After spending the first part of the pandemic in the spotlight for a large COVID-19 outbreak at Otay Mesa Detention Center, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has contracted out medical care at the facility to the private prison company that owns and operates it.
Detainees interviewed by the San Diego Union-Tribune say the medical care, which they and their advocates already had criticized , has grown even worse under the private operator CoreCivic than it was under ICE.
Detainees complain of missed and late medications, multiple-day waits for medical attention and a lack of transfer of records that left staff in the dark about what treatment individual detainees were supposed to be receiving. It has also meant that those who had been approved for specialty care, such as oncology and orthopedics, would have to begin the lengthy process anew.
“The first couple of days, it was chaos,” said Guillermo Alvarez Mendoza, a detainee with diabetes, hypertension and chronic back pain. “If you were getting your blood sugar checked two or three times a day, it was midnight before they came for the first blood-sugar check.”
Read the full story on LATimes.com.