Detained. Deported. Infected.
Hundreds of Brazilians were deported home this summer by U.S. immigration officials. Photo courtesy of Douglas Magno/Folhapress
The United States and Brazil have some of the world’s highest COVID-19 numbers. And as U.S. deportation flights continue sending Brazilians home during the pandemic, inadequate health care by immigration officials has aggravated an outbreak in Governador Valadares, a small city in southeastern Brazil with almost 8,000 infections and 267 deaths.
Editor's Note: This story is another in a series examining coronavirus impact on U.S. government detainees deported to Latin American countries. Many were sent home infected with COVID-19. Reporting on this series was sponsored by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
This article is a collaboration with Folha de S. Paolo, where you can see the project in its original Portuguese.
*Read here about how ICE’s “COVID Flights” turned one Colombian deportee into a super-spreader.
*Read here about health care problems inside ICE’s expansive immigration detainee transportation system.
Tired of “working to survive" in his home country, Paulo Passos, a 39-year-old carpenter, traveled to Mexico in December of 2019 with a clear goal of crossing the border into the United States without permission. He figured he could make a go of it again: He’d lived in the U.S. for 11 years before going back to Brazil in 2015.
But his plan was quickly spoiled. He was captured by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, and spent the next six months in three different migrant detention centers.
Then things got worse.
By early May, the spreading, global pandemic, which up to that point Passos had only seen on TV, became a reality in his cell: Of 32 detainees in his building at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico, 23 tested positive for coronavirus, including Passos and another Brazilian. This was at a time when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), was reporting 150 infected detainees among the 1,089 people in the facility.
Passos said that not until several days after the first cases emerged did detainees receive masks. "I would wash mine at night and wait for it to dry in the morning."
With bunk beds nailed to the floor, distancing was impossible. Detainees started a hunger strike to pressure guards to help an Ecuadorian man who for three days straight endured a fever of 104 degrees. “They took him to the prison clinic, where he was on the brink of death for 17 days,” Passos said.
Having suffered from bronchitis since childhood and with a medical history of three bouts of pneumonia, Passos was afraid that COVID-19 would affect his lungs, but the only symptom he experienced was chest pain. ICE deported him on a flight chartered by the U.S. on June 19, a few days after Brazil officially ranked second in the world for the most COVID-19 deaths. The United States ranked first.
Paulo Passos
Passos was shocked at the lack of preventive care along the route connecting these two top-ranking COVID-19 nations. Passengers were given face masks, but they were seated next to each other. “There were many free seats, but they did not separate us,” he said. There was no water in the bathroom, so they could not wash their hands. Members of the crew used face masks intermittently.
They took his temperature before boarding, but asymptomatic people and those without a fever did not raise clinical suspicion. “When I came, the pandemic was peaking, all jails were infected. There could be people with COVID-19 on the flight and nobody would know,” he said.
Upon arrival, Passos saw coronavirus signs at the airport, but nobody asked him about his health. Since Brazil had not established a quarantine for international travelers, passengers went straight home.
LIke many deportees, Passos lives in Governador Valadares, a city in southeast Brazil known as the main source of migrants from Brazil to the U.S. – so much so that it is almost impossible for residents to get a visa and travel legally. In early August, the city of 145,000 had almost 8,000 COVID-19 infections and 267.
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has maintained a controversial posture against the coronavirus this summer. Photo courtesy of Ettore Chiereguini/Shutterstock
A change in protocol
Besides Passos, palabra. interviewed several other Brazilians arriving home on four ICE flights, on March 6, May 15, June 19 and July 17. According to those testimonies, care and precautions were minimal at first, but kept improving over time. Even so, some mistakes were consistent, for example, the lack of social distancing among passengers.
On the March flight, when the pandemic was just starting, there were no health measures for the 55 deportees. “Nobody spoke about the coronavirus, there were no precautions, face masks, nothing,” said Camila de Oliveira, 20, a passenger on the flight.
U.S. agents detained her while she was crossing the border with her mother in September 2019. Both were deported, but at different times, Camila on March 6, and her mother on May 15 along with 79 other Brazilians. When de Oliveira went to pick her up at the airport, she noticed that ICE had adopted preventive measures, although they did not seem to be enough. “They took their temperature and gave them face masks and alcohol gel. But since they came handcuffed, it was difficult to manage the face masks or use gel. They also did not give them a COVID-19 test, either when leaving or upon arrival. Nobody asked my mother about her health after getting off the plane,” she said.
Other detainees complained of lack of care during the transfers within the U.S. before being deported. Evanilson Sousa Gomes, 34, was taken by van with five other inmates from the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey to a Philadelphia airport, where their plane would leave for Brazil on May 28. There was no social distancing between passengers in any of the vehicles
Sousa Gomes had been infected with COVID-19 in April, while being held at the center. He said he was isolated only two days after his symptoms began, something that happened only under pressure from lawyers. Face masks arrived eight days after infections began at the site. Another Brazilian who shared his cell became sick the same week. A guard died. “We did not die, thank God, because we are healthy,” said Sousa Gomes.
