Last fall, we sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies demanding the release of critical information about their failed response to COVID-19 in federal jails and prisons. After a year of stonewalling, the documents slowly trickling in are frightening: desperate pleas from on-the-ground staff to their supervisors about incarcerated people and staff dying. In one instance, after months of radio silence from supervisors, an employee at the Yazoo City federal prison in Mississippi wrote:

Let that sink in. This is a federal government employee implying that the federal government is breaking the law. Instead of helping incarcerated people (or on-the-ground staff), BOP dodged responsibility and protected leadership, as seen in their response to the whistleblower:

The whistleblowing employee made clear that this wasn’t his first time asking for help:

What options remain for on-the-ground prison staff — much less the people incarcerated in these facilities — whose requests are blatantly ignored? Internal communications reveal that senior staff knew, in no uncertain terms, about the dangers and proceeded with business as usual anyway. For example, across the country from Mississippi, the BOP headquarters forced a prison in Victorville, California to go forward with a staff training despite the threat of COVID.

“Any additional extensions will have a negative effect on staff annual leave,” leadership threatened the prison staff. The vice president of the facility’s union protested, copying his previous unaddressed email: “I never received a response from any[one]. 3 days after my email a staff member in this region passed away … The staff member at FCC Victorville put his own life at risk while working the isolation unit, paying the ultimate price … I conclude this email in disgust.”

Ignoring alarm bells about health emergencies in federal prisons only heightened the damaging collateral effects of COVID faced by people of color, a community over-represented in our federal prisons. Last spring, when positive COVID rates were still rising and incarcerated people were dying in federal and state prisons across the country, a discussion was taking place within BOP to limit eligibility and ultimately end home confinement. Home confinement allows an incarcerated person to be moved to their residence or a specified location instead of prison for the duration of their sentence.

This affected Michael Ryle, a 77-year-old man who was eligible for parole but had not been approved prior to his death on Jan. 8, 2021. Emails between Assistant Director Andre Matevousian and the BOP Emergency Operations Center contain a running list of people who passed away in facilities due to a lack of testing and distancing, sparse masking, poor ventilation, and failure to release people despite the authority to do so. Many of the names listed were Black and Brown people suffering from pre-existing medical conditions and inadequate health care.

Some of these now deceased people were scheduled to leave prison as early as this year. For example, Kevin Gayles was a 38-year-old Black man with a projected release date of Dec. 25, 2023, and Ronnie Glenn was a 61-year-old Black man with a projected release date of April 15, 2021. A separate email exchange describes a Black male with stage 4 chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and reduced blood flow to the heart who tested positive for COVID-19 but wasn’t evaluated until 10 days later, at which point he was taken to a hospital where he died. Had the BOP taken its staff’s concerns more seriously, it could and should have released many more medically vulnerable people and ultimately avoided these unnecessary deaths.

The crisis is far from over as COVID cases once again surge across the country. BOP Director Michael Carvajal has maintained a culture of impunity that Attorney General Garland and President Biden must address. The BOP is an agency under the Department of Justice, making Garland’s responsibility paramount. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s plan to bring roughly 2,000 to 4,000 people back into deadly prisons portends a continuation of these horrors, as new detentions combined with the delta variant set those incarcerated — particularly older and medically vulnerable people — up for illness and death. Our demand for documents continues, in an attempt to both hold the government accountable for its actions and to protect lives going forward.

Still wet from the river and held outdoors under the Anzalduas International Bridge overnight, the mother of a 6 year old pleaded with Border Patrol agents to help her sick child and others. “They’re not going to die,” replied one agent, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.

But children have died in Border Patrol custody. And conditions at Border Patrol’s Anzalduas Bridge “Temporary Outdoor Processing Site” (TOPS) — a stretch of gravel and grass patches under an international highway in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley — risk the health and safety of the migrants who are detained there. That’s why we’re calling on the Biden administration to immediately close the site and implement oversight measures to ensure Border Patrol no longer holds anyone under such inhumane conditions.

Border Patrol began holding migrants at this outdoor site buried deep on federal property and out of public view on Jan. 23, 2021. It has detained migrants, including families with children, under the Anzalduas Bridge ever since — except for the multiple times when the site, located in a flood plain, has been evacuated due to weather conditions.

In late June 2021, we joined a brief official tour of the Anzalduas TOPS, during which Border Patrol representatives described the site as being used exclusively to hold families with children under 7 years old. Though we were not allowed to speak with those detained there, what we observed was deeply concerning.

