Officers abused migrant locked up alone for weeks over language barrier, complaint says

A migrant woman spent more than a month in solitary confinement due to a language barrier, after she asked for feminine hygiene products and couldn’t understand officers’ English commands, according to a complaint detailing “inhumane conditions” at a northern Florida detention facility.

Ana, a pseudonym for the woman, was denied clean clothes, feminine products, showers and medical care while detained in the Baker County Detention Center in Florida in 2023, a complaint filed by the ACLU of Florida and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit. The facility is about a 30-mile drive west from Jacksonville.

At the jail, where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains migrants, officers are accused of neglecting and sexually abusing Ana, a 33-year-old mother who is a survivor of domestic violence and human trafficking, according to the complaint.

Instead of responding to her pleas for help, they would mock and laugh at her, according to the complaint.

“They treated us like animals,” Ana, who is Colombian, said in a translated video testimonial published by the ACLU of Florida on Nov. 20.

“They threw food at me, they insulted me….They didn’t let me take a bath,” she said in a video testimonial published by the ACLU of Florida on Nov. 10.

When Ana began experiencing a mental health crisis inside her dark, unsanitary solitary confinement cell, three male officers and two female officers stripped her of her clothes and strapped her to a restraint chair, the complaint says.

“You feel like you were literally raped, because they did it like animals,” Ana said of the incident in the video. “They tore my clothes.”

Officers left her strapped to the chair, for hours, in an anti-suicide smock that was torn and exposed her nude body, according to the complaint.

Alongside the complaint, which was sent to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a whistleblower disclosure was filed on behalf of a former nurse at the facility by the Government Accountability Project.

The nurse, Vera Goodwin, reports “a pattern of systemic neglect” and racial and sexual harassment against detainees, the ACLU of Florida said in a Nov. 14 news release.

“What Nurse Practitioner Goodwin witnessed at Baker represents a complete betrayal of public trust and human dignity,” Government Accountability Project’s senior director for advocacy and strategy, Dana Gold, told McClatchy News in an emailed statement on Nov. 22.

“When she reported these abuses through proper channels, she was fired — a classic case of shooting the messenger while protecting the perpetrators.”

The Baker County Detention Center should be closed, according to the Government Accountability Project, the ACLU of Florida and the RFK Human Rights organization.

Baker County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Thomas E. Dyal Jr. and ICE didn’t immediately respond to McClatchy News’ requests for comment. Dyal is the center’s director of detention and ICE operations.

Restrained in chair as ‘punishment’

When Ana was detained at the detention center in May 2023, officers wrongly identified her first language as English and failed to communicate with her in Spanish, the complaint says.

Despite Ana having a medical history of hypothyroidism, PTSD, depression and anxiety, the officers considered her as having no “immediate health needs or problems” because they failed to properly assess her, according to the complaint.

A few days after her arrival, Ana asked an officer for a “bathroom” in English then tried to explain she needed feminine hygiene products, the complaint says.

Ana, who doesn’t “speak or understand English well,” didn’t understand what the officer replied to her in English, according to the complaint.

The officer became “irate” and yelled at Ana, who was then put in a dark, solitary cell due to the language barrier, the complaint says.

Ana had no mattress to sleep on inside the cell, the complaint says.

After an officer told her that she’d spend two days in the cell, Ana panicked, “began crying, could not breathe, and started vomiting,” according to the complaint, which says she was bleeding through her clothes, since she never was given feminine products.

In response to her panic attack, they put Ana in a restraint chair as “punishment” and left her in only her bra and shorts, the complaint says.

Following a month in solitary confinement, officers restrained her in the chair again while she was in mental distress, after ripping her clothes off, according to the complaint.

“While her breast was exposed, male officers walked by to ogle her and mock her through the window,” the complaint reads.

Officers later played footage of this incident at a staff meeting “as an example of a good use of force,” according to the complaint.

The complaint accuses staff of violating ICE’s 2019 National Detention Standards’ “policies on sexual abuse prevention and intervention when they left Ana exposed on two occasions, leered at her for hours, and failed to intervene or report the abuse.”

The complaint contends the officers took part in voyeurism.

In 2022, the ACLU of Florida filed Prison Rape Elimination Act complaints with DHS in connection with how other female detainees experienced voyeurism and abuse at the same center.

‘Horrific treatment and gross mismanagement’

Goodwin encountered Ana by the time she had been in solitary confinement for 30 days, according to the whistleblower disclosure.

“Goodwin was concerned about the impact of solitary confinement on Ana’s psychological well-being, particularly for a period of 30 days, locked away from others and prohibited from outdoor recreation time,” the disclosure says.

She watched officers berate Ana and broke out “in tears” after she saw the video of Ana being strapped to the restraint chair.

Ana was detained at the center from May 2023 through July 2023 before being released on bond, according to the complaint.

Gold told McClatchy News that “Goodwin’s need to exercise her whistleblower rights and duty as a medical provider to speak up about horrific mistreatment and gross mismanagement is a testament to the utter failure of DHS’s oversight of its contractors to stop abuses that have been knowingly allowed to continue for years.”

“ICE should end the knowing endangerment of immigrants in detention by closing the Baker facility immediately,” Gold said.

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