He added that he was the only one to receive a coronavirus test before boarding. Everybody was sitting next to someone else. He did not find soap in the airport bathroom. Also, he was not asked about symptoms upon arrival in Brazil or in the days following. “Certainly, more people could have been infected in prison and during the trip.”
The most recent ICE flight landed in Brazil on July 17. Before the trip, some migrants were tested for coronavirus, while others were quarantined. They had their temperatures taken when leaving the prison, before the trip, and during the flight. They were given very thin face masks, and some said ICE agents took them off during the flight.
Brazilian soldiers disinfect lobbies in Rio de Janeiro's international airport earlier this pandemic summer. Photo courtesy of Photocarioca/Shutterstock
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), even though ICE went from only taking deportees’ temperatures to testing them for COVID-19, there were confirmed cases of deportees with coronavirus in at least nine destinations: Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and Romania.
“It is likely that deportees with COVID-19 also arrived in other countries. The difference is that those countries have been more successful in keeping it a secret,” said Jake Johnston, a researcher with CEPR.
An ICE spokesperson told palabra. that the agency had updated its protocols since the beginning of the pandemic, with measures such as temperature control beginning in March, and testing in some cases starting April 26. They said that all detainees and staff now receive face masks and are shown how to use them.
ICE said occupancy at detention centers has been limited to 70%, with a decrease of 44% in the number of inmates between March and August. It also said that visits had been suspended, and that social distancing was implemented at meal and recreation times.
The spokesperson also said that when the pandemic began, resources for testing were limited, but said the number of detainees tested has grown “significantly” in the past two months.
Hundreds of Brazilians were deported from the United States this spring and summer, exposing many to the coronavirus. Photo courtesy of Douglas Magno/Folhapress
Massive deportations resume
The Brazilian government banned ICE-chartered flights in 2006. But in October 2019, current president Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of Donald Trump’s, allowed massive deportations to resume. During a trip to Washington in March 2019, federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the president, said that undocumented Brazilians abroad are “an embarrassment” to the country. When ICE flights resumed, diplomats told the press that Trump had pushed for deportations during commercial negotiations.
The number of Brazilians detained while crossing the Mexico-U.S. border in 2019 went up more than tenfold compared to the previous year, from 1,600 to 18,000.
According to ICE, from October 2019 to Aug. 8, 2020, 1,786 Brazilians were deported. During the same period, 18 chartered flights arrived in Brazil with those deportees, according to the Belo Horizonte airport, the final destination for the flights. There were 15 flights after March, at a time when regular international flights were suspended. Palabra. learned that the most recent flight arrived in Brazil on September 25th, with 52 deportees.
According to a study published in July by Science magazine, the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where the airport is located, was the virus’s second major port of entry into Brazil, behind Sao Paulo.
On July 1, Ambassador Michael Kozak, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, told Congress that of the more than 37,000 Latin American and Caribbean deportees from March to mid-June, 220 tested positive for COVID-19. Over 190 of them were in Guatemala, with the rest in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti and Brazil.
It is difficult to confirm these numbers in Brazil due to poor oversight of international arrivals.
International passengers are not quarantined or tested for COVID-19. The medical service at the airport only cares for passengers who voluntarily tell them their symptoms. According to ANVISA, the health monitoring agency responsible for such controls, nobody on deportee flights showed signs of the illness. Passengers are not traced the first 14 days after arrival, as recommended by the World Health Organization. None of the deportees interviewed by palabra. has been in touch with health authorities. Also, most did not quarantine at home.
Various representatives of the Brazilian government, including the foreign affairs and health ministries, and the federal police, told palabra. that they do not have information about possible infected individuals who arrived in the deportee flights.
ANVISA said that it does not take passenger temperatures and does not recommend airports do so, “based on available scientific literature.” According to the agency, the effectiveness of that measure is uncertain, since symptoms are not always present, while the investment in the procedure is high in relation to its presumed effectiveness.
The Science magazine study included an evaluation of the impact of limitations to entry into Brazil by international travelers, concluding that as of the end of April, over 100 strains of the virus had entered Brazilian territory from different countries. This was long before the restriction on international travelers, which indicates that the measures came too late.
The study shows that Brazil did not adopt enough measures to avoid the spread of coronavirus, and it recommends expanding testing, identifying and tracing those infected, and maintaining social distancing, the last one repeatedly criticized by Bolsonaro.
Though he himself tested positive in July, in public speeches he minimized COVID-19, even calling it “a little flu,” and had maintained that even if he got it he would not feel anything because of his “athletic background.” He also defends chloroquine, a medication used to treat malaria, as a cure, though it has no proven efficacy against COVID-19.
With nearly 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and an average of 650 deaths daily, Brazil has had no health minister from May 15, until September. The new minister is the third in less than a year. The two previous office holders quit amid disagreements with the president on chloroquine and social distancing. Before him, another minister had resigned for a similar reason. Currently, an army general holds the interim position. On Oct. 6, the country crossed the 147,000-death mark for the illness.
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Flávia Mantovani is a reporter for the international section of the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, in Brazil. She has written about migration and human rights since 2014. She has published reports in the Spanish magazine Capital, on BBC Brazil and in Brazilian media such as G1, Veja and Piauí.