A federal judge in Arizona has ruled in favor of migrants and against the Border Patrol for the conditions at the Tucson Sector holding facility, calling them “presumptively punitive” and saying they “violate the Constitution.”
Judge David C. Bury’s ruling made permanent an injunction he issued in 2016 that required the Tuscon Sector to improve conditions.
As USA Today reported, that meant that migrants held at the facilities for longer than 12 hours must be provided with clean mats and blankets and be allowed to clean themselves.
“The Plaintiffs, who are civil detainees” — not criminal detainees — “in (Customs and Border Protection) holding cells, face conditions of confinement after 12 hours which are substantially worse than detainees face upon commitment to either a civil immigration detention facility or even a criminal detention facility, like a jail or prison,” the ruling stated.
During the seven-day trial, attorneys representing the migrants presented evidence that convicted criminals in prison enjoy a better quality of life than those held at the Border Patrol facilities.
One video shown to the court, for example, depicted a man stepping over the bodies of other men sleeping on an overcrowded floor and making his way to the bathroom, only to find every stall occupied by someone sleeping.
Judge Bury also noted that criminal inmates have a greater “opportunity for uninterrupted sleep,” have another layer of clothing to keep warm, and more variety of food than frozen burritos, juice, and crackers.
As well as providing better conditions, the ruling also orders the CBP to not hold migrants for more than 48 hours after being processed.
By law, the Border Patrol is only allowed to hold migrants up to 72 hours before transferring them to another federal agency such as ICE, but as CBP explained during the trial, what other agencies are capable of doing is out of their control. If ICE doesn’t have the capacity to pick up a group of migrants, the holding cells become overcrowded.
About 20% of migrants — 12,000 of them — in the Tucson Sector were held longer than 72 hours last year, PBS reported. Migrants were held for an average of 54 hours.
As a response to the video shown in court, Judge Bury also ruled that sleeping in or near bathrooms at the facilities would be banned.
“Being forced to sleep in a toilet area due to overcrowding offends the notions of common decency,” the ruling stated. “It is unsanitary and degrading for all detainees who either have to sleep in the toilet area or try to use the toilet when others are sleeping there.”
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The ruling also took pains to clarify for the Border Patrol how they need to allow migrants to clean themselves. “A shower is a bath in which water is showered (as in to wet with a spray, fine stream, or drops) on the body. A ‘paper-shower’ or ‘shower-wipe,’ by definition, is not a shower.”
It’s worth noting that, in his ruling, Judge Bury wrote that he had seen no evidence that the CBP created the adverse conditions on purpose.
However, he also pointed out that the conditions had existed there for some time with no action taken to alleviate them.
“Nobody has done anything,” he said on the last day of the trial. “Is that why a court has to jump in? It just seems like the lack of a response to these numbers just calls for a court order.”
The Border Patrol has not commented on the case.
