Background
What You Need to Know
This research builds on and extends critical environmental justice scholarship into carceral spaces — focusing on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States detains more immigrants, including asylum-seekers, than any other nation in the world. Drawing on the lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory, the research draws direct connections between institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement policies.
The nativist and racist rationale for harsh immigration policies asserts that callous treatment of immigrants makes U.S. society safer. The data show the opposite: the blow back from these policies made U.S. society less secure and degraded civil and political rights for all — including residents of communities near ICE facilities who faced dramatically elevated COVID-19 infection rates.
Context
Racism, Immigration, & the Carceral State
The links between racist over-policing and the criminalization of immigration are indirect but powerful. Since the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s and 70s, policing and corrections bureaucracies have been officially rendered "colorblind" — yet as BLM has documented and condemned, the ongoing war on Black lives has deployed a cocktail of racialized surveillance, policing, and incarceration that devastates Black communities.
These same racialized logics have been extended to immigration enforcement. The coercive approach to immigration is especially harsh for Black immigrants, but numerically it impacts far more people from Mexico and Central America, who constitute 89% of the ICE detainee population. Although the degradation of their freedom, dignity, and health was understood and anticipated, callous political and bureaucratic calculations drove policymakers to expand the criminalization of immigration across presidential administrations — Democratic and Republican alike.
The "Enforcement First" Machine
By 2012, the United States spent $3.5 billion more on immigration enforcement agencies than on the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service, and ATF combined. From 2008 to 2011, more than half of all federal prosecutions focused on immigration-related offenses. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security consolidated and rationalized this machinery — making immigrant surveillance, apprehension, detention, and deportation not an aberration, but the systematic product of a modern bureaucratic state.
Methodology
What Did the Researchers Do?
Riskscape Analysis at Two Scales
The researchers pursued multi-scalar empirical analysis using the riskscape framework. Riskscapes encompass different viewpoints on the threat of loss across space, time, individuals, and collectives — highlighting how defining and responding to one set of perceived risks can exacerbate others. The analysis operated at two spatial scales: the specific contained space of ICE facilities, and the broader landscape of surrounding communities and counties.
Quantitative Analysis
Using county-level COVID-19 data compiled by the New York Times and ICE detention population data from spring 2020, the researchers addressed two complementary empirical questions:
- Did ICE detention facilities bring COVID-19 sooner and more severely to their counties in the spring of 2020?
- Did ICE detention facilities contribute to higher COVID-19 caseloads over the summer of 2020?
For the spring analysis, logistic regression modeled whether the presence of ICE detention increased the likelihood of COVID-19 milestones — from first case detected to major outbreak exceeding 2,500 cases — across 3,139 counties. For summer caseload growth, the researchers employed generalized spatial two-stage least-squares regression (using a queen's weight matrix) to account for spatial autocorrelation in the spread of a highly transmissible virus.
Critically, the analysis also examined transmission at the scale of multicounty Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) economic areas — capturing how staff, contractors, and visitors commuting to and from ICE facilities across county boundaries spread infection throughout broader regional economies.
Findings — Inside ICE Facilities
Ideal Conditions for Infection
The COVID-19 case rate among ICE detainees reached 6,683 per 100,000 as of August 2020 — a mean monthly case rate ratio 13.4 times higher than the U.S. general population. This is almost certainly an undercount given documented testing deficiencies in ICE facilities.
The overlapping risks confronting ICE detainees made this outcome not just likely but inevitable:
| Civil & Human Rights | Abusive Treatment | Facility Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Facilities located to maximize isolation from legal counsel; detainees more likely to lose their cases | Coercive treatment including physical force, tear gas, pepper spray; solitary confinement widely used | Children forced to sleep on floors in overcrowded facilities without adequate food or healthcare (UN Commissioner for Human Rights) |
| Denied adequate access to health facilities and treatment | Women subjected to sexual assault and forced sterilization | Sharp increase in people detained, exacerbating overcrowding and understaffing |
| No suitable mental health services; ICE impeded access to legal counsel | People with disabilities subject to "cruel treatment and neglect" | Food quality routinely poor and too often unsafe; wage theft widespread in for-profit facilities |
ICE personnel did not merely neglect these conditions — they actively weaponized them. As the pandemic emerged, guards punished detainees who protested. More disturbing still, ICE personnel threatened to expose detainees to COVID-19 as a punitive measure. One detainee suspected the callous disregard for health was based on a calculation that "burials are cheaper than deportations."
"The question is not why ICE officials failed to anticipate these effects — but why, given the foreseen risks, they chose to go ahead anyway."
Findings — Community Transmission
The Blow Back: COVID-19 Beyond the Fence
The quantitative analyses provide clear, county-level evidence that ICE detention facilities elevated COVID-19 risk throughout surrounding communities — both sooner and more severely.
Spring 2020: Did COVID-19 Arrive Earlier?
Net of controls for race, workforce composition, limited English proficiency, and urbanicity, counties with ICE detention were significantly more likely to experience COVID-19 milestones earlier. A county with two or more ICE detainees was 129.3% more likely to have at least one confirmed COVID-19 case by April 1. The effect held across multiple severity thresholds — through "serious outbreak" (250+ cases) and "major outbreak" (2,500+ cases) levels.
The BEA-level analysis revealed that the spread extended well beyond the counties housing ICE facilities. Counties in BEA economic areas with high levels of ICE detention (26 or more people detained across the area) faced consistently elevated risk of every COVID-19 milestone.
Summer 2020: Did Caseloads Grow Higher?
The spatially weighted regression analysis of COVID-19 case growth from May 1 to August 1, 2020 confirmed the pattern. From a baseline of 493.5 cases per 100,000 in counties with minimal detention, the expected caseload reached 542.8 per 100,000 where 100 people were detained — and exceeded 550 cases per 100,000 at the highest detention levels (roughly 10% higher than baseline). At the BEA economic area level, the effect was larger still: counties in BEA areas with 1,000 or more ICE detainees faced an estimated 29% higher caseload relative to the baseline.
Implications
How Can You Use This Research?
Enforcement-first immigration policies are justified on racist and nativist grounds — to protect and insulate "the larger society" from the threat posed by nonwhite immigrants. The nativist logic suggests that risks, like the people detained, are confined by the walls and fences surrounding ICE facilities. The COVID-19 pandemic proved this was a fantasy.
This research demonstrates that carceral space cannot be treated as hermetically sealed from surrounding communities. Staff, contractors, and visitors enter and exit ICE facilities across multiple shifts daily — carrying infection in and out. The community transmission of COVID-19 from ICE facilities was not only predictable; it was predicted — by the people detained, by public health officials, and by immigration advocacy organizations whose calls to reduce the detainee population went unheeded.
Public health advocates and policymakers can use this research to demonstrate that immigration enforcement regimes carry measurable public health costs that extend well beyond immigrant populations. Environmental justice scholars and practitioners can use the riskscape framework developed here to examine other carceral settings — including prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities — where overlapping risks create conditions for disease transmission that inevitably escape institutional boundaries.
More broadly, this research is a case study in what de Zwart calls "unintended but unanticipated" consequences — situations where those in power know the truth, yet let bad things happen anyway. Understanding why and how this occurs, and who bears the cost, is essential to building governance systems that protect rather than endanger public health.
