The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.
After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency moved the detainees on "ICE Air" charter flights to avoid overcrowding at detention facilities in Arizona and Florida, a precaution they said was taken because of the pandemic.
But a Department of Homeland Security official with direct knowledge of the operation, and a former ICE official who learned about it from other personnel, said the primary reason for the June 2 transfers was to skirt rules that bar ICE employees from traveling on the charter flights unless detainees are also aboard.
The transfers took place over the objections of ICE officials in the Washington field office, according to testimony at a Farmville town council meeting in August, and at a time when immigration jails elsewhere in the country had plenty of beds available because of a dramatic decrease in border crossings and in-country arrests.
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"They needed to justify the movement of SRT," said the Department of Homeland Security official, referring to the special response teams. The official and the former ICE official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal decisions. They and another Homeland Security official briefed on the operation characterized the tactical teams' travel on ICE Air as a misuse of the charter flights.
At a hearing in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of four detainees who were already at Farmville, an ICE attorney told a judge that one reason for the transfer was that "ICE has an air regulation whereby in order to move agents of ICE, they have to be moved from one location to another with detainees on the same airplane."
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, focuses on the exposure to the coronavirus for the detainees, three of whom contracted the infection.
Asked about the primary purpose of the charter flights, ICE officials said the goal was to move detainees into facilities with more space for social distancing.
"ICE transfers detainees due to the operational demands of the detention network. The June 2 transfer of detainees to Farmville was made as part of a national effort to spread detainees across the detention network to facilitate social distancing and mitigate the spread of COVID-19," Henry Lucero, who oversees ICE enforcement operations, said in a statement.
ICE statistics show the facilities the detainees came from were not near capacity June 1, when the transfers were arranged. CCA Florence, a jail in Arizona with beds for roughly 550 detainees, was about 35% full that day, records show. The facility that appeared most crowded, Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, was about 70% full. Farmville was 57% full, according to ICE.
"During COVID-19, the agency has taken steps to protect detainees in its custody and promote social distancing whenever possible," spokeswoman Danielle Bennett said in a separate statement. "This has resulted in the transfer of detainees from facilities with larger detention populations to facilities with fewer detainees. This was the reason for the transfers to Farmville."
Current and former ICE officials said such an operation is unusual. ICE officials did not respond to requests for examples of other detainee transfers this year from Arizona or Florida to Farmville, which is the agency's closest major facility to Washington.
But publicly available flight data show the June 2 flights were highly unusual. There is no other record this year of ICE transferring detainees from Phoenix to Virginia or Miami to Virginia, according to records compiled by Witness at the Border, an immigrant advocacy group that monitors ICE Air activity.
On June 1, after two nights of mass protests outside the White House, a top Homeland Security official said in a memo obtained by The Washington Post that special response teams were being sent to the District from Arizona, Florida and Texas, with plans to arrive the next day.
The move was part of a wider deployment of Border Patrol agents, U.S. Marshals, ICE tactical teams and other federal forces in downtown Washington and around the White House. ICE teams stationed closer to the nation's capital were already in place at the protests; the additional units were flown in as reinforcements, U.S. officials said.
The teams were not responsible for guarding detainees on the flights, a role handled by private contractors and ICE enforcement officers.
Lucero was a key player in the decision to move the heavily armed teams on ICE Air flights, three officials said. He formerly ran the agency's Phoenix field office, and has a close relationship to the Phoenix tactical officers, who are considered among the agency's best-trained, the officials said.
The special response teams, based in several ICE field offices, are typically used to control riots in detention facilities, among other duties. They usually deploy locally, using ground transport. In cases where they have to fly, the teams normally use commercial airlines, which can be expensive and inconvenient because of the weapons and equipment the agents travel with.
The use of the teams was part of the Trump administration's effort to "dominate" racial equity demonstrations nationwide. ICE special-response teams deployed to civil unrest and protests this summer in Washington, New York, Houston, Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Buffalo, N.Y., according to a GAO report published Thursday. More recently, federal agents have been sent to Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore.
D.C. Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser did not request special-response teams to deal with protests in the nation's capital, which were generally peaceful. City officials have criticized the federal response to the demonstrations -- including the decision to have police in riot gear forcefully scatter a crowd to clear the way for a photo opportunity by President Donald Trump on June 1 in front of St. John's Church near the White House -- as excessive overreach.
The June 2 deployment to the District took place amid heightened concerns that immigration detention centers and prisons had become deadly incubators for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. There had been 5,670 cases of the virus reported in ICE facilities as of Thursday.