The temperature was in the 90s. For the dozens of children and adults detained outdoors in the heat, only a fan and a set of overhead sprinklers provided plainly inadequate cooling. At a meeting in May, a Border Patrol representative justified holding families in the South Texas summer heat by egregiously claiming that the conditions are preferable to many migrants, who Border Patrol described as “not used to air conditioning.”

In addition to having no basic temperature controls, the TOPS has a bare-bones structure that lacks other minimal protections. Families are funneled through a series of outdoor areas surrounded by plastic fencing. We observed them being held in an area with hard benches and gravel as the only places to rest or sleep.

Border Patrol told us there is no medical staff on site beyond emergency medical personnel, and the nearest paved road to get to medical aid is a five to 10 minute drive away. Border Patrol has even given us conflicting answers about what, if any, detention standards apply to the site. This is particularly troubling since detention standards mandate a “reasonable and comfortable” temperature for those detained — contrary to the very design of the TOPS.

Just last week in the Rio Grande Valley, we interviewed recently released families with small children who reported that thousands of people were being held at the site. Every family reported spending two or three days under the bridge. Mothers shared that Border Patrol denied their pleas for medical care for sick children and that they experienced miserable conditions in high temperatures.

The TOPS has also been shrouded in secrecy. There are no telephones for migrants, and, like all Border Patrol facilities, no in-person visits are allowed. As pictures of a make-shift outdoor site began to surface earlier this year showing families with small children sleeping on the ground in corral-like holding areas, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking details. We wanted to know how long people were being held outdoors and how Border Patrol was ensuring the safety of those in custody. Over four months later, the agency still hasn’t responded to our FOIA request.

Subsequent reporting and our own interviews confirmed that families were being held outdoors under the bridge for multiple days, without adequate access to medical care, subjected to verbal abuse by Border Patrol agents, and suffering from first cold springtime and then hot summer temperatures.

Border Patrol said on our tour in June that families were held on the site for six to eight hours before being released to local shelters. But the agency also indicated that no one was released from the facility between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. — indicating families may in fact be held longer.

This is unfortunately not the first time we have witnessed Border Patrol hold migrants in wholly inhumane conditions outdoors. At least twice the Trump administration held children and adults in similar disgraceful outdoor conditions — once underneath a bridge in El Paso, Texas, and once in a Border Patrol parking lot in McAllen, Texas.

The Biden administration must reject the inhumanity of Trump-era practices and close the Anzalduas Bridge site. Border Patrol has demonstrated that it simply cannot hold people in appropriate conditions at this site. Border Patrol’s willingness to detain families with very young children in such a place reflects the agency’s systemic failures to provide humane detention conditions. Border Patrol’s lack of transparency is also deeply concerning and shows the need for outside access to the facilities where it holds migrants.

The administration should also take steps to remove Border Patrol from the detention business altogether. With the agency’s long track record of abuse, the Biden administration cannot allow conditions like those under the Anzalduas Bridge to persist. We demand better.

The assault on the practice and ideology known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been a wildly successful propaganda campaign. As of this week, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations have made efforts to restrict education on racism. But what exactly is CRT, and is it really commonplace in K-12 curriculum, as the right makes it out to be? And why does reckoning with the history of racial oppression elicit such profound censorship from those that typically tout support for free speech?

The practice and framework of CRT, which asserts that racism is embedded in the legal system and government policy as opposed to individual prejudice, has consistent historical precedents. Yet every time this structural racism is brought to the forefront of public discourse, opponents accuse advocates of stoking division and animosity. Discomfort is natural when encountering the American legacy of slavery and genocide, but anyone who values freedom and justice can recognize the need to resist the suppression of conversations that could perfect our democracy.

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On this week’s At Liberty podcast episode, you’ll hear from Kimberlé Crenshaw, pioneering CRT scholar and Distinguished Professor of law at Columbia University and UCLA, who unpacks the contemporary pushback against anti-racist education and connects it to the historical repression of civil rights movements. From the laws that worsened inequality to the rhetorical attacks against Black liberation, Crenshaw lays America bare and dares to envision a more equitable union.

Kimberlé Crenshaw on Teaching the Truth about Race in America

Kimberlé Crenshaw on Teaching the Truth about Race in America

Lawmakers, parents, think tanks, and conservative pundits have waged a war over how to teach students about systemic racism. As of this recording, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations have made efforts to restrict educati...

Lawmakers, parents, think tanks, and conservative pundits have waged a war over how to teach students about systemic racism. As of this recording, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations have made efforts to restrict educati...

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