This is intercepted.

I'm Jeremy Scayhill coming to you from my basement in New York City and this is a special bonus episode of intercepted.

Across the United States right now there are over 32,000 people in the custody of immigration and customs enforcement, otherwise known as ICE.

Now tucked away in remote corners of the country, ICE's detention centers have long had issues with providing adequate medical care and they've been proven breeding grounds for disease.

Just last year an outbreak of mumps overtook dozens of ICE facilities infecting nearly 900 detainees.

For the tens of thousands of people currently detained by ICE during this coronavirus pandemic, for whom social distancing is impossible, there are widespread fears that an even more widespread and deadly outbreak could occur.

Carceral facilities, prisons, jails, like ICE detention centers have much higher infection rates than the general public.

On Rikers Island here in New York for example, the rate of infection is seven times that of New York City.

As of Thursday there have been 100 confirmed cases of coronavirus among ICE detainees and 25 cases among ICE employees at detention centers and that's according to ICE's own website.

My colleague at the intercept Ryan DeVro has been speaking directly to detainees inside of an ICE facility in Etouac County, Alabama.

Now ICE maintains that it is following appropriate CDC protocols, but as Ryan DeVro recently reported in a story titled burials are cheaper than deportations virus unleashes terror in a troubled ICE detention center.

Detainees in this Alabama facility overwhelmed by their own precarious conditions in the face of the coronavirus threat were forced to radically take matters into their own hands to ensure their own safety.

Here is Ryan DeVro with the story.

On March 20th new ICE detainees were dropped off at a detention center in Alabama in a county called Eroa.

The men who are already in detention get word that one of the men has been exposed to the coronavirus.

People inside the detention center got increasingly scared about this.

They started raising alarms with guards who were on duty that night told them that these new arrivals needed to be quarantined and they couldn't be kept in their unit.

And a standoff develops between the guards and the guys who are in detention.

The detainees are told that they need to go on lockdown.

JL officials are going to sweep in there and there could potentially be a fight.

One of the men in the unit, a guy who's been there for some time decides to climb up onto a second story railing and he wraps some bed sheets into a rope and ties them around his neck in a news.

A second detainee joins them up there and they basically threaten to jump if the guards move in.

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