ICE is a Public Death Agency

At what point does confining people in a measles quarantine zone constitute torture, not MAHA?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a funny bunch of fascist enforcers. I’ve never seen people so devoted to wearing masks when they are abducting and murdering Americans, but so zealously opposed to them if they are remotely related to public health.

Not that anyone would ever confuse ICE for a public health agency, since they are known for shooting, beating, kidnapping, deporting, and neglecting people to death in the course of tearing apart our Constitutionally-protected civil liberties. These are not activities that contribute to Making America Healthy Again. Neither is fomenting the spread of preventable diseases. Like measles.

There are now two measles outbreaks in ICE facilities in two different states: Texas and Arizona. This seems very familiar. Oh right, I wrote that something like this would happen last week.

The Arizona cases are at a privately operated detention facility in a county that has dealt with ongoing measles outbreaks since last year, when the outbreak in West Texas spread there. The first case detected at that ICE detention facility was a Mexican national, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson was careful to note.

Unfettered xenophobia as an excuse for the government to commit violent felony crimes against its own people was, as usual, the first priority. However, that ignores that this Mexican national was in the US—at an ICE detention facility in Arizona—when they got measles. They got homegrown American measles that has been circulating in Arizona since last year. Even if the first case picked up the infection in Mexico, the measles circulating there was introduced from the outbreak in West Texas. The measles causing outbreaks at ICE detention facilities probably came from America, not abroad.

ICE is a measles virus’ best friend

ICE detention facilities have been the site of preventable disease outbreaks for as long as ICE detention facilities have existed. Ten years ago there was a measles outbreak at an unnamed ICE detention facility with the same capacity and in the same county in Arizona as the outbreak taking place now. If they are the same facility, then evidently CoreCivic, the private prison contractor who operates it, didn’t change a whole lot to avoid future measles outbreaks. ICE contractors famously do not provide basic medical services, much less offer any kind of preventive or routine care like vaccination to detainees. Even worse, moving people from state to state and deporting them allows pathogens to move around too. ICE actively enables outbreaks to spread across the US and around the world.

How about this: we don’t vaccinate, we just export it

Immigration hardliners will sometimes claim that ICE detention and deportation policies reduce disease. If you round up all the susceptible people and deport them, then theoretically you’d only have healthy, immune Americans remaining. Except that is not how measles, immunity, or immigration works.

Measles virus is extremely contagious. One infected person can infect 12-18 other unvaccinated people. When measles is introduced to a susceptible community, it explodes. South Carolina has racked up nearly 1000 cases in just a few months. The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles, but it only works if people are immunized before exposure. We have seen this in communities across America. We’re seeing it now in South Carolina. I went on NewsNation Live with Marni Hughes to talk about it. I tried to pack as much measles information into this 5 minute interview as I could:

We see it now in Pinal County, Arizona, where an outbreak that started last year has not stopped. There would not be measles in ICE detention if measles weren’t already in the community where the detainees and ICE brownshirts came from. That’s because the problem isn’t unvaccinated immigrants. The problem is unvaccinated Americans.

This is not a new problem, nor is it limited to the US, as I recently wrote in Nature Medicine. Declining MMR uptake precedes the current MAHA agenda led by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., although he contributed to this significantly over the years by spreading lies about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Kennedy has worked for decades and made a fortune creating conditions for measles to thrive in American communities. He discouraged vaccination in response to a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 to conduct an uncontrolled observational experiment on unconsenting children. As a result, thousands got measles and 83 people died. Mostly young kids.

ICE is the most extreme realization of Kennedy’s dream. ICE detention facilities are concentration camps. They pull people from the community—and now the criteria for ICE detention seems to be “existing in proximity to ICE”, so it’s effectively random—and cram them into appalling congregate living conditions. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) submitted a report to the Senate Judiciary Committee last July detailing an inhumane, dangerous environment for detainees. Durbin’s report describes extreme overcrowding, lack of access to health care (including both emergency treatment and essential medication like insulin for diabetics), no quarantine or infection control procedures for COVID (or anything else), unsanitary conditions, limited or no access to food or water, constant light, extreme temperatures, unlawful solitary confinement, and inability to access legal services.

These conditions are ideal for allowing measles to spread, provided enough unvaccinated people are detained. Vaccination rates have been tanking everywhere. If you detain enough people, you will eventually build a critical mass sufficient to support an outbreak. Maybe even an epidemic, if community vaccination has declined enough.

ICE detention facilities are ideal outbreak factories. Concentrating people of all ages from throughout the community in miserable, deprived, high-stress living conditions, with poor nutrition and no access to health care is a good way for a virus to spread explosively. Unless those people are vaccinated.

Immigrants don’t promote measles, ICE does

Obviously the 8th amendment is not susceptible to measles but I just wanted to show something cruel and unusual

As more and more people are detained in Minneapolis and in cities targeted by the Trump administration around the country, we will see more and more measles cases related to ICE detention. We will probably hear a lot more about how this is the result of open borders, an “invasion” of immigrants, or whatever other racist, xenophobic MAGA culture war crap that President Donald J. Trump dementedly cooks up for his base on Truth Social. But we won’t hear about how the Trump administration’s policies are responsible, both because the government’s capacity for collecting data and reporting it is obliterated and most media coverage takes a tone of false neutrality. “Vaccine exemptions are on the rise” or “uptake has fallen,” as if we have no idea why.

