Eleven ICE Staffers at Alexandria International Airport Test Positive for Coronavirus

Eleven U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement staffers at the agency’s facility at the Alexandria airport have tested positive for coronavirus, the largest outbreak among staff at any ICE facility nationwide.

The ICE Alexandria Staging Facility is normally used as a holding pen for immigration detainees as they await deportation flights out of the Alexandria International Airport. ICE Air, the agency’s charter deportation airline, uses the airport as a hub for dedicated deportation flights to Central America.

ICE has continued operating deportation flights out of Alexandria as normal despite the coronavirus crisis, said Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman.

But ICE is no longer holding detainees at the airport staging facility in the wake of the outbreak among staffers, Cox said, instead driving busloads of them from ICE detention facilities across Louisiana directly onto the tarmac to board flights.

It’s unclear what might have triggered the outbreak. Cox said no one in ICE custody with a known coronavirus infection moved through the facility. ICE employees are still working out of the offices there processing paperwork for the deportation flights, Cox said.

The Alexandria airstrip is only an “international” airport by dint of ICE Air’s sizable operation there. Commercial airlines only operate flights from Alexandria International to a handful of domestic destinations, including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.

ICE Air has flown U.S. citizens stranded abroad home on the return legs of deportation flights. Cox said the State Department is coordinating those flights and that people flown back to the United States on the flights are responsible for arranging their own way home once they land in Louisiana.

At least five people held at ICE detention facilities in Louisiana have tested positive for coronavirus, including people held at the Richwood Correctional Center near Monroe, Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield and LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla.

Another detainee at the Adams County Correctional Center, just across the Mississippi state line in Natchez, also tested positive, according to the agency.

People loaded onto deportation flights are screened for fevers before being cleared to board, Cox said, and the agency won’t deport anyone who’s currently ill. Cox said detainees who have potentially been exposed to coronavirus are housed together in “cohorts” at detention center for at least 14 days.

ICE is reviewing the cases of people at high risk from coronavirus — primarily the elderly or people with serious underlying health conditions — who are currently locked in immigration detention, Cox said. A total of 693 people had been released from detention centers nationwide as of April 10, Cox said.

As of earlier this month, ICE was holding over 33,000 people across the country, including illegal immigrants facing possible deportation and asylum seekers who’ve traveled from around the world to seek refuge in the United States.

But immigrant rights groups have said those steps are not nearly enough. The ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center decried sanitary conditions in Louisiana immigration detention centers and asked a federal judge in Washington to order ICE to release asylum seekers.

A new lawsuit on behalf of people held at six ICE detention centers in Louisiana called the lockups “notoriously overcrowded and unhealthy” and the possibility of deadly coronavirus outbreaks “inevitable.”

If you have questions about coronavirus, please email our newsroom at [email protected].

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