariz., where federal immigration authorities have held migrants for months.
The coalition that filed the lawsuit was then allowed to inspect and photograph four of the eight stations with holding cells.
The Border Patrol fought the release of the images in court, arguing that metadata on the video stills contained sensitive information about the agency’s data collection methods.
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The lawsuit also accuses the Border Control agency of failing to adequately screen detainees for risky medical conditions and for failing to provide adequate access to medical treatment from health care workers.