Kennedy owns a lot of the cases that have been spreading in the US, in large part because he has worked professionally for the last two decades to make them a reality. Kennedy is now revising decades of science and health data and evidence-based policy with an alternative history in which we “restore” an eugenicist utopia that never existed in the first place. Measles did not go away before the vaccine was developed because of sanitation or anything else. There are no alternative treatments that work for measles. Kennedy’s evidence-free policies will not make America healthy “again,” or at all. “Gold Standard Science” was never an actual standard. It’s just something Kennedy made up, like his theories on teen sperm, aluminum salt adjuvants, the cause of AIDS, the evidence base about the connection between autism and the MMR, mRNA vaccine technology, expertise, and avian flu management.

During Josef Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, his star agricultural scientist, Trofim Lysenko, developed crop production methods that didn’t work. Lysenko solved the problem of his methods not working by fabricating data and rewriting history, much as Kennedy and his minions running HHS are doing now. Stalin definitely liked making things up to accomplish his political objectives, so he put out a flood of propaganda saying that Lysenkoist agricultural methods were far superior to decadent Western ways of growing wheat and barley. Anyone who objected was executed or banished to a gulag.

A lot of people blame Lysenko for this, but Lysenko on his own could not have starved millions. He needed Stalinist forced collectivization to impose his pseudoscientific beliefs on the entire population of the Soviet Union, causing famines. Lysenko’s policies were used to justify detaining Stalin’s enemies. At first these were dissidents, kulaks (bougie land owners whose property Stalin coveted for his collective farmland), and the Mendelian geneticists that Lysenko hated. It was eventually extended to “cosmopolitans”—AKA Jews. What began as a supposed effort to transform Soviet agriculture using revolutionary Lysenkoist crop science was soon revealed for what it really was: enforced compliance with the mandated ideology of the authoritarian state. Millions died of starvation. Millions more were hanged, shot, starved, tortured, or worked to death in Siberia.

Almost a century later, Trump is doing the same thing with immigration policy. ICE is now routinely using lethal force on Americans for opposing them peacefully or getting in their way. And as far as infectious disease is concerned, ICE is taking the groundwork for measles outbreaks that Kennedy has laid by dragging down vaccine uptake and supercharging it. Measles doesn’t need any help spreading in susceptible populations, but ICE practices will help it anyway.

Yup.

Congregating lots of sick people in one place and exposing them to a potentially deadly disease is not just unwise from a public health perspective, it is also a gross violation of our Constitutional rights. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment, is not the only civil right that ICE is routinely violating but it’s the one I think is relevant here.

I am not a lawyer and my sole legal experience comes from my part-time office assistant job at a personal injury law firm when I was in college and watching a lot of Law and Order: SVU. So while I am a complete amateur regarding constitutional law, I am qualified as a virologist to assess whether forcibly confining people and exposing them to a virus that causes pneumonia, a full-body macropapular rash, encephalitis, and can wipe out your immune memory for several years—and does this worst of all in kids—is cruel. Because measles can be prevented very effectively with the MMR vaccine, it is also unusual. Measles was eliminated in the US for more than 25 years. Homegrown measles WAS unusual. Kennedy’s MAHA anti-vaccine disinformation brought it back.

The facility in Texas is the nation’s largest ICE facility for detaining children. Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy used by ICE to lure his father into custody, was detained there. Some children are too young to receive the MMR, which is a live-attenuated vaccine and is not given to newborns. Others may not have received it due to lack of access to health care. But children are at the highest risk of severe disease. They are most likely to be unvaccinated. And they are not getting vaccinated now because ICE and its private prison contractor are not offering vaccination to detainees. They are putting children at risk of suffering from a preventable disease that will injure or kill them. This is cruel and unusual. It is a crime.

As ICE detains more people, this atrocity expands, as does the risk to all Americans’ health. We need to contain measles, not seed new epidemics. ICE must be stopped. They must stop killing people, either by murdering them directly, neglecting them to death, or putting them at direct risk of contracting a completely preventable disease.

Right now, Congresspeople and Senators from both parties are negotiating the DHS budget. If they don’t reach an agreement soon, DHS will be partially shut down. Things aren’t going very well. Republicans are giving Trump what he wants, which is unfettered ICE police state fascism. Democrats are insisting ICE agents remove their masks, get warrants, and generally obey the law. Negotiations are at a standstill.

That’s why Americans need to tell their representatives and everyone else right now that a vote for ICE funding is a vote for measles. TELL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES THAT THE DHS BUDGET MUST INCLUDE:

1. No funding increases for ICE detention

2. No funding increases for ICE at all

3. Reduced funding for ICE detainee interstate transportation or deportation

4. No funding at all for ICE deployment to US cities

5. No funding at all for ICE raids

6. No masks on ICE agents

7. ICE agents must obey the law

8. Increase funding for ICE medical services for detainees, including vaccination