From [HERE] On June 29, Stephen Brown was woken up around 4 a.m. and told that he was about to be moved from the jail in Clinton County, Pennsylvania. He didn’t know where he was heading. Brown, who came to the United States from Jamaica as a teenager 40 years ago, learned that six other immigrant detainees were being transferred from the jail. He realized that the seven of them had something in common: They were all suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Over the next 24 hours, they were loaded into a van to cross through Pennsylvania, a plane to Texas and then Louisiana, and a bus to Alabama, according to a sworn declaration Brown submitted in federal court this month—all of which put them in close quarters with each other and with guards just as the number of COVID-19 cases nationwide was spiking. The seven men ended up an hour northeast of Birmingham at the Etowah County jail, which now has 20 active COVID-19 cases, according to ICE’s website. The Pennsylvania jail they left has none.

Neither the ACLU nor Brown’s immigration attorney had a chance to stop his transfer because they weren’t notified. The ACLU is demanding that ICE release Brown or safely return him to Clinton County, where he would be able to meet with his immigration attorney.

In addition to Brown, the ACLU is representing 10 other detainees who are vulnerable to COVID-19 and seeking release from three Pennsylvania immigration detention centers. Cho says Brown is the only plaintiff in the case who has been transferred out of the state. 

The other six detainees who were transferred, who were among dozens of people at Clinton County suing ICE without an attorney as part of a different lawsuit, had all taken part in a brief hunger strike at Clinton a few days before the transfer, according to Brown’s declaration. The ACLU argues in its lawsuit that the transfer was “blatant retaliation.” A jail roster shows that all six remain at Etowah. 

The transfer could make it harder for the six men to secure improved detention conditions. Their lawsuit focuses on conditions at the Clinton County jail. Transfers cause claims to become moot, or no longer legally relevant, when a lawsuit challenges conditions at a specific jail, Cho explains. If the six men filed a new lawsuit to demand better treatment at Etowah, ICE could transfer them again or choose to fight the case in the conservative Northern District of Alabama. 

Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Brown in his suit, says ICE has long used transfers to the Deep South as a form of retaliation and to get people under the jurisdiction of conservative judges. What’s new is that those transfers now mean potentially exposing people like Brown, who has high blood pressure, to the virus that led them to sue for their release in the first place. They also risk spreading COVID-19 between detention centers.[MORE]