Plymouth jail complaints reveal pattern of abuse against ICE detainees, report claims

Citing two decades-worth of complaints about overcrowding, inadequate health care and other mistreatment, a new report alleges Plymouth County Correctional Facility staffers engaged in a pattern of abuse against immigrant detainees.

Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts and Boston University School of Law’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program based their report, released Monday, on records of complaints and violations dating as far back as 2002.

The documents revealed a range of issues, including insufficient access to legal counsel and the punitive use of solitary confinement. Plymouth is the sole county in Massachusetts that retains an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain and house immigrants in its jail.

Boston University law professor Sarah Sherman-Stokes, who directs the school’s immigrants’ rights program, said the findings illustrate a clear violation of the rights of immigrants detained at Plymouth, as well as a failure of accountability by ICE officials.

“At Plymouth, we’re seeing a jail who has consistently, over the course of 25 years, failed to comply with recommendations made by oversight agencies, has failed to comply, even minimally, with the national detention standards, and yet has continued to be rewarded with a contract with ICE,” she said.

Plymouth’s immigrant detention capacity increased in April by 35%, when ICE negotiated a new unit with 139 beds, Sherman-Stokes said. The expansion now allows the jail to house more than 400 migrant detainees.

Suffolk County terminated its contract with ICE in 2019, followed by Franklin County two years later.

In March of 2021, the federal government ended its contract with Bristol County following a scathing report by then-Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. It found former Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson and his staff violated the civil rights of immigrants in ICE detention during a violent incident in 2020, amid the height of fears regarding the spread of COVID-19 in jails.

Plymouth’s contract with ICE runs through the end of this month. The jail has not yet signed a new one, according to Karen Barry, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office.

“We are justifiably proud of our professional staff and the exemplary level of humane care and security provided to all individuals entrusted in our care,” Barry said in a statement.

The report also includes excerpts from interviews with more than 60 immigrants who have been detained at Plymouth.

Arik Halliman, a 41-year-old Jamaican citizen, spent more than a year in ICE detention at Plymouth before he was recently transferred to another facility in New Hampshire. Halliman said he believes conditions are poor at Plymouth by design, as a way to deter people from fighting their deportation cases.

“They don’t want you to be comfortable because to me, they don’t want you to fight your case,” he said in an interview.

Halliman said he often could not get calls to his lawyer to go through and was made to wait overnight to receive pain medication for a pre-existing condition. And then, he said, there was the cold.

Other inmates, he said, would “start blocking the vents and stuff like that because you cannot even sleep good when you’re cold,” he said. “You might wrap up in your blanket, but you still cold. You still shivering.”

A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Spoiled food, inadequate health care and insufficient access to legal counsel were among the concerns about the jail laid out in an August letter from Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE. The lawmakers questioned whether the federal government should renew its contract with Plymouth, citing ongoing “inhumane” and “substandard” conditions.

In March, immigrant advocates filed a complaint with the state’s attorney general’s office, asking for an investigation into Plymouth County Correctional Facility. The office said it received the complaint but declined to comment further.

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Editor’s Note: Boston University holds the broadcast license for WBUR. Shannon Dooling is an associate professor of the practice, investigative reporting, at the BU College of Communications. Both WBUR and Dooling’s journalism are independent, and BU had no editorial role in this story.